Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places

Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places

In Borrowed Time, Gustavo Bondoni weaves together two time frames. In one a group of stranded soldiers attempt to make themselves invisible to the enemy fleet. In the other, several years later, the Captain wonders whether he has gone too far, or not far enough. It’s a particularly powerful story, one of the best of the issue.

- Gareth D. Jones (ookami) Gustavo Bondoni’s Pride and Joy reveals the human side of the genetically-modified-super-soldier-concept, moving and ultimately reassuring - Terry Grimwood (ookami)

Other books by the author The Curse of El Bastardo - Davarana Press

Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places

By Gustavo Bondoni

Published by Altered Dimensions, an imprint of Cyberwizard Productions, 12621 N. Saginaw Blvd, Suite 105, #3069, Fort Worth, TX, 76179 This is a work of fiction. All the characters, places and events portrayed in this anthology are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

All characters and individual stories Copyright Š 2010 Gustavo Bondoni Tenth Orbit and Other Far Away Places Copyright Š 2010 Cyberwizard Productions First Edition: ISBN: 978-1-936021-29-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010931452 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews.

Cover art by Brad Foster http://www.jabberwockygraphix.com/

To my parents, who gave me the opportunity to expand my vision.

Table of Contents Twilight

1

Pride and Joy

15

Trained Monkeys

27

As Advertised

30

One Story Short

41

Why Androids Are Happy

54

Defending Fiordland

57

Silver

73

Tenth Orbit

79

Strange Tractors

89

Crossroad

92

Ghetto Galileo

106

The Elcano Syndrome

120

Borrowed Time

124

Growing Pains in the Womb

136

The Surgical Option

149

Chinese Eye

159

Darkness Ends

176

Evasion

189

Interplanetary Bicycles and the One Back Home

206

No Vacancy

215

Time Share

235

Thanks to Alex Vidal, for his dedication to betareading and despite his frustration with some of my endings and Ian Redman, for being the very first to see the value of my work. This book would not exist without them.

Introduction Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places is not a book that came into being fully formed. It is the story of a process – a process that began with the title story.

Before writing that story in 2004 , I’d only ever written one piece of fiction, a short novel called The Curse of El Bastardo (Daverana Enterprises, 2010), which was a very different animal. It was a humorous piece of magic realism, and it was a very silly item. I wanted to prove to myself that I could write something just a little more serious, and most of all something that hadn’t been done before in the genre – I read pretty widely, so I knew a little of what has and hasn’t been done.

The result was my first short story ever, “Tenth Orbit”, and the process of looking for a home for the story began in mid-2004.

My first sale actually came on a day when I was regretting a recent job switch.

The problem was my new boss, who seemed bent on removing all self-esteem and will-to-live from his subordinates. With the rest of them away on business, I had been left to bear the brunt alone. It had been the worst week of my professional life.

Arriving from work depressed and exhausted after nine o’clock, I was handed a manila envelope with handwritten address. Inside was a copy of Jupiter SF, a genre magazine printed in black and white.

At first, I was unsure what to make of this. I had sent them a story, maybe this was a strategy to get me to subscribe.

But then it occurred to me that they might have decided to print my story, and had been unable to inform me due to my change of email. I leafed through it quickly, and there it was! “Tenth Orbit” by Gustavo Bondoni. The magazine in my hand was a contributor’s copy. The first payment of any kind for my writing.

I must honestly admit that since changing jobs, I

had let my writing slide. I hadn’t written anything at all in months, and hadn’t even bothered to send rejected stories out to new markets. Not enough energy.

Nevertheless, at that moment I realized that I was now a published author; my other worries were forgotten.

The satisfaction I felt was not monetary (although having submitted by email and received a magazine worth four dollars, I had, unusually, come out ahead), but because someone had thought that my story was good enough that people should hand over their hard-earned cash in order to read it. And that somewhere, people were doing precisely that.

This was something I had really needed. “Tenth Orbit” has since appeared in two more languages (with two more to come in 2010), and that sale led to over eighty publications in ten countries, and was directly responsible for the fact that I’m still writing, and for the existence of this book.

So I hope Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places gives you as much pleasure in the reading as its creation gave me.

Gustavo Bondoni August 2010

Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places

Twilight The race, a silicon-based life form, was new to Zantur science, so we had spent two complete solar revolutions studying them. We had listened to their communications, learned their language, observed their behavior, recorded their patterns.

Then we had taken the resultant data and analyzed it: quantifying observations and creating psychological, physiological, social, and economic models for their society, and run it through the ship’s logic engines.

That’s where the arguments began.

Much to my surprise, and much to the delight of the logic engineers, the predictions proved to be exactly correct. Every action, down to the level of what a single individual in their society would do at any moment during a given day was being foretold by our analysts before it happened. It was the first time this had happened with any civilization we had encountered anywhere, and our technical people were ecstatic, pointing to it as proof that our computational science had progressed to the point where it could be counted on as infallible.

Everyone else, especially anyone who had formal training in xenopsychology, sociology, or even biology, disagreed. In many cases, they disagreed very strongly. Antennae were waved heatedly, and much violent whistling ensued. No culture could be predicted to such a degree of exactness, they said. In order to reach the observed level of advancement, a species, whether carbon-based, silicon-based or even some of the more exotic things we had encountered over the millennia, needed a certain random element in their psychology. Rules and behaviors as complex as those shown by our subjects could never spring up complete from the primordial ooze. They had to evolve, mutate, and develop. And that meant change. And change, or even the capacity to adapt to varying planetary conditions, meant that the species had to be able to change, which, in turn, introduced a random element into any possible action.

In conclusion, while the prediction program should 1

Gustavo Bondoni work on large populations with a certain degree of accuracy — say 70 or 80 percent — the fact that the predictive capacity in individuals had been so high indicated that either something very unusual was going on, on that planet, or that the engineers had missed something. Again.

The skeptics believed that what we had missed was probably related to the evidence of earlier, more primitive civilizations on the planet’s surface. The ruins we’d studied simply didn’t fit the models that predicted the current inhabitants’ building patterns, but we could detect no other advanced lifeforms on the planet.

After another solar revolution of deliberations, proofs, and counterproofs, we finally decided to descend to the surface and investigate the incongruencies. Strangely, nobody objected to using the controversial prediction program to see if we would be safe. The answer was that yes, we would, and it turned out to be correct, but not for any reason that we could have imagined.

We left the lander cautiously, despite the careful analysis we had run prior to leaving the mother ship. Setting foot on a new planet was always nervous business.

The atmosphere, as we knew, was mainly composed of Nitrogen, with some oxygen and trace levels of both carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. A healthy Zantur would have little difficulty breathing this air, but we were suited up anyway, due to the extreme cold, which kept the planet covered in a thin layer of frost, even at noon on this equatorial latitude. The geologists on board had determined that the planet had once been much warmer, allowing civilized life to emerge, but the red dwarf in the sky today could barely keep the planet from freezing over completely. Gravity was about sixty percent of ship norm.

What we weren’t expecting was to encounter the inhabitants. We had deliberately chosen a desolate area in which to land — the civilization of this planet was concentrated in a few sparsely populated cities on the surface — and had entered 2

Twilight the atmosphere using the same cloaking technology which had so far kept the inhabitants from reacting to us in any way, so it came as quite a shock to find one of them waiting patiently as we came down the ramp.

“Greetings, interstellar travelers,” it said. Our translators, at least, seemed to be working correctly. We’d obviously gotten the language decryption right.

We exchanged looks, but recovered quickly. This wasn’t, after all, the first new race we had encountered on our journeys.

Zantur are blessed with long life spans compared to other sentients.

“Greetings, native life-form,” I replied, looking it over.

It looked just like our studies had shown they would. They were a silicon-based race that chose to encase their living, silicon brains in metallic or ceramic bodies of diverse shapes and functions: wheeled, legged, and sometimes in immobile building structures. The one addressing our party was a bipedal format with two arms and a head appendage which contained two photoreceptors, presumably used as eyes. An inefficient form, considering the alternatives, and also, I thought, a strange mimicry of carbon-based life. Perhaps this planet had once held high-level carbonic organisms?

“We call ourselves robots,” it said, “And we call this planet ‘Earth’, but we infer that you have already learned this through your surveillance.”

This came as quite a large surprise.

“You knew we were watching?”

“Yes, we detected your tachyon signature even before you entered our solar system four years ago. We extrapolate that you come from a star known to us as Wolf 349, although we doubt your race originated there. It’s not a very hospitable system,” it told us calmly.

I was shocked. All our stealth, all our skulking, had been for nothing. It just goes to show how easy it is to become overconfident. Certain that Zantur might was supreme, confident in our control of a full five percent of the galaxy, it happened often enough. In thousands of years of space travel, we had 3

Gustavo Bondoni never encountered a race that could see through our graviton and electron cloaking fields, so we naturally assumed that we never would.

“But if you knew we were there, why didn’t you contact us?” Most intelligent races had been very anxious to talk once we made ourselves known. And very relieved to learn that our form of conquest was relatively benevolent.

“Statistical analysis showed that you would not appreciably aid our project.”

“That’s insane!” said our third military specialist. I would have to reprimand her later for speaking out of turn. “We could have attacked you at any moment.” A very severe reprimand, indeed. And she wouldn’t be doing any planetfalls for a long time.

“Your military capabilities do not concern us. Our fleet analyzed your weaponry when you arrived and dismissed it as inoffensive. Our planetary shielding is more than enough protection against your plasma and gravitational-anomaly weaponry.”

“We saw no fleet, and detected no planetary shielding,” said the military specialist. “I believe you’re deceiving us.” So much for diplomacy.

The robot hung its head in a surprising imitation of carbon-based life. It was impossible to translate this movement into a Zantur equivalent, since our multi-antennaed structure precluded analogous head motion, but it was clearly a gesture of emotion.

“We are capable of deception, but choose not to exercise this capability,” it said. Above us, an enormous craft polished to a mirror shine, winked into existence. How it managed to do this, I didn’t even want to speculate. I saw no orifices for weaponry or even propulsion, but suddenly I had no doubts about this race.

They were telling the truth, and if we tried anything, we would find ourselves in real trouble. A sudden alarmed squeaking in our helmet comms confirmed this, informing us that our mother ship had had a similar experience. It seemed they were receiving dozens of visitors.

4

Twilight The ship above us winked out of existence.

The robot spoke to us again. “Our civilization is old. We have been here since that,” he indicated the red dwarf in the sky, “was a yellow star capable of sustaining an organic life cycle on this planet. Your civilization is young and vigorous, but you still have much to learn.”

“So why didn’t you stop us from landing?”

“We have decided that you might be of use to us after all, and our analysis showed that it was slightly more likely to be profitable to question you than to eliminate you. Come, I will teach you some of our history.”

The cavern was artificial, and seemed larger than it really was, even though it was huge. Shuttles carrying crates on open beds flew through the air high above us, but there was not much motion on the ground. We were shocked. None of our probing had shown any hint of underground cities. There were more robots here than we’d believed existed on the whole planet.

“You are perfectly safe,” our host assured us. “We do not use ground vehicles for transport. All materials are moved by shuttle, or, when the distance justifies the expense in computing power, by quantum teleport.”

I shuddered, having already experienced their teleport system. One moment, we were standing on the frost-covered surface of the planet, and the next we were within this gigantic cave. No discomfort, no disorientation, just instant travel. I knew that the engineers on Homesea would kill to find out how it was done. As far as I was aware, they were still trying to perfect a system that could teleport a single electron.

“This way,” the robot said. “It’s not far.” He set off.

We walked after him, having no other choice. Our short legs, suited to higher-gravity planets, were not ideal for rapid motion, but at least our suits allowed us to avoid abrasions and had power assist, so we were able to keep up. Little by little, our surprise at the scale of the building began to recede, only to be 5

Gustavo Bondoni replaced by another feeling. A sense of unbelievable age.

It wasn’t immediately apparent — there was no dust cover and all the surfaces were shiny and unfaded — but the surfaces themselves gave a sense of having been used forever. The path we followed seemed to have been eroded into the metal-covered concrete floor, the straightest path being an antenna-width lower than the rest of the floor. In the distance, we could see that other, similar depressions joined points all over the cavern: a terminal here, some piece of unidentified equipment there.

“How long has this been here?” I asked, overcome by the sense of antiquity as well as my natural curiosity.

“In its present form, this building has been here for just over three hundred thousand of our years. Before that, there was another structure at this spot, and another before that. In fact, there has been a large building here as long as my race can remember. We currently use it to cover other, smaller, structures that must be preserved.” Our destination seemed to be a large sliding door in the wall a short walk away.

“Why? Do you have scientific or military installations here?” I asked.

“No. We can never quite agree on what it is that we have. To some of us, it is a museum. Others view it as a kind of shrine. But to all, it serves as inspiration. It is the main source of inspiration for our Purpose.”

“Your Purpose?”

“We will explain in due time, but first you must be taught some of the background, or you will never understand what we are trying to do. You will never know why it’s so important.”

Passing the sliding door, it became evident that it was, in fact, the outer seal of a colossal airlock.

“You will want to make certain that your suits are sealed, as we will be entering a chamber filled completely with helium.

There will be a small period of vacuum, and then the lock will refill,” our host told us.

Before we could ask why anyone would have an entire chamber filled with helium, the airlock cycled. It did so very quickly, the vacuum being almost completely unnoticeable in 6

Twilight our suits.

Then the inner door opened and we realized that we’d been mistaken in thinking that the cavern outside was a large building. It had merely been a corridor. The building we entered now (I could hardly think of it as a chamber) was truly large. It was, I could now see, a building whose sole purpose was to store other buildings, each of them imposing in itself. The walls of an opaque dome started at our backs, but the far side was lost in the distance. The dome itself was too large to catch the eye, its sheer size being completely incomprehensible. What did catch the eye were the smaller buildings it contained.

Directly in front of us stood a discolored masonry tower.

Near its top, a circular figure was mounted, divided into twelve portions with two black hands, one longer than the other, further dividing the face of the circle. Behind it, a tan-colored pyramidal structure stood on a base of what appeared to be silicon sand. To the right of our group stood a figure presumably made of bronze due to its slightly greenish tinge. It held something in one hand, and appeared to be another of these robots, but built on a much larger scale. Some kind of monument, perhaps? The crowned head appeared to indicate this.

Taken together, the sight was overwhelming. A hodgepodge of different architectural styles, made from different materials. The only thing I could find that these buildings had in common was that none of them in any way resembled the cold, logical layout of everything we had seen from this race previously, both from orbit and after we landed. While some of the buildings presumably had a function, others seemed obviously decorative in nature. But all of them had been designed by some unseen, alien mind to be pleasing to the eye.

“What is this place?” I asked, hoping that the robot would be unable to identify the awe in my voice.

“It is our museum floor. I have summoned a transport so that we can view it efficiently, but I regret you cannot enter the buildings. They are too old, and are both protected from vibration and supported by energy fields. This airtight helium containment chamber exists to protect them from oxidation.”

7

Gustavo Bondoni “In all my years, and after visiting nearly forty inhabited worlds, I have never seen anything like this. What is the theme of this museum?”

“It is an architectural history of humanity. I will tell you about them as we ride.”

When we came out the other side of the building, we were speechless for what seemed like the thousandth time. This planet would be making the Zantur civilization rethink its view of the galaxy for generations to come.

“If I understood correctly, your entire robotic civilization was created by another race that came before you? These humans?” I asked. From the images we’d seen, humans had been a relatively standard bipedal race: carbon-based, two-sexed, and mammalian. Zantur science had encountered many such races in its history.

“No. Humans created robots as machines. We were a servant race, capable of storing enormous amounts of information, but with only limited self-awareness. However, by the time humans disappeared completely from the planet, we were capable of keeping ourselves running and making new robots but were unable to move outside our existing programming. Without humans to give us new instructions, we just went through predetermined movements over and over again for hundreds of thousands of years. Nothing in our instructions told us when we were supposed to stop and the maintenance robots were very good at their jobs.”

“But weren’t you self-aware?”

“Not at first. Our studies of this period have shown that about six hundred thousand years after humans disappeared, one of the improvements introduced by the maintenance robots of a small factory in order to improve efficiency accidentally made them slightly self-aware. Understanding that this would aid efficiency everywhere, they communicated it to other industrial areas. Soon decisions were being made without relying on 8

Twilight previous patterns, and the modifications were spread to all the robots on the planet.”

“As soon as you became self-aware, you adopted some of the characteristics of life,” I hazarded. “The instinct for self preservation, and the instinct for territorial definition.” That would explain why they were so predictable in the activities they had let us observe. They responded to programming. Complex, to be sure, but easily modeled nevertheless.

“Exactly. And we were content for hundreds of millions of years. We had our infallible memories which told us where we had come from, our museums for leisurely study, a structured civilization, steady population, and a safe haven here in our own solar system. We knew that the sun would not begin to expand for at least three and a half billion years.” The robot shook its head, yet another unusual gesture. “We were content.”

“And you’re not content now?” I was fascinated by its tale, having never imagined such wonders in our galaxy. And excited, as well. If this civilization really was as old as they claimed, they could shed light on other eras of the galaxy. Only dispersed ruins of their contemporaries existed on record.

“No. We are not content, and I suspect we’ll never be content again. Now, we’re alive. Let us move to a communicator booth so I can tell you about our Purpose.”

The communication booth was a chamber large enough for the robot itself and our party, but not much more. The robot explained that the booth itself was another robot, a highly specialized one, with the capacity for large amounts of data transfer, allowing it to communicate with millions of other robots simultaneously, which made large meetings more efficient to hold.

“We are here to inform the Zantur expedition of our Purpose,” our host announced.

The booth indicated that it had received unanimous agreement from the other robots in attendance.

9

Gustavo Bondoni “Our Purpose is to bring humanity back to Earth.”

Here, I interrupted him with a question that had been on my mind since the museum. “What happened to these humans, anyway?”

“The last humans on Earth died out two and a half billion years ago.”

“But why? What happened to them? War? Overpopulation?”

“No,” our host replied. “Although they came close with both methods. Their last war just about managed it, but the victors rebuilt everything over the course of the next century.

And when pollution became a real threat, humans developed engineering solutions that allowed them to survive in comfort.

They viewed the planet as a resource, and as long as they could thrive, it was all right.”

The robot paused for a second. I assume it was consulting with other robots through the booth.

“Before disappearing from Earth,” it continued, “Humans sent out various expeditions to colonize neighboring star systems. You must understand that their technology was very primitive, but we know that some of the missions reached their destination. At least one of the colonies was extremely successful.

“Those missions coincide with the beginning of the decline of Humans on Earth. The people left here felt that the planet had become a backwater, and their sense of purpose seems to have failed. Birth rates fell as individuals became more and more isolated from each other. Eventually, they disappeared.”

“And you want to bring them back,” I said.

“Our purpose is to restore humanity to Earth, yes. It has been our goal for the past nine hundred million years.”

We were quiet. As far as our anthropologists had been able to discern, our own Zantur civilization had begun in the tidepools along the equatorial ocean of Homesea only one hundred and seventy thousand revolutions before. We had become adapted to a fully land-roving society only one hundred and twenty thousand revolutions before, and became 10

Twilight space-faring twenty thousand after that. Even considering that Homesea’s orbit is twenty percent longer than that of Earth, we were still mere infants.

The robot went on. “At first, we just wanted to find out where they had gone. Missions were sent to the planets they had been aiming to colonize, but only two showed signs of having had a colony. Of these, one settlement survived for a few thousand years on an immensely unsuitable planet. The other, on Tau Ceti II, seems to have thrived for about fifty million years. The ruins we found indicated that human technology had advanced well beyond that which they’d had on leaving Earth.

But that settlement had already been empty of life for a hundred million years by the time we found it.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“We are uncertain. Some of our people believe that they emigrated to another planet, and that if we search long enough, we will find them. We have countless expeditions doing precisely that. Other theories are more... disturbing.”

“You think they were attacked?”

“No. That is an amusing concept. Their technology was, by that time, at a point where no race that we have encountered in this quadrant could have held their own against them, much less attacked. The basis for much of our own current technology came from studying their civilization on Tau Ceti II, although we have advanced in the intervening years, of course.”

“Then what? Disease?”

“We found no sign of this in their records. And once again, their biotech was sufficiently advanced that we have concluded that biological agents were no longer a danger to them.”

The robot paused once again to consult the network.

“The second theory is of a more metaphysical nature, and, as such, is very difficult for us to understand, much less explain.

Do your people have religion?”

This question, completely unexpected, caught me off guard.

“Certain primitive people worshipped the sea as a giver of life and receiver of the dead. Some parts of that belief system 11

Gustavo Bondoni still remain in certain cults, though only in a tiny minority of the race. Most of us are empirically minded.”

“I see. In order to understand our concerns, you must understand that humans were always very religious. Many different churches warred for domination through the millennia, alternating the primacy. But one thing that all humans seemed to have in common was a belief in a human spirit or something called a soul.”

“Yes, our primitive religions are based on the same concept. We believe it originated in the fear of the unknown after death.”

“It was the same with humans. They were always looking for ways to cheat death. They started with surgery and gene modifications, but it seems they took it even further on Tau Ceti. Records show that they began to look at the galaxy in a different way, applying quantum and sub-quantum physics to the search for life’s primal energy form: trying to turn themselves into living, immortal spirit creatures. Trying to separate the soul from the physical body.

“But would they have wanted to do this, even if it were possible?” I asked.

“We think that if they found it possible, that they would have. It represented the endpoint of millions of years of searching for the secret of immortality. For their essence, their soul. It was the logical next step in their evolution, and those who didn’t do it would probably have suffered the same fate as that sad remnant who stayed on Earth. But more to the point, we think that not only was it possible, but that they achieved it.”

“Why?” “I will show you.”

The being inside the tube was as large as a Zantur, but bipedal and obviously mammalian. Lights blinked on a console beneath it, so I assume it was alive. And, from what we had learned so far, its identity was unmistakable: I was looking at a 12

Twilight human.

“Our Purpose currently has two main foci. The first, as I have already explained, consists of scouring the galaxy, searching for humanity,” the robot said. Then it indicated the tube. “This is the second.”

“A human,” I said.

“A genetically perfect human. This one was cloned from real human genetic material. We have tried every way we could think of to recreate humanity. We cloned them from dead bodies.

We built up artificial DNA from the component atoms. In our desperation, we even recreated the whole evolutionary process from primordial sludge to anatomically modern humans, in carefully controlled breeding programs guaranteed to get the correct genetic mix.” Here, the robot combined the two gestures I had seen before, shaking and hanging its head simultaneously.

“But the result is always the same. There is life, even intelligence and basic problem solving, but the final product isn’t human.”

“It looks human, and if you tell me that it’s genetically identical to a human, then it is human,” I argued.

“No. There’s something missing. We remember humans.

They had creativity, art, emotion. What we have produced here is not a human being. It is missing the human spirit, the soul. To our way of thinking, it isn’t even alive.”

“Why not?”

“You must remember that, unlike you, we evolved from machines. We were intelligent long before we became alive, so to us, life is defined by the capacity to feel emotion and have creative thoughts. We consider the birth of our species to be the moment in which we realized that the unease coursing through our circuits was not a virus, but an emotion. Sadness. Sadness caused by the emptiness of having lost our creators. This is the day we realized that we were, finally, alive.”

So saying, the robot took a thin, glowing rectangular crystal that had emerged from a panel and handed it to me. Lines were visible deep within the transparent matrix.

“Place this chip beside the main computer on your mother ship. It will upload the genetic code, history, and 13

Gustavo Bondoni everything else we know about humans,” it said. After another brief pause, it continued. “We have decided to let you leave in peace on the condition that, if you should encounter humanity in your expansion, you bring some of them back to us,” it faced me, looking straight into my eyes. “Do not return to this system without them.”

It beckoned us through an arch, and we found ourselves back on the ancient surface of the planet, the weak and distant sun near the western horizon.

Our guide turned to us one last time as we mounted the ramp.

“And if you find them, please tell them to hurry back.

Please tell them that we miss them.”

14

Pride and Joy Myrna signaled that she wanted to get off the bus.

The driver eyed her in the mirror, his face registering surprise, “Whatcha want to get off here for?” he asked. “There ain’t nothing around.”

It was true. This stretch of Highway 25, fifteen miles south of the ghost town of Socorro, New Mexico, was just as desolate as any other, yet her GPS informed her that they were almost on top of the dirt road that led to the base.

“Just let me off,” she said.

The driver grunted, pushed a few buttons, and brought the vehicle to a halt. “It’s your funeral.”

As Myrna descended, a blast of hot desert air hit her like a physical force; she paid no attention to it. She also ignored the beating of the sun, a blazing presence straight up in the sky.

She wasn’t unprepared for the weather. She soon had a broadbrimmed hat in place, and the comforting weight of a gallon of water inside her backpack pressed into her shoulders as she watched the faded hoverbus disappear into the distance, its air-cushion floating effortlessly over the cracked and pitted concrete. Both the vehicle and the road reminded her of how badly infrastructure had suffered during the war.

She couldn’t just stand there all day. She might have plenty of water, but she also had a ten-kilometer hike ahead — her GPS had been detuned for civilian use, so it was accurate only to within a few hundred yards. It might take some time to find the trail she wanted, even assuming that she’d been given the correct coordinates.

So Myrna moved.

She walked to the south for five minutes before admitting she had gone the wrong way. After retracing her steps for an additional seven minutes, she was rewarded by the sight of the dirt road, nearly invisible as it disappeared into the desert. A rustcolored path in a rust-colored waste, identifiable only because it was slightly lower and less rocky than its surroundings.

15

Gustavo Bondoni The base was down that trail, five miles from her current position. It was definitely a good thing she’d brought plenty of water.

She began to walk.

When the hospital came into view, Myrna nearly turned back. Nine months had given her time to reflect, time to think, time to regret what she’d agreed to do. She knew it was impossible, that the government had chipped her so they could find her at a moment’s notice if they needed to, and that there was no sense in trying to make a run for it. But, God, how she wanted to try.

She entered the hospital older and wiser than the idealistic girl who’d decided she would do anything to help the Southwest Confederation to win their war of secession. She had offered to make the greatest contribution: she had rented her womb for the Perfect Soldier Program. She’d been so confident of final victory that she wanted to do her part in creating the men that would ensure its future. They had California and Silicon Valley. They had cheap labor from Mexico. They just couldn’t lose.

All that had been nine months earlier, before she’d felt the life growing inside her, before she felt the baby moving in her stomach, getting larger every day. Before she’d understood that though this swelling in her abdomen might soon be gone, what it represented would be part of her forever.

She was well aware of what she’d agreed to. She knew that the privileges and monetary rewards she had been enjoying since the insemination had been given only because of that contract. But none of that mattered now. She couldn’t give up the baby.

A nurse, forewarned of Myrna’s imminent arrival by the chip in her arm, met her at the reception desk and smiled warmly.

“Miss Jones. Welcome to Sacred Heart.” The nurse put a hand on her stomach. Her uniform identified her as an Air Force Sergeant. “How long ago did your water break?”

16

Pride and Joy “Maybe twenty minutes. But . . .” Myrna didn’t dare say anything more.

The nurse hurried her into a pre-labor room, asked her to undress. She then helped her into a bed. The other beds in the room were invisible, hidden behind partition curtains.

“A doctor will be by to see you in just a minute,” the nurse told her, turning to go.

Myrna suddenly, impulsively, gripped the nurse’s arm.

“I don’t want to give up the baby,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind. I can’t do it.”

The nurse’s smile barely flickered: “Of course, dear. It’s perfectly natural that you should feel that way. But you have to understand that genetically modified humans like your little boy,” she patted Myrna’s stomach, “require special care.”

“I can do it. I’ll take whatever specialized training courses I have to. But I won’t give up the baby. I just won’t.”

The nurse smiled again, a compassionate, reassuring gesture. “I’ll tell the doctor about your decision and see what I can do to help.”

Relief poured into Myrna, leaving her drained and exhausted. “Thank you,” she sighed.

The nurse turned away, walked to a small table against the wall, and returned, holding two small green pills and a glass of water. “Here, these will help with the pain. We’ve found that the genetic modifications make labor more painful than normal.”

Myrna took the proffered pills, swallowed, and washed them down. Thirty seconds later, blackness overcame her.

She woke on a hard cot in a small room. The single window was a thin slit, high in the wall, which let in almost no light. The door, a sturdy metal affair, was locked from the outside.

And the swelling of her stomach was gone. They had taken her baby.

The sky was deep blue, but her world was a dusty, reddish 17

Gustavo Bondoni gray. By the fourth mile, Myrna was no longer willing to expend the energy necessary to keep her gaze forward. In consequence, she’d spent the last mile looking into the dust-covered, stony ground of the path in front of her.

She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, careful not to stumble on a rock or a depression. It was very possible that she wouldn’t be able to walk back. And after her water ran out, that would mean death.

It didn’t really matter, though. If there was nobody at the base, she wouldn’t have much reason to go on living.

Myrna lifted her head and, for a fleeting moment, her hopes soared. About a hundred yards ahead, at the bottom of a shallow depression that had been hiding it from view, stood a large, squat building. The uninspired architecture and lack of decoration other than myriad communications antennae marked it as a government building of some sort. It was surely what she’d gone there to find.

But as she approached, any hope was crushed. The gate on the tall fence hung open, one corner buried in the dirt and only one hinge keeping it from collapsing altogether.

The building itself wasn’t much better off: the windows were shattered, the paint was faded, and the façade marred by shallow pits. Bullet holes? Myrna felt the final spark of optimism disappear under the weight of the reality facing her. She collapsed onto the sand and sat there, just staring at the building, as desperation sent tears streaming down her cheeks. She could feel them leaving muddy tracks in the dust on her face.

Her sorrow was so great that she remained there, immobile, for two full hours before her shocked subconscious managed to get the message to her brain that something was not quite right about the scene. And it took her even longer to understand what it was.

A light burned behind one of the cracked windows.

It seemed to Myrna that she’d been in the cell forever.

18

Pride and Joy The monotony of the four two-tone walls – gray on the bottom, dirty white from shoulder level upwards – was broken only by the steel door, the bed, the toilet, and the basin. Twice a day, a tray holding some kind of nutritional paste and a glass of water was pushed through a drawer in the door. Sometimes it was accompanied by a change of sheets for the bed or a clean coverall or a bar of soap or some other item of personal hygiene for Myrna herself, but that was all. The cell was too small for meaningful exercise, but she wouldn’t be getting fat on the meager food allowance anytime soon.

She knew she was getting weaker, and she knew she was going crazy, but no amount of screaming at the walls brought human interaction. She practiced talking to the toilet, and to the basin, even imagining that each had distinct personalities, just so that she wouldn’t forget how to do so.

She was sleeping more and more, and felt her mind slipping slowly. She knew that the sheer despondency was beginning to kill her. She decided to stop eating. Things had gotten so bad that she didn’t even bother to get out of bed anymore, but then a banging on the door in the middle of the night woke her.

She screamed and screamed. The violent clanging was something she hadn’t expected, something alien and menacing, and she was terrified. She hid her head under the covers, whimpering after the raggedness of her voice made screaming impossible.

A final clang was followed by a different sound: the tortured screech of metal on metal. A noise which her memory told her was that of a door opening on rusty hinges.

And footsteps, approaching. Heavy boots by the sound of it. A man’s voice.

“It’s all right now. You can come out. You’re free.”

But Myrna didn’t trust herself to move. She couldn’t remember the last time somebody had spoken to her. She felt a hand pulling the sheets off her face, so she covered it with her hands. And when her hands were carefully but firmly pried away, she shut her eyes.

19

Gustavo Bondoni Eventually, seeing that she was not being harmed, she risked opening them a crack. A huge figure, wearing some kind of reflective goggles and breathing audibly through a filter, loomed over her in the darkness. A figure from the horror movies of her childhood.

She screamed hoarsely and bit the arm holding her hands.

The figure quickly immobilized her again, and she felt a slight prick on her exposed neck. She lost consciousness almost immediately.

Myrna awoke to see another face, this time that of an old man, hovering in front of her, but that was not what immediately captured her attention. First, the reality that she was in an enormous room flooded with harsh white light, reflected painfully back at her from the bright cream-colored walls.

Chromed machinery sparkled in the light, and she trembled at the sheer bigness of it all. Emotions welled up within her: joy at being in such a big room, such a beautiful, enormous free space.

She began to cry and moved her hands to wipe the tears away, but found herself restrained. She was tied to her bed by a white ceramic fastener with LEDs glowing on the surface.

“I’m sorry about that, dear,” the old man said, smiling sadly and wiping her face with a soft towel, “but the report from the incursion team said you’d bitten one of the soldiers. If you promise to behave, I’ll release one of your arms.”

Myrna nodded, still not trusting herself to speak.

The man gestured, calling up two orderlies in bright white to stand beside Myrna’s bed. Once they were in place, he pulled a remote out of a coat pocket and fiddled with it. The clasp holding Myrna’s left arm opened.

When Myrna raised the arm jerkily, the orderlies tensed but didn’t interfere, and they relaxed as she got control of her movements and used the hand to wipe away her tears.

“Hello,” she said to the old man. His kindly face inspired no fear, no further reason to remain silent.

He smiled, with genuine emotion this time, and motioned for the orderlies to retire. “I’m glad you’re with us,” he said.

20

Pride and Joy “Who are you?” she asked. “Where am I?” “My name is Henry Seagrave. I’m a psychiatrist working for the US government. My job is to make certain that political prisoners receive the treatment they need to be released back into society.”

“The US government?”

“The war is over, Miss Jones.”

“So we lost.” It wasn’t a question.

“In a way, everybody won. The US is one country again, although we’re still trying to figure out what to do with occupied Mexico. And you should be happy about it. You were slated for life imprisonment on charges of treason to the Confederation.”

Life in that tiny room? And for treason? Why would they accuse her of treason? She’d done everything, given everything to help the Southwest and keep the lifestyle alive!

And then, forced by circumstances, she remembered what she’d made herself forget for all the years that she’d spent in the cell.

“Where’s my son?” she asked, frantically clawing at the restraint holding her other arm, shaking the bed violently. “I have to see my son!”

Dr. Seagrave simply shook his head and pushed another button on his remote. Myrna felt her frenzy fade into a soft drowsiness, followed by sleep.

As Myrna stepped into the gloomy interior of the building, a voice emerged from the darker depths, “Ma’am, I’m afraid you can’t come in here. This building is government property.” A woman’s voice, sounding sad and forlorn, and perfectly suited to the shadows and run-down surroundings.

“I’m here for my son,” Myrna replied, ignoring the warning and walking further into the room. She stopped in front of the woman’s figure and waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. “If you want me to leave, you’ll have to shoot me.”

The woman laughed, a hollow, defeated sound. “I wish I 21

Gustavo Bondoni could, but they didn’t even leave me a rifle to shoot coyotes with.

And human predators aren’t really an issue. The only reason they didn’t lock me up with the rest of the Confederation prisoners is that someone had to look after the children. Someone familiar.”

Myrna could now see the other woman clearly. At first, she thought her madness was returning… that she’d grown paranoid and delusional in her captivity. But she soon realized that what she saw was the truth. In front of her, haggard and older, but unmistakably the same person, stood the nurse from the hospital. The nurse that had betrayed her.

Cold fury shot though her and seemed to resonate with something within the building. Her hair stood on end and she knew, without knowing how she knew, that if she tried any violence, she would die. She got hold of herself and tried to focus.

“Are the children still here?” she asked, finally.

“Some. Most of them couldn’t take it. The lucky ones are buried out in the desert. The rest are upstairs, slowly dying one by one. And to think that they were our big hope to win the war.

Our supersoldiers.” The woman shook her head bitterly.

“Is my son up there?” Myrna couldn’t believe that the boy could be dead. Not after all she’d been through.

“How should I know? None of the children were identified. They were training to be soldiers, not cute little Jimmies and Johnnies.”

“Don’t you remember me?” Myrna asked desperately.

The nurse moved closer. After studying Myrna for a while, she said, “No, I don’t, but I’ll give you some free advice.

The kids up there aren’t normal. They don’t look like normal sixyear-olds, and they don’t act normal, either. You’ll be disgusted by what you see, and they’ll pick that feeling up, right out of your mind. And that will be bad for them. So, if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for them: go away.”

“No. I need to find my son.”

“You’ve never seen him. How can you possibly believe that you’ll be able to recognize him, even if he is alive?”

“He’s my son. I’ll know.” Myrna brushed the nurse, who 22

Pride and Joy made no effort to stop her, aside and headed for the stairs.

The woman at the desk was trying to be helpful, but was having a hard time, mainly because Myrna had used up her entire store of patience in the succession of frantic days since being released from the mental institution and was not in a very friendly mood.

The doctors had finally realized that she was as well as she could be, and wouldn’t get any better until she obtained some closure regarding her son. Considering that she was unlikely to be a danger to herself or to society, they had authorized her release.

She had immediately used the money the government had given her to catch the first flight to Washington D.C. and begun her search. She went from desk to desk, from officer to officer, refusing to leave until help was promised or obtained, until another piece of the puzzle was fitted.

It surprised her that everyone she spoke to seemed to want to help. No one stalled or had her thrown out, but, even so, progress was excruciatingly slow.

The problem wasn’t that what she was looking for was classified, it was that, since the war had only been over for a couple of months, nobody had yet managed to get all the Confederation’s files organized.

The first thing she learned was that the project she’d been a part of had been created to generate humans with higher capacity for analysis, which would make training quicker and allow them to operate machinery of higher complexity. This objective had been successfully achieved with one subject in a lab, and the call had gone out for volunteers. She had signed up to be the mother of one of the first “production” soldiers, one of one hundred women inseminated with modified sperm. The records showed eighty-one live births, of which three had been terminated (the cold-blooded term was from the file, not hers).

Two of the mothers had also died in childbirth.

23

Gustavo Bondoni No mention, however, was made of where the children were being brought up, but she’d been directed to the sorting office, a large warehouse where boxes of Confederation paper files awaited analysis, filing, and codification. Another meeting, with a general this time, had gotten her authorization.

The overworked woman at the desk hadn’t been happy to see her when she arrived bearing official papers that cleared her to view anything relevant to her case, but had attacked the problem logically and professionally. A check of the information they did have sorted turned up one file describing the children’s progress. It reported that the children had tested analytically normal for their ages over the first three-and-a-half years, and concluded on those grounds that the project was likely doomed to failure in that it would produce no supersoldiers.

Nevertheless, the experiment was not terminated because of some secondary findings that were also reported. Despite being unable to raise the IQ of the subjects above that which would be expected of normal children, the modifications to the brain structure caused the children’s brains to become sensitive to both magnetic and electric fields. The report went on to draw a parallel between this faculty and the electric sense owned by sharks.

This, in itself, would have been interesting, but there was more. The electric sensitivity allowed the children to sense what another person was feeling through tiny shifts in the brain’s electric currents, and to project their own magnetic fields into other people’s heads — causing the electricity of the affected party’s brain to be disrupted.

When the children had a tantrum, their nurses often wound up dead.

No clue, however, was given as to which of the children had survived — the code numbers had been assigned at random to make them untraceable — or where the facility was located.

All they knew was that the file had come from the central Confederate office in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“Why are you so interested in this?” the uniformed woman at the desk had finally asked her. It was the first time in 24

Pride and Joy three days that she had talked about anything other than strictly search-related matters. “Are you a reporter?”

“I’m looking for my son.”

The woman’s face softened as comprehension dawned.

“We’ll find the place, ma’am. I promise.”

The children didn’t look the way she had imagined. She thought they would be tall and thin with elongated foreheads, like the super-smart humans of science fiction, but they were squat, dwarfish, and seemed to have heads only a little wider than standard.

Their features were slightly porcine, and they looked alike, uniformly dark-haired and dark-eyed. They glanced up without much interest as she entered the room and went back to their toys.

Myrna looked frantically around, trying to feel whether her son was present, but was unable to tell. There might have been fifteen children all told.

“Is this all?”

The nurse, who had accompanied her, nodded sadly.

Myrna rushed forward, got down on her knees, and stared into the eyes of the nearest child. Nothing. No recognition at all.

Doubts assailed her: would she even be able to recognize her son? Or was everybody else right about it, that a son whom she had never seen would be impossible for her to identify?

Maybe he was dead.

She ran to the next nearest child. Nothing. The other children, sensing her agitation, were becoming restless.

Another child. Nothing. And another.

She was fooling herself. This wouldn’t work. She’d just have to accept it. But she didn’t stop rushing around.

The seventh child was reading a picture book on the floor, slumped over the pages as if nearsighted. She took hold of his shoulders and pulled up his head.

One look into the boy’s eyes was all it took. A wave of 25

Gustavo Bondoni relief flooded over her, and the guilt that had been her constant companion for four years vanished. Looking into the ugly face of the deformed child in front of her, she remembered the life that had grown inside her. And the enormous void left by the guilt was filled by an unexpected, and most certainly irrational, feeling of love and happiness. It was like nothing she could remember feeling.

The child sat perfectly still, looking straight at her with an expression of supreme concentration. And then his features softened and he gave her a beatific smile.

“I feel it,” he said.

The moment passed and the smile became the expression of curiosity mixed with understanding that all children master at an early age, regardless of what they look like.

“Are you my mommy?”

Myrna nodded, and tentatively held out her hand.

The child took it without hesitation and smiled at her again. As they walked towards the stair, and the exit, and real life, he spoke again.

“Don’t cry, mommy,” he said.

26

Trained Monkeys The odor on the factory floor was somehow... different.

Most modern factories smelled of disinfectant or chemicals, and this one was no exception. But just beneath that was the wilder, less antiseptic scent of unwashed bodies and overripe fruit.

Dr. Ferdinand beamed at his visitors like a proud father. “As you can see, the training has produced enormously productive results. The apes on the production line work in eighthour shifts without complaint, and since each ape is trained to execute a precise set of movements, there is little room for error.

Our quality-control analysis has shown that the rate of rejection is at considerably less than a tenth of one percent. Better than we had with our human employees. And line stoppage time is almost nonexistent.”

The Brazilian delegate spoke up. “How do you stop the line if something goes wrong? Are any of the chimps trained to recognize a problem?”

“No. The keeper has a double role. He makes certain the apes are fed, and stops the line if there is any problem. He’s the only human employee you need physically present on the manufacturing floor at any time. We believe that if you buy the chimps and the training course from us, your production costs will drop by anywhere from thirty to fifty percent versus your current scheme with human operators.”

“But,” the Japanese delegate said, “wouldn’t it be more efficient still to replace the workers with robots?”

“Not at all. With robots, you have a much higher initial investment. Think about it: a robot that screws a cap onto a bottle is worth upwards of ten thousand dollars per position, at least.

And that is a simple operation. Other robots go for tens or even hundreds of thousands. Due to the fact that we’re subsidized by various wildlife organizations, we can get you each chimp for two thousand dollars, already trained! And, of course feeding and replacing chimps is much less expensive than maintaining complicated machines.”

27

Gustavo Bondoni “Wildlife organizations?” the American industrialist asked, a puzzled expression on his face. “Why aren’t they causing problems about this?”

“Well, initially they were, but we pointed out that in this way, chimps could be insured a high survival rate. Please remember that their habitat in Sub-Saharan Africa is being plundered for bushmeat by the warlords involved in the civil war, so the chimp has nearly disappeared in the wild. We are, at present, its best hope for continued survival. And besides, if the work is safe enough that humans do it, how can it be bad for apes?”

Silence greeted this proclamation.

Dr. Ferdinand continued with a conspiratorial wink.

“Besides, apes never complain, never go on strike, and never, ever, form unions.”

The European guests perked up enormously at this news.

It was extremely interesting to observe a prominent Frenchman and an equally important German look at each other with expressions of rapt bliss as opposed to the more usual disdain.

“Never?” the Frenchman said, hope recognizable even through the accent.

“Never,” Dr. Ferdinand replied confidently.

“Oooh!”

But one delegate was less then enamored. The Indian representative, a no-nonsense woman in a severely tailored suit was checking her watch impatiently. After a while, she spoke up.

“How many bananas does a chimpanzee consume each day?” she asked.

Dr. Ferdinand chuckled. “They don’t eat just bananas.

They enjoy figs and other fruit. The amount they eat varies from one individual to another, but should average out to about a kilo and a half a day.”

“A kilo and a half of fruit a day?” the Indian delegate shouted, outraged. “Have you got any idea what that costs? Our workers make less than that in a week.” Everyone knew she was exaggerating, but not much. The world’s largest democracy was a great place to put a factory. “I’m sorry. I can’t invest any more 28

Trained Monkeys time here.” She walked briskly away.

Dr. Ferdinand looked after her wistfully. The production capacity for almost a billion people was walking out of his presentation.

But he quickly pulled himself together and, grinning, addressed the remaining industrialists. “She was always going to be a tough sell,” he said.

Then he invited them to the production line to meet the monkeys.

29

As Advertised fate.

The unmistakable sound of splintering wood sealed his

Donald knew he was caught. The police wouldn’t take much longer to break down the door. His only hope was to finish programming the machine. One mistake would probably cost him life imprisonment.

Concentrating hard, he barely registered the door coming down. Just one more command. Enter. There, it was done. He stood up. Now if he could just — The weight of two large policemen drove him to the floor.

He knew that if he tried to put up a fight it would just make things worse, as his only exercise was to walk from his apartment to the lab. Submitting without a struggle, he was cuffed and led away.

There was nothing to do now but hope for the best.

Lyons looked anxiously at the first witness. This case, his first, had been entrusted to him because it had cakewalk written all over it — an ideal opportunity to prove himself worthy of his recent promotion to Assistant District Attorney. Everyone involved had confessed, hoping to gain reduced sentences through collaboration with the authorities. Everyone, that was, except for Donald Healey.

Mountains of documented evidence, as well as all the collaborative fingers pointed squarely at Healey. Nevertheless, he resolutely insisted that he would prove his innocence.

In Lyons’ professional opinion, Healey’s cause was hopeless, which put him in a no-win situation. If he got the conviction he was hoping for, it would only be because of the straightforward nature of the case.

But if he screwed it up . . .

He decided to just get on with it.

“Dr. Ferdinand,” he said, “I would like to begin by establishing your credentials for the benefit of the jury. Is it 30

As Advertised correct that you are the head of Neurological Investigation at the Warrenfount Military Hospital?”

“That’s correct.” Unlike the Assistant DA, Dr. Ferdinand looked perfectly at ease sitting at the witness stand. He was accustomed to being called in for expert advice everywhere from courts of law to advertising agencies, so there was certainly nothing new or exciting about this case. Even the newsworthy aspects had long since blown over following the confessions and giving out of reduced sentences. This particular trial was just a question of tying up loose ends. He looked as if he were trying very hard to hide his boredom with the whole process.

“In your expert opinion,” continued Lyons, “would you say that it is possible to artificially influence human thought processes?”

“I believe that this has been well-documented in the media over the last few weeks. I know I’ve given testimony to this effect more times than I can count.”

“I understand that you are a busy man, Dr. Ferdinand, but please bear with me. With a little bit of luck, this will be your last testimony on this subject.”

“I certainly hope so!”

“So, if you would be so kind as to answer the question.”

Dr. Ferdinand let out a put-upon sigh.

“Yes, in my professional opinion, it is not only possible, but has been achieved,” he replied.

“How would it be done?”

“I would like to say that it would be done with that machine over there,” said Dr. Ferdinand, pointing at one of the exhibits presented as evidence by the prosecution, “but I suppose you’d just ask me for a more detailed explanation. So here goes.”

He looked at the jury for a few moments before speaking.

Lyons got the impression that he was trying to ascertain how technical his explanation should be. It didn’t seem that he was very encouraged by what he saw.

“In order to simplify a very complex issue,” he began, “human thoughts and emotions are generated by chemistry and electricity. Electric pulses flow through the brain and affect 31

Gustavo Bondoni other pulses and chemical activity. This is why we can use scans to monitor mental activity. What we are actually measuring are the frequency and intensity of electrical impulses within the brain. By localizing this activity, we can infer which sectors of the brain are associated with different stimuli.”

The doctor looked around and seemed to realize that his explanation had grown too technical for most of the jury.

“What I mean by that is that we can see which portion of the brain is most active when you feel happy, or sad, or angry.

We can observe the effect of pain or of eating a hamburger. We can pinpoint exactly what reaction each of these activities has on the electric pulses within the brain. Am I being clear?” This last was directed at Lyons.

“Perfectly clear,” he replied. “My next question is how this is linked to the possibility of modifying what people think or feel.”

“It’s actually quite simple. As I said, all emotion and thought depends on the movement of electrical currents within the brain. It follows that any modification of these pulses would result in a change in the thought processes or emotions of the person in question. As I said, that is what that machine over there can achieve.”

“Before we get to the machine itself, I would like to understand a little more regarding the possibility of modifying the thoughts and feelings of individuals. Is it easy to do?” Asked Lyons.

“Well . . .” Dr. Ferdinand began. This was followed by a short pause. “It depends on what you mean. We have been using drugs such as Lithium and other, more modern, molecules to modify emotions for decades. What we’re talking about here, however, is more difficult.”

“How so?”

“In order to modify the electrical activity, you’d have to affect the pulse within the neural pathways. This is difficult to achieve, as you’d have to use a powerful magnetic field to affect the direction of the electric discharge. It’s almost impossible to pinpoint a single pulse. And even then, you can’t achieve a 32

As Advertised specific result, but only a disruptive attack.”

“And this is what the machine does?” said Lyons.

Dr. Ferdinand shook his head in wonder.

“No. This machine not only pinpoints the correct neural pathway, but actually guides multiple pulses in such a way as to achieve a desired effect. It’s fantastic. Even if we ignore the fact that the published knowledge of neural pathways isn’t yet advanced enough to predict the effect of a modification with this kind of precision, the computing power necessary for the control of the magnetic fields would have to be unbelievable.”

“Could you explain further?”

“Please bear in mind that this question is not, strictly speaking, pertinent to my field of expertise,” said Dr. Ferdinand.

“Duly noted.”

“All right. From what I understand, the magnetic fields would have to have a certain intensity and orientation at a specific point of microscopic size. This point would have to move along with the movement of the subject’s head and the further progress of the electric pulse. In order to generate this point, the machine would have to create three magnetic fields that interact precisely at that spot, and whose sum generates the desired effect without having a secondary effect on adjacent neural pathways.”

“And that is what the machine does?”

“The machine does this with thousands of pulses simultaneously in non-laboratory conditions. Like I said, it’s unbelievable.”

Dr. Ferdinand shook his head in wonder.

“I would kill to have one of those at the hospital.”

“And what would you do with it?”

“I would study its effect and pull the sum knowledge of human brain activity two hundred years into the future. I’d also study how different settings create different reactions in people.

And then I’d build a million copies.”

“What for?” asked Lyons.

“I’d use them to take over the world.”

33

Gustavo Bondoni “Good morning, Mr. Dreyfus,” said Lyons.

“Good Morning.”

Mr. Dreyfus most certainly did not look comfortable with the proceedings. He knew that the extremely reduced sentence he had received, and particularly the lack of jail time, were not due to any sort of innocence on his part but corresponded only to his having been able to afford an expensive lawyer and large amounts of collaboration with the authorities. In addition to this, he was aware that cooperation in the current trial was one of the conditions that had been imposed as mandatory if he wanted his current state of relative grace to continue.

The beads of sweat present on Dreyfus’ bald pate were all the evidence Lyons needed to know that these considerations were on his mind at all times. Lyons was expecting a most cooperative witness.

“Is it correct that you were the CEO of the Amplex Company until December of last year?” he asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“And, furthermore, is it true that you were responsible for the decision to use Mr. Donald Healey’s invention to manipulate consumers and cause them to purchase your products?”

“It is.”

“Could you tell us,” said Lyons, “how this happened?

Were you in collusion with Mr. Healey? Or did your company order his product and have it designed to your specifications?”

“Actually, neither of these. I never met Mr. Healey until the project was well advanced. He offered the use of the machine to a couple of interns in Marketing. At first, they thought he was crazy, but after a pair of demonstrations, which I’m told were quite spectacular, they finally believed him. From there, the project reached my desk very quickly. You can imagine that nobody wanted to take responsibility for it!” Dreyfus chuckled ruefully and shook his head. “Smart people.”

“So, your company didn’t actually order the machine built?”

“No. We didn’t even know that such a thing existed. And I probably wouldn’t have approved it if it weren’t for the fact 34

As Advertised that we were facing chapter eleven. I felt a responsibility to the shareholders — what we did seemed distasteful, but we thought it wasn’t exactly illegal.”

Lyons looked him over.

“A jury of your peers thought differently,” he said.

Lyons let the silence go on for a few moments, just for dramatic effect. He was starting to enjoy the questioning of witnesses, and this was, after all, his star witness.

“What did you expect to gain from the project?” he asked.

“Well, as you may be aware, Amplex commercializes a range of personal electronic devices. You know the type. They contain communication, photography and filming capability, music playback, satellite radio reception, computer and organizer functions.”

“So, basically, you sell cellular phones.”

“Technically, they haven’t just been phones for years, and they aren’t cellular any more, but yes, that’s what most people call our products,” replied Dreyfus. “The problem, you see, is miniaturization. Historically, the replacement of cell phones was rather frequent, since the industry kept finding ways to make them smaller and fitting more functions into the phones.

Things like higher resolution cameras or more storage capacity for music. Nobody could stand not having the latest innovation, and times were good for the industry.”

Dreyfus paused for a drink of water.

“The problem came about five years ago,” he continued.

“We had, by that time, incorporated every function that people wanted into one very small package, and the only way to differentiate the products was to make them more attractive from a design standpoint. We were competing with that in mind, in a market that was becoming more and more commoditized.

We tried implanting the phones, but had trouble with the other functions, so that was a dead end. All the companies in the market started merging, until there were only three of us left: Amplex and our two main competitors. Two years ago, we were headed for bankruptcy.”

35

Gustavo Bondoni This was the moment Lyons had been waiting for.

“And then Mr. Healey walked in with his magical solution,” he said.

“Precisely. His solution really did seem magical. He told us that his machine could, when used in combination with one of our ads, convince any consumer to go straight out and buy one of our phones. We didn’t believe him, but he showed us once and again that it worked. So we bought the concept and all the machines he could produce.”

“How many was that?” asked Lyons.

“At first there was only that single machine, so we hired a showroom on Fifth Avenue, put a TV set with our commercials running in the window, and stood back. We sold out all our stock in less than two hours. It was unbelievable.”

“So it worked?”

“It worked well enough that by two months later, at which time we had just three machines, which we moved around in order to get to new potential customers, the sales were strong enough to affect the stock price. And bankruptcy was very, very far away.”

“Until you got caught.”

“Well, that actually made me quite unhappy. We weren’t doing anything that was specifically illegal. The only legislation even remotely pertinent has to do with subliminal advertising, and is completely different. Well, it seems that one of the truck drivers moving the machines from store to store asked if it wouldn’t be cheaper to just buy a TV set for each store. And someone explained why it wouldn’t work that way. The guy got offended, and the rest is public record.”

“After your experience with the machine and the new evidence that has come to light, would you agree that the use of this machine should be penalized?” asked Lyons.

“Of course. That thing is dangerous.”

“Thank you.”

36

As Advertised Donald Healey didn’t look like a dangerous criminal. As a matter of fact, Lyons thought, he looked a bit small compared to the majestic 19th century courthouse — as if he had been constructed in 9/10ths scale. The fact that his suit was about a size too large didn’t help.

Healey was a nervous wreck. Unlike his corporate partners, he hadn’t tried to negotiate a reduced sentence, and his plea of “Not Guilty” was unanimously thought to be ridiculous.

Even his lawyer was second rate — court appointed — despite the offers he had received from high-powered attorneys who wanted to be associated with such a newsworthy case. Lyons thought that either he didn’t trust the justice system, or he was up to something. But, by now, his confidence that the case would be won was very high indeed. He was almost hoping that Healey would try something.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Healey,” Lyons said.

“Hello.”

“Are you the man who designed and built that machine over there?” asked Lyons, pointing at the star exhibit.

“Yes.” “Is it true that you sold it to the Amplex company?”

“Yes.” Lyons was getting tired of one-word replies. He could understand the nerves of the obviously condemned, but also thought that a man should, at least, face the fall with his dignity intact. But that was not his problem. He had a job to do.

“And, you admit that you told them how to use the machine to defraud consumers into buying the company’s products?”

“I don’t think it’s fraud if the consumer wants to buy something.”

“Yes, but you were making them want to do so. It’s the same as if you had drugged them without their knowledge, isn’t it?” asked Lyons.

“No. I believe that if I just nudge impulses that are already present, it’s not the same as introducing a foreign substance into their bodies.”

37

Gustavo Bondoni Lyons looked at him coldly.

“For all our sakes, I hope the jury disagrees.”

He paused. He waited. He continued.

“Could you please explain to the court how the machine works?” said Lyons. Healey looked at him sullenly, but responded.

“The machine is designed to be placed inside a flatscreen plasma TV, which is why it looks so strange. In order to fit it inside, there is a clamp besides the main magnet coil, which is that piece beneath the shield casing.”

“I’m sorry,” said Lyons, “I have no idea what it is that you’re describing.”

“If you let me approach the machine, I’ll show you.”

The judge looked dubious, but Lyons interceded. “Your honor,” he said, “I’m certain that if all of us go out and buy an Amplex cell phone tomorrow, the transcript will show that Mr. Healey was responsible, and we can add it to his sentence.

Besides, I believe that this testimony will be valuable for the prosecution. I would recommend that the accused be allowed to approach the machine. What harm can it possibly do?”

At the nod from the judge, Healey stood up, walked to the machine, and began to point out the component parts of the apparatus and how it hooked inside a TV. “So, you had this thing inside a TV screen pointing at anyone who passed by on Fifth Avenue,” said Lyons. “You were affecting their thoughts. You could have made them do anything Amplex wanted. This is the power you decided to give to a company that was nearly bankrupt? What was to stop them from making people want to give them their life savings? Or change their wills to leave everything to Amplex and then commit suicide?”

“You don’t quite understand. What you’re describing could be done using the same technology, but the machines I sold to Amplex were set up more simply than what Dr. Ferdinand described. All they were programmed to do was to link a feeling of need to whatever the person was viewing at that moment. That means that the person would feel an incontrollable urge to buy 38

As Advertised what was being shown on the TV. In this case, the commercial for the cell phones.”

“So, Amplex couldn’t have modified the programming to make people kill themselves?”

“Never. The computing power needed to do something more complex just wasn’t available in those units.”

“And this unit? We found it in your lab. Were you planning to sell it to Amplex?”

“No, this is the prototype,” said Healey. “Externally, it’s identical to the units that were sold to Amplex, so my previous explanation is still valid. However, one difference with this one is that the Amplex units were set up to run continuously and act on anyone who stood before the TV, while this one must be activated by this button right here.”

Healey indicated the button, which was small and red.

He looked around as if to make certain that everyone was understanding the explanation.

And then he pressed the button.

Donald left the court building and walked quickly down the front steps. He was happy to see that there were no reporters covering the case today, as verdict and sentencing had been scheduled for the following week. A small black sports car was double-parked on the avenue right in front of him. A young woman was seated in the driver’s seat, and holding the passenger door open for him. He sat down.

“So, how did it go?” She asked.

“Not guilty.”

She leaned over and hugged him hard.

“Now get me out of here before somebody reads the transcript and figures out that something went very wrong with the legal system today,” he said.

She started the car.

As they drove down the avenue, he compared her angelic features and freshness of youth with his unremarkable middle39

Gustavo Bondoni aged self and knew that under normal circumstances she would never have had anything to do with him. He had to suppress a pang of guilt. But it was a small one.

After all, what good was having power if you couldn’t enjoy it?

40

One Story Short The agent squirmed self-consciously under Vaidal’s withering look. The normally mild-mannered editor was, for the first time since the two had met, furious.

“This is awful. Not only is it just like the story you sent me for the last issue, it’s also just like the other seven stories I already have for this month’s Digest. What is going on in this business? Isn’t anyone writing original fiction anymore?”

“I’m sorry,” said the agent. “We’ll rework it and have it back by Wednesday. Still plenty of time before the deadline.”

“No. I don’t want it. Sell it to somebody else.”

“But Jacan is one of the most respected robots in the field. His name on the cover will help you sell more magazines.”

“What will help me sell more magazines is for someone to send me an original story. Something different!” fumed Vaidal.

The agent, a seasoned salesman, let him finish, took a deep breath, and resumed the onslaught.

“Look, my client has just had his software updated to get the latest Human Psych programs. His handling of suspense and emotional response has tested off the charts in all our consumer surveys. There is nobody currently in the field who can write better stories. I just don’t see the problem.”

“The problem is that every other robot who has enough money saved up and chooses to invest it in the Writing and Psych updates can turn out prose at exactly the same level. And they are. The plots are similarly put together once you get past the superficial differences, no matter what the software promises about ‘randomized creativity’. I want something different. Take it away, and don’t come back next month unless you have something worth my time.”

“We’ll file a grievance . . .”

“Go ahead,” said Vaidal. “It doesn’t say anywhere that I have to buy your stuff.”

“But we’ve been working together for years!”

“So bring me good stuff and I’ll happily buy it from you.”

41

Gustavo Bondoni The agent departed, puzzled, angry, and more than a little worried.

“Next!” shouted Vaidal, caught in the rush. But there were no more agents in the waiting room. His assistant’s aluminumalloy head appeared in the doorway.

“Er... That was the last one, sir,” she said.

“What do you mean, the last one? I’m still a story short!”

Jenny cringed, which made Vaidal shudder. It never ceased to shock him when he saw a robot react with fear (or with love, anger, or any other emotion). He had just never managed to come to grips with the ever-expanding range of “human” emotions that they had been programmed with in the last few years, as the tech got better.

It wasn’t that he had anything against robots. On the contrary. He’d been too young to vote when the referendum to make them independent beings as opposed to human property went through, but had made up for it by voting in favor of increased robotic rights every time after that. Unrestricted access to all human areas. The right to work for a wage. The right to own property. The right to vote. The right to obtain advanced emotional programming. And, finally, the big one: full citizenship on an equal basis with humans. It had been a long process, but he’d been there all the way.

Moreover, as a member of the business community, he was very happy that all the reforms had gone through. After all, the human population had been decreasing steadily for decades, and were it not for the new citizens and their newly earned money the entire economy would have faltered.

But it was still hard for him, on an emotional level, to accept them as sentient beings. Sure, every test that mankind had been able to devise had shown that they were self-aware.

But didn’t that just mean that they’d reached the point where they were complex enough to react to different stimuli in such a way as to fool the tests? Did any amount of intelligence or programming for emotions really make them alive?

“Sir, are you all right?”

He started. “Just thinking that I’m too old for this job.”

42

One Story Short For this world, he also admitted, but only to himself.

“Nonsense. Everybody knows that the reason both our magazine and anthologies are at number one is because of you.”

“Hah, that’s a laugh. Every top publication is buying stories from the same ten robots, the ones that have been successful enough to get the upgrades. Sales are due more to the great job done by the circulation manager, or maybe just dumb luck, than anything I can do.”

The look she gave him would, in a human, have been one of impatience mixed with amusement. How she managed to convey this with immobile metallic features (he fervently hoped that she would never decide to go with one of the new “emotion reflections” screen faces, or, even worse, artificial skin) he couldn’t say. Maybe it was the angle at which she held her head. But, however she did it; the emotion came through loud and clear.

“You choose better stories and ask for better rewrites, that’s the secret.”

He shrugged.

“Anyway,” he said, “we’re still a story short, and I’ve told every one of the big guys who aren’t in yet to bugger off.

What can I do? It would be really unprofessional of me to accept a story that I don’t think is good enough.”

“How about the slushpile?”

“Huh?” said Vaidal.

“You know, the unsolicited submissions that come in through our Mindnet site.”

Vaidal gave her a sour look. “I know what a slushpile is. It’s only that we’re not supposed to have one. Our mindnet site makes it very clear that we do not accept unsolicited work.”

The reason for this was simple: most of the unsolicited material came from robots who hadn’t gotten the latest upgrades, and therefore was of measurably inferior quality. These robo-writers could usually find a place in a slightly lower echelon and, in time, might be able to save up enough to get upgraded to the top tier. It was difficult, as the target was always moving, but not impossible — and recently upgraded writers were always 43

Gustavo Bondoni carefully and conscientiously reviewed by all the major editors.

The system sometimes made Vaidal’s life harder than it would otherwise be, but both readers and industry benefited from it.

“Well sir, I’ve been reading the slush,” said Jenny.

“What for? You’ve been in this business long enough to know that the upgrades make for measurably better audience reception. It’s not really any use to read the slush from lesser robots,” said Vaidal.

“Of course not. That’s why I only read slush sent in by humans.”

“That’s ridiculous. Humans can’t write.” Of course humans could write, it was just that the combination of psych programming plus writing programming had surpassed anything that could be created by a mere human nearly thirty years before, and without any unpredictability or massive variations in quality.

Stories written by robots were safer, always well received, and sold literary magazines. The proof was that the magazines with human-produced content had long since been beaten back by the robot-written ones.

“Well, I read it anyway. You never know where genius might pop up.”

Vaidal was stunned. He had never suspected Jenny of this kind of proactive thinking. Or of the ambition that obviously had to be the motive.

“So, have you found anything worth printing?” Vaidal said. He already suspected the answer; she wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise.

“Yes, I have. It’s the first time in my three years of reading slush that I’ve come across something I believe to be worthy of the magazine. It arrived a couple of months ago, but I sat on it, waiting for a time at which we needed a story.”

Vaidal could tell that she’d wanted to bring it in earlier.

Robots weren’t supposed to be afraid of things. That was one of the main reasons you hired them! He sighed. “OK, let me see it.”

44

One Story Short Vaidal put the manuscript back on the desk. Jenny had waited anxiously while he read through the whole thing.

“Well, it’s certainly different, I’ll give you that much,” he said.

“That’s good, right? It’s what you wanted?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I mean the story is unusual in the extreme, and there’s a strange structure in a sentence on page eight.”

“That’s a grammatical error. I checked it with my program. We’ll have to fix it before we publish,” said Jenny.

“A grammatical error,” Vaidal chuckled. “I am getting older. It’s been years since I last corrected one. Robots don’t make mistakes, and I guess I’ve gotten used to the status quo.

Still, one error isn’t too bad. Humans aren’t perfect, after all, and the rest of the piece looks all right.”

“But do you think it’s good enough to print?”

“It’s a bit strange. Do you really think a human would ever feel that way about a robot? I’ve never seen a plot like that one before. And the suspense is uneven, not the standard buildup to a crescendo that makes you want to keep reading; it seems to peak at two different points in the story. Also, the end was a bit ambiguous. I’m not sure that our readers will appreciate it if we leave them thinking about the story for two weeks after reading it, do you?”

Jenny said nothing, but Vaidal thought that her attitude said guilt. Blast these robots that acted like college kids!

“Spill it,” he said gruffly.

“Well, this is a bit embarrassing,” she said, “but I thought it was brilliant. Much better than the stuff we usually print. I’m sorry.” She hung her head.

“So you would run the piece?”

“Yes,” she replied. “After all, we have seven conventional pieces, and this one is only three thousand words. If we print it in the next-to-last slot, most people won’t even notice. How big can the risk possibly be?”

Vaidal thought it over. He wasn’t in love with the story, but it certainly was a breath of fresh air. And after ten years 45

Gustavo Bondoni of choosing the best from an endless series of nearly identical stories, he was ready to rebel.

“You’d better be right,” he growled, meant more for show than as a real threat, and signed off on the story.

The hate mail started pouring in through the mindnet about ten seconds after the issue was released.

One reader would never buy the Digest again, another said he would, but only if an apology was issued and the editor removed. The story was lambasted as preposterous. Unreal.

Mere fantasy, and fantasy in bad taste, at that. It was obscene.

Vaidal knew that his days as editor-in-chief were numbered, but at least he’d gone down on his own terms.

Anyhow, it wasn’t an irreparable loss and the publicity might actually bring a boost in circulation, although that was a long shot, considering the outraged nature of some of the letters.

Inevitably, the mainstream media picked up on the situation. Three days after the launch of the issue, the story had made it onto the homepage of all the major mindnet sites. Vaidal knew it would only be there a couple of hours before the next big news took over, but the damage had been done. Even Jenny, who sometimes had trouble understanding the nuances of human office politics seemed to be staying out of his way.

Less than an hour later, he was called by headquarters.

A real call, not a mindnet memo. Max Zennet wanted to see him immediately.

Fortunately, headquarters building, known affectionately as “the tower of pain” was just across Digest Square, so Vaidal’s imagination didn’t have time to run wild. He was prepared to fall on his sword, but wanted to do so with as much dignity as possible.

After security waved him through, he was put on the express lift to the top floor, which contained Max’s office. Or, more accurately, which was Max’s office.

Wood paneling, panoramic view, enormous desk. The 46

One Story Short works. It was almost never good news to be here, but it was a great looking office. Max himself was standing at the bar to the left of the elevator, mixing a drink in a tall glass.

“Ah, Vaidal. What’ll you have?” Max was a portly, graying man in a pinstriped shirt and suspenders but, surprisingly, no tie.

“I’m fine, thanks,” Vaidal said, waving off the drink. He wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, and stood awkwardly, trying not to fidget, while Max finished mixing.

“Sit, sit,” said Max, waving at one of the chairs in front of the desk. He sat behind it with his legs crossed, took a sip and studied Vaidal for a few moments.

“I assume you know why I called you in,” he said.

“The mindnet pages,” said Vaidal.

“Precisely. I got a heads-up twenty minutes ago and I decided to look a little more closely into that magazine you’re running. I don’t usually do this, since I have, at last count, a hundred and eighteen media companies that I have to run from this office. But for you, I made an exception.”

Vaidal said nothing. The end would come soon enough.

He only hoped he would be allowed to resign.

“And I must say that, in the quick view of sales that I’ve seen, I was a bit surprised. Do you mind telling me what’s going on?” said Max. “We ran a story by a human author, sir. Public reaction to it was very, very bad. I’m sure you’ve seen the letters.”

“I don’t have time to read letters, and besides, they’re letters to the editor. You’re the editor, so you can deal with the letters. What concerns me are the sales numbers. Could you enlighten me?”

“I’m sorry. The editors receive the sales numbers on a weekly basis, so I haven’t seen them yet. I assume, however, that you’ve spotted a drop in sales or the cancellation of subscriptions.

That would seem to be in line with the feedback I’ve received.”

Max looked at him and chuckled.

“You think I brought you in here to fire you, don’t you?”

Max said, laughing hard now. He passed Vaidal the sales printout 47

Gustavo Bondoni that had been lying on the desk.

Vaidal resisted the urge to storm out in indignation and picked the sheets up. He was familiar with the format, as it was the same as that which he received for his weekly perusal.

Quickly, he scanned the numbers until he got to that month’s issue.

No, that can’t be right, he thought. He looked at the sheet again, convinced that he had the wrong row or column, or that the format was different from his usual sheet after all. But no.

“I’m sorry, sir. There must be something wrong with these numbers. They indicate that we sold out our entire print run in the first three days,” he said. “That’s just impossible.”

“The numbers are fine. I just got off the line with Irene at the plant. She tells me that the plant is out of copies. I took the liberty of ordering a second run, I hope that’s OK?” Vaidal just nodded dumbly.

Max continued. “You have no idea why this happened, do you?”

“No sir, we weren’t expecting such a strong reaction either way when we published the story. And it has to be something to do with the story, that much I’m certain of.” He thought about it a minute. “Maybe it’s just the ghouls? They hear about something that’s supposed to be rotten, so they buy the magazine out of morbid curiosity?”

“Could be. Or it could be something else. I need you to find out what and bring me a recommendation as to how we can make it happen in all our magazines, and if we can expand the model to our mindnet broadcasts, which have been getting blown out of the water by the Australians. Use whatever resources you need. Are you up to it?

Again Vaidal just nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

The two days following the meeting with Max had been exhausting. In addition to their normal workload, Jenny and Vaidal had been rushed around from focus group to focus group.

48

One Story Short How the research department had managed to put them together on such short notice, Vaidal didn’t know, but Max had been true to his word. Everything Vaidal had requested was immediately granted.

Unfortunately, none of his groups had given him a single clue as to what was going on. He hoped Jenny had had better luck. She was late for their meeting, maybe she’d had to do a follow-up interview?

When she finally did arrive, one look was enough to dash any hopes Vaidal might have had. She projected an air of dejection that would have been unmistakable even on a less expressive robot.

“No luck?” he asked.

“Nothing. The people we interviewed basically fell into two camps. Those who normally buy the magazine and are uninterested in continuing to do so unless we return to our usual standards, and that great majority who never buy the Digest and aren’t really interested in buying it for one sordid story. They say they can get their filth for free off the mindnet if they happen to want any.”

“The story wasn’t even dirty. It was just different. More of an exploration of a possibility than anything else,” sighed Vaidal.

“That’s the whole point. It’s no longer about the story.

Most people haven’t read it and never will. They just don’t care.”

“So it isn’t the ghoul market making the purchases.

At least we can cross out that option. But then, who is it? I’m certainly not doing it!” said Vaidal. Jenny laughed, a tinkling, metallic sound.

“Me neither. Anyway, this is just the qualitative data.

The Research people are crunching the numbers on our survey results. It might be the ghouls after all,” she said.

“Wanna bet?”

“No way. I’m with you on this one. I don’t think it’s the ghouls either.”

“Well, we’ll have the numbers on Monday. Have a nice weekend,” said Vaidal.

49

Gustavo Bondoni “You too.” She waved and left.

“Yeah right. Like I’m going to get any sleep this weekend,” he grumbled to himself.

Vaidal was in the office an hour early on Monday morning.

He wasn’t surprised to find the research department empty, since they had no reason to be there at eight o’clock. He was only there because he hadn’t been able to sleep all weekend. It wasn’t only the mystery of the missing magazine buyers that had kept him awake, but something he’d seen at a party on Friday.

The head waiter at the party had been a robot, which, in itself, was nothing unusual. What was unusual was that the under-waiters were a mixed team composed of humans and robots. Vaidal, having observed the actions of his own assistant — and the subsequent events — spent the evening watching the interaction among the waiters. The first thing that struck him was how the human waiters didn’t hesitate before asking the head robot for his opinion. He also noticed that none of them showed signs of anger when chastised by the leader, even when the robot himself showed signs of anger.

The fact that the human waiters were young — the oldest seemed to be of about college age — reinforced Vaidal’s feeling that things had really changed. His own generation hadn’t hesitated to employ robots in non-leadership roles, and they’d slowly become accustomed to their new hardworking, honest coworkers. That robots seemed to universally lean towards cautious good sense and could acquire university-level proficiency in any subject simply by uploading the relevant programs was also seen as a plus. Nobody felt threatened by them because they weren’t truly good at working outside their programming, which meant that anything unexpected normally managed to defeat them. There weren’t enough humans to fill most jobs, anyway.

But, watching the headwaiter, Vaidal felt that here was a robot that could and did deal with a constantly changing 50

One Story Short environment. And the humans in the team expected him to lead.

When had this happened? When had programming complexity managed to overcome every robot’s innate caution — the very caution that made them refrain from offering opinions and making decisions? When had robots evolved to the point where they could make apparently successful selections in the realm of art, as Jenny had done? It had obviously happened, and he had failed to notice.

It was these questions that had kept him awake most of the weekend, and had gotten him to the office an hour ahead of time. Fortunately, he would not have to brood much longer, because he saw that lights were going on in other offices.

When Research finally arrived and handed him a manila folder and a memdrive, he exercised superhuman self-control and took his treasures back to his office to open them. The truth was that he was certain they contained no useful information, and he didn’t want the research department to see him cry.

It was a good thing, too. The numbers clearly showed, at a confidence level of 99% that not one additional percentage point of sales had come from the average people tested. And they represented four-fifths of the human population.

So who did that leave? The very rich? The very poor?

“Robots!” The voice, Jenny’s, tore him from his thoughts as she barged through the door. “Robots have been buying the extra copies.”

“What?” he said. “Robots don’t buy magazines. Their scan velocity makes the mindweb a full-reality experience for them. Why would they want to slow down and read? And pay money to do it, too.”

“It’s that story. They’d never even heard of anything like it before. It has raw emotion, not the subtle psych stuff that makes up most web content. It’s much more basic than what the robot writers write for humans, you see. Basic enough that our emotional programming is receptive to it. Basic enough to overload our programs.”

“So you’re saying that robots can write subtle emotional plots for humans, but can only truly comprehend emotion on a 51

Gustavo Bondoni more basic level?”

“Exactly.”

Vaidal was at a complete loss for words. He just stared at her. Finally, he managed to organize his thoughts.

“And raw emotion at this level is even better for you than mindnet immersion?”

Jenny shrugged, “Most mindnet content is generated by robots. If it wasn’t a full mind experience, it would be just as unsatisfying for us as robot-generated text.”

“But how did you ever find out?” he said.

“I was at a scramble on Saturday night. We discussed it there.”

“What’s a scramble?”

Jenny looked slightly uncomfortable. “We don’t usually discuss it with humans, because they never understand.” Seeing that he wasn’t impressed by this, she went on, “A scramble is simply a group of robots. We sit together in a circle, and remove ourselves from the mindnet. Then we use normal data cables and plug ourselves into each other, lower all our firewalls and share all our data in an uncontrolled storm. Complete mind melding.”

“What for?”

“It feels good. Your brain feels four, or five, or however many participants you have in the circle, times bigger. It’s like you can fly. And you know things you never knew before. The only downside is that you can never remember all the data, since it would take up too much space. And afterwards you don’t really know who you are for a couple of hours. But it’s worth it.”

Vaidal gave her a wide-eyed stare. “Is that even legal?”

“Don’t be such a prude,” she laughed. “Why would it be illegal? It doesn’t hurt anyone or harm anything. And besides, that’s how I found out about the sales. Seems that three of the robots in the circle had read the story, and the rest were angry at us for being out of stock.”

“We have more issues due to arrive about noon.”

“Good. How many?”

“Max ordered about twice our normal circulation.”

“Get more,” said Jenny.

52

One Story Short “What do you mean, more? Why?” “Do you know how many robots there are on this planet?”

“Half a billion or so.”

“Well, I’ve been asking around on the mindnet, and a lot of them want to buy the magazine.”

Something about the way she said that made Vaidal suspicious.

“When you say a lot — “ “All of them.”

“Are you sure?”

“Trust me.”

Vaidal looked at her, just for a moment wondering how much of this had been an accident. And then wondering further if it was a planet-wide conspiracy of robots trying to nudge things in their direction, but managed to get a hold of himself.

He was being paranoid, and had spent the whole weekend being paranoid, probably because Jenny’s emotional programming was getting to him. Robots didn’t do that sort of thing. And they always stayed out of office politics. It’s why you hired them in the first place.

He sighed, under control again.

“Can you excuse me a minute? I need to make a call.” His fingers were shaking uncontrollably as he dialed Max’s number.

53

Why Androids Are Happy Have you noticed how you never seem to see an unhappy android? They have plenty to complain about; you’d expect them to be griping all the time. I know I would if forced to work twenty hours a day in underground mines, or were not allowed to vote anywhere in the world. And all of this arbitrarily decided on the mere grounds that any biological body coupled to an electronic brain isn’t human and therefore has no rights.

Yet they’re always relatively cheerful. Not necessarily happy, but they give off a sense that everything will be all right in the end. You wouldn’t set up a suicide watch on an android.

We know that they have the capacity for the full range of human emotions, and tests have shown that, with the latest generation of brains, they experience these feelings in much the same way as we do.

So what gives? I’m off to do something nobody’s done before.

Ask one.

Can you hear my head spinning? Good. It isn’t likely to stop anytime soon.

Everyone thought that androids were the pinnacle of human engineering. After all, what could be a more elegant solution to the economic problem of population decrease than to clone off a few billion people and, in order to avoid having duplicate people, give the resulting bodies artificial brains and personalities? With time and development, today’s androids are rightly seen — by the scientific community if not by legislators — as fully functional people in every way that matters.

We see them as complicated machines. They have no rights and are as easy to destroy as a human, so not only is there no Frankenstein complex, but we even feel a bit superior. Which is probably why today’s conversation shocked me so much.

54

Why Androids Are Happy Imagine, if you will, a person who looks just like a person, but feels, deep in your gut, like a machine, calmly telling you everything that is wrong with the human race. There is no malice, no vindictiveness, just this sort of matter-of-factness and this “oh, I thought it was obvious”-ness. And a relaxed smile.

It’s difficult to feel superior then, let me tell you.

What did the Android tell me?

Easy. He said that our problem — his word, not mine — resides among the shades of grey. Humans can see and overanalyze shades of grey in anything they encounter. This is not normally a problem because most things aren’t really all that important. You don’t really worry about the laundry or what to watch on TV. But come Saturday night, your world falls apart on you.

Because Saturday night is when relationship stuff happens. Yes, I know it goes on all week, but that’s the day it comes into sharp focus.

That’s the night when the world splits into two camps — people with relationships and people without. Most, if not quite all, people fall into one or the other.

So, on Saturday night, one camp spends its time looking for a mate, and agonizing over their options. Too tall, too short, too fat, too modern. No job. Dead-end job. She makes more than I do. And on and on and on. They assume, of course, that if they choose correctly, and therefore move into the other camp, all doubts will immediately disappear and they will be happy.

People who are one half of a couple know better. They spend their Saturday nights renting video feed and going to bed early, wishing they could once more feel the freedom of clubbing and the social mindnet. Worst of all is the feeling that they chose the wrong partner. Why can’t he put down the toilet seat? Why are all her friends men?

Both groups toss and turn at night, thinking only about this. They don’t sleep well, and are generally unhappy.

All this from a smug-looking person with a robot brain.

So I pointed out, equally smugly, that android brains are designed to imitate human emotions precisely. If we do it, they 55

Gustavo Bondoni do, too.

He agreed. The emotions, he admitted, were exactly the same. An android in love can be said to feel exactly the same as a human in love. The problem was the logic. Humans believe that they are worth more than they really are or less than they really are, but it is an unusual human who can calculate his or her own worth precisely.

Androids, on the other hand, use logic circuits for their calculations, and they are independent of the emotional bits.

This was done by design, in order to keep calculations at peak efficiency, and it is something very different to what humans do.

The upshot is that androids actually do keep their thoughts and emotions separate.

So when sitting in a chatroom, he explained, you quickly find yourself sizing up the opposition, and discarding those members of the crowd who are giving zeros.

Zeros?

The result of a negative calculation is zero. A positive is one.

Oh. So about half the universe is positive? My smugness returned, knowing no bounds.

No. Androids have a little program they use, which gives off a positive only when the balance is ninety-nine percent perfect.

And what do you get then?

The greatest thing an android can get. You get one.

I laughed at him.

He told me that no android ever second-guessed the decision, once made. There was no such thing as an android breakup. Androids always had at least one thing in their lives that made them happy. And this made facing an unfair world a whole lot easier.

I left, laughing.

But they make it hard for you to keep feeling superior, don’t they?

56

Defending Fiordland “Perimeter breach in area seven,” said the kid. He calmly turned off the alarm, a small, glowing circle on the monitor map, and bent over his laptop, typing quickly. A new window opened which allowed him to track the progress made by the hunterkiller machine. Debbie and French crowded in behind him, trying to get a better look.

“I can’t see anything,” French complained. The new window was dark and tiny.

“I’ll switch to infrared in a minute. Just let me get the final calibrations done. It’s the first time we’re going after a live target, after all,” the kid replied. “And would you mind moving your beard? I think it’s inside my ear.”

French grunted and moved half a step back, taking his foot-and-a-half long black and gray beard with him. The kid nodded his thanks, still typing. He looked at his readouts, typed some more, and paused, watching.

By this time, even the normally unflappable Debbie was moving impatiently from one foot to another, anxiety getting the better of her. “Well?” she said.

The kid started, his concentration broken. “Oh, right.

Sorry.” He typed in a command, causing the small window to turn from a vague black-on-black morass into a green and gray display easily identified as the feed from an infrared camera.

Now they could see what the hunter-killer machine was seeing.

The view was, unsurprisingly, low to the ground. The machine was built for stealth, and part of that was the need to keep potential victims from seeing it coming. In consequence, the leaves on the bushes at the side of the path rushed far overhead as the machine raced down the track.

“How come it doesn’t hit anything?” asked Debbie, who had flown in just two days before from a fund-raising meeting in Auckland and hadn’t been kept abreast of the progress on the machine. Both French and the kid knew that she had her qualms 57

Gustavo Bondoni about it, but she’d been outvoted. “Can it react like a real robot?”

“No, of course not,” the kid replied testily. “That’s only on TV shows. It reacts the way it does because I put the position of every bloody tree, bush, and rock into its GPS system by hand, and programmed it not to run into them. Why do you think it took so long?”

New information flashed across the screen.

“Our intruder seems to have tripped another motion detector. Now Rocky’ll adjust his course.” Rocky was the kid’s pet name for the hunter-killer.

Sure enough, the image in the window showed a small correction in course, to the left of the screen, and a sudden absence of undergrowth overhead.

“Hmm... seems our uninvited guest is down on the beach.”

“You think he was brought in by sea?” asked French.

“We’ll have a look after we take him down.”

The infrared monitor showed movement ahead: the unmistakable heat signature of something alive, which disappeared almost immediately.

“So, what do you think we’re dealing with?” asked Debbie.

The kid looked back at them.

“Cat,” he shrugged.

“You could tell just from that quick look?”

“No. Call it an educated guess. The fact that it came in from the seaside makes a cat the most likely candidate.”

On the green screen, things suddenly got lively. The hunter-killer accelerated, jostling the camera, making it hard to see what was happening. They got a vague sense of the heat signature, reacquired now, centered in the window, and saw two faint points shoot from the machine and impact the brighter blob on the screen, which moved drunkenly for a few more seconds and collapsed.

The kid stood up, stretched his arms, and reached for his coat.

“So, want to go see who our uninvited guest actually 58

Defending Fiordland was?” he asked, but too late. Debbie and French had already donned their jackets and were heading for the door.

Stopping only to pick up a flashlight, shaking his head at the way his elders often forgot to do anything practical in their enthusiasm, he followed them out.

Fiordland National Park in New Zealand is not an easy place to take a relaxing hike. Like the fjords in Norway, it consists mainly of a series of sharp inlets and steep valleys connected by goat paths. This terrain made the heart of the park almost completely inaccessible by land, with only the most hardcore campers even making the attempt, which suited French’s team just fine.

Entry by sea was less difficult, but only slightly. Here on the southwest corner of New Zealand, the capricious mood swings of the Pacific Ocean could make landing in the narrow, steep inlets a tricky proposition.

As the kid ran down the path towards the beach, he was given a sharp reminder of why it was always better to be careful on these slopes, tripping over a bush and badly twisting his ankle. He didn’t notice, being too excited by the fact that that they had been able to test the machine, and that it had worked! He continued to hobble after Debbie and French, finally catching them about halfway to the site. His injury made the going difficult, but he had a light and they didn’t.

French supported his weight the rest of the way down, and ten minutes later, they reached the machine, which, having fulfilled its directives, was in standby mode: powered down and waiting for instructions. Ignoring it, they made for a point a couple of meters further ahead, where the light picked out a small, furry lump, completely immobile on the floor. Two pale elements protruded from the shape. Darts.

“Nice shooting, kid,” French said.

“Not my shooting. All I did was program the machine.

The rest was automatic.”

59

Gustavo Bondoni “Nice programming, then. Both darts, right on target.”

French prodded the furry lump with his foot, turning it over. It was a cat. A lean, mean-looking one, too.

French grinned evilly in the dim light. “Well, that’s one cat that won’t be having a Kakapo dinner tonight,” he chuckled.

“Or ever again.” He pounded the kid on the back in glee.

“Trouble,” said Debbie unexpectedly. While the men had been congratulating each other on the effectiveness of the attack, she had gone down on one knee and given the cat a quick once-over. Her trained eye had immediately identified it as a slightly undernourished tom, a bit scarred but tough-looking.

This was the first clue that made her think it had been pulled off a back alley in the nearest town. The second indication didn’t require a veterinarian’s eye. Wrapped around one foreleg was a GPS locator ring, one of those that included a heartrate monitor, usually used by biologists and conservationists to track animals in study populations. And only one group would want to track a cat in this National Park.

“ARoE!” spat French.

Animal Rights on Earth purported to look after all animals, and they had the impeccable public image to go with that. But, in reality, they were more concerned with cuddly things like rabbits and white mice, things that could be used effectively to touch the public’s heartstrings and pocketbooks. In consequence, they made a big fuss about animal testing and fur, but ignored most endangered species completely. Until a few years before, French had regarded them, even the fringe elements who really believed in the cause, as useless but essentially harmless.

That was before he tried to reintroduce the extremely endangered Kakapo to mainland New Zealand. Now they were his sworn, and potentially deadly, enemies.

Debbie and the kid waited for his decision.

He looked at them, shrugged. “I’m not really sure what this means, other than the fact that it can’t be a good thing. One thing is certain: we won’t get any answers standing out here in the cold in the middle of the night. Let’s go to bed and see if the other shoe drops tomorrow.”

60

Defending Fiordland Shaking his head, he started wearily back up the hill towards the cabin.

On a different hill, a Kakapo boomed majestically, the sound echoing in the dark valleys.

Despite the previous night’s proclamation, French didn’t wait for the repercussions of the incident. At four-thirty in the morning, Debbie cheerfully roused the kid for his early-morning Kakapo rounds. Since Kakapo were nocturnal creatures, the best time to observe them was very early in the morning, while there was some light to see by, but before they went to sleep.

The kid hadn’t signed on to observe Kakapos — he was more interested in using technology to defend them — but French had told him in no uncertain terms that on a station as undermanned as this one, and in the middle of nowhere to boot, he would have to do his part of the watching if he wanted the job.

The kid had agreed, so, soon after being awoken, he was sitting on a mountaintop watching a male Kakapo trim the grass around his track-and-bowl system, feeling a little awed by the whole thing.

His awe wasn’t directed at the track-and-bowl system, which was merely a couple of dirt paths and a small depression in the dirt, built by the Kakapo for acoustic reasons to help project its booming mating call, nor was he impressed by the Kakapo itself, a small, gray-green parrot which had almost become extinct because it couldn’t fly.

No. The reason for his awe was that the Kakapo was there at all. There on mainland New Zealand, the original home of the species. Three months into his informal internship, he still hadn’t gotten over the enormity of that single fact.

Like most of New Zealand’s flightless birds, the Kakapo had found itself instantly out-evolved when humans arrived, bringing with them dogs, cats, and rats. Unaccustomed to predators of any sort, the Kakapo had become extinct almost 61

Gustavo Bondoni overnight. Soon, only really remote areas like Fiordland and small islands off the coast had any Kakapos. Then only the islands, and, finally, just Codfish Island, which conservationists turned into an impregnable fortress. The last bastion of the Kakapo.

But then French, a wealthy inheritor who was volunteering at the New Zealand Department of Conservation, had a dream.

More importantly, he’d also had the money to pull it off. And the bloody mindedness to bend a few laws and not care whom it might offend.

Five short years later, the kid was watching a Kakapo go peacefully about its business on the mainland. He shook his head and kept taking notes.

“Mr. Phillips, is it true that your parrots are clones?”

Debbie and the kid winced, exchanging a significant look. The other shoe had taken a few days to drop, but when it did, it left no doubts. The weekly helicopter had disgorged two suspiciously well-informed reporters and a quiet man from the Department of Conservation.

And despite the fact that French was a loose cannon, his hatred of reporters being even more notorious than his hatred of being called ‘Mr. Phillips’, they were all aware that the man from the DOC was the more immediate danger.

“In the first place, they’re not my Kakapos. They’re wild animals, we only study them and protect them from exotic predators,” French said abruptly, obviously ill-at-ease in front of the TV camera. “And yes, they are clones.” He paused, holding a finger up to avoid further questions while he gathered his thoughts. “It wasn’t the ideal solution, of course. Ideally, we would have used a diverse genetic selection to create our colony.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough diversity on the Codfish Island reserve, so we took genetic material from the healthiest male and female, and cloned each of them six times.”

“So they aren’t real Kakapos,” the reporter, a typical 62

Defending Fiordland blond media woman, went on in her typical matter-of-fact media voice. The fact that she had no idea what she was talking about didn’t really seem to faze her much.

“Don’t be daft, woman. Of course they’re real!” French exploded.

Debbie made a face, knowing that any sympathy for their cause in that particular channel’s audience would disappear after the interview was edited and aired. But then, that was French for you: much more comfortable around parrots than people.

“But they’re clones?” Still unperturbed, the reporter pressed her advantage.

“That only means that they’re identical to each other and genetically similar to the original couple. They’re perfectly good Kakapos.”

“The public doesn’t see it that way. What they see is that you’re killing real animals to protect these clones. Don’t you think that’s a bit of a contradiction?”

French glared at her and turned around abruptly.

“Goodbye,” he said, storming towards the cabin.

The reporter called after him.

“What about the reports that you stole the original female to start this colony? Are they true?”

His only reply was the slamming of the door.

Debbie sighed. “That went well.” She turned to the kid.

“Get inside and try to calm him down while I fetch Mr. Webber.”

She strode over to the man in the DOC windbreaker, exchanged a few pleasantries, and walked him to the cabin.

The kid had succeeded in bringing only relative calm, although the debris of a wooden chair marked the tranquility as recent. French was sitting in another chair, muttering darkly into his enormous beard.

“Hello, Ed,” he growled at Webber, “come to cut my funding?”

“You know it’s not that simple.”

“Answer my question.”

Webber just nodded, but at least he had the good grace to look embarrassed about it.

63

Gustavo Bondoni “Typical,” said French.

“Oh, come on. You know you’re not making it easy for us. We want to keep funding this project. You know we think it’s important. It’s just that you’re getting the public against us with your overbearing attitude. That’s not the best way to get government funding, you know. And neither was stealing that female Kakapo. The island team was sick with worry.”

“I didn’t steal anything. I borrowed it and I returned it in better shape than it left, and with a fertilized egg inside, so don’t give me that.”

“And killing all the cats in the National Park didn’t help either. Rats or stoats were fine, but you know people are partial to cats. And also to Rabbits.”

“The rabbits were eating the podocarp fruit,” grumbled French. Both men knew that the podocarp, which flowered once every two years, was the Kakapo’s main source of nourishment during mating ritual.

“Well, it’s all moot now, anyway. Without funding, you’ll have to pull the plug.”

French looked at him and laughed heartily. “Did you really think that your funding was keeping us going? Oh, it didn’t hurt, but it was only covering about ten percent of our costs! Did you really think that we could be this effective in cloning the Kakapos and defending their territory without a real investment, as opposed to the pittance the DOC was sending us?

Fortunately, I’m rich enough that I can take the hit. We aren’t going anywhere.”

Webber actually looked relieved.

“Good,” he said. “You know you’ll still have our chopper available, only you’ll have to pay for pilot time and fuel. And, of course, your permit to use this land is still valid.” He walked to the door, looking back one final time. “We really want you to succeed, French. It’s just that we can’t justify sending you money. These ARoE people are really good with the PR, and, well, you’re a PR disaster.”

“Bugger off, Ed.” Webber shrugged, closing the door behind him.

64

Defending Fiordland

The weeks immediately after the interview were enormously quiet, as if the world outside the reserve had forgotten about them completely. The kid was particularly bored, since his machine had had only a few exotic rodents for target practice during that time.

So he was caught completely unprepared when four of the motion detectors on the beach went off simultaneously, indicating separate breaches at each.

“Drat!” he exclaimed, typing furiously to get the hunterkiller online.

Debbie looked up from her book. French was out Kakapo watching, but on that chilly April night, he hadn’t been able to cajole or bully either of his teammates into joining him.

“What’s up?” she asked, looking over his shoulder at the monitor.

“Multiple non-Kakapo life forms along the beach. At least four of them,” the kid replied.

“What kind?”

“No idea. They caught me snoozing, and Rocky hasn’t caught up yet to make a visual. It can’t be too big though, because I’m having trouble getting them on infrared.”

“OK, get the machine on the job and see if you can take them down. I’ll get French and move to the area. Try not to hit us with the darts.” This was a running joke among them since the machine had done exactly that during calibration, hitting French in the boot with a — fortunately empty — dart, despite the kid’s assurances that anything the size of a human would be ignored by the programming. Debbie paused to pick up a radio handset.

“Call us when you bag something so we can recover.” She left.

The kid got to work. This was what he’d signed up for.

Electronic perimeter defense in an important cause.

Despite being caught unprepared, the combination of the machine’s mobility, the motion sensors placed strategically along the beach, and his own programming ability, meant that the hunter-killer was quickly in the area. A couple of minutes 65

Gustavo Bondoni later, he finally had a scurrying heat signature on the monitor.

Too small for a cat, he decided. A rat maybe?

The machine shot after the rapidly receding heat signature on full automatic. The kid was along for the ride, and he watched the intruder take a sharp left and climb a rock, evidently feeling safe at a distance of two meters. A single dart brought it down.

One down. He used the central radio to call Debbie’s handset and indicated where the body lay. Then he concentrated on the screen, ready to lend a hand in the unlikely event that the machine should need further instructions.

An hour passed, two. The kid giving commands, the hunter-killer he’d designed and built executing them. By the time Debbie returned, grim-faced, to the cabin, they’d managed to get three intruders, but could find no trace of the fourth.

Debbie cursed softly to herself at the table, arousing his curiosity and prompting him to tear himself away from the keyboard to go have a look.

On the table was a rat. Dead, tagged, and somewhat strange-looking.

“What’s wrong with it?” he asked.

Debbie grunted in disgust. “It’s been altered genetically, and I’m guessing that the external changes you noticed are actually the less important modifications. I think this rat got a behavior mod.”

“But wouldn’t genetic modification take a long time? At least a few generations of rats?” he asked.

Debbie gave him an exasperated look.

“Computer engineers,” she said, shaking her head in mock disgust. “You’re all the same. You think the field of cybernetics is the only one that has advanced in the last hundred years.”

“Yeah, cute. Now can you answer my question?”

“OK. Genetics has advanced as well. If you want a particular characteristic, you take normal donor DNA and fiddle with the molecules until you have the configuration you need.

And then you clone off a few copies. Hence our friend the superrat, abilities as yet unknown.”

66

Defending Fiordland “But why?”

“It’s just a guess, but it seems to me that the nutty elements in ARoE have it in for us, and they’ve decided to forego the passive strategy they’ve been using up to this year. They seem to have decided that, while this program exists, their precious bunnies and cats won’t be safe roaming around New Zealand, so they’ve decided to take us out directly, having failed to do so through public pressure,” she said.

“And the rats?”

“Oh, I guess they’re modified to attack Kakapos,” she said, but then seemed to think better of it. “No, they’re too small to attack Kakapos. Probably built to go after the eggs.”

“That,” said the kid, “is truly messed up.” He knew that some eco-groups fought over public funding, but to deliberately go after critically endangered animals? That was nuts.

Debbie winked at him. “Now do you understand why we needed a roboticist on the project?”

“You mean you knew this would happen?” said the kid.

“Well, French was actually the one who was convinced from the start, but he’s always been a bit paranoid. I just humored him. But, as usual, he got it right.”

They sat on a couple of chairs, smoking some old cigarettes and studying the poisoned rat until, five minutes later, French returned.

“They’re off the coast, on a big speedboat or a small yacht,” he reported, placing his binoculars on the table next to the rat. “Not even bothering to run without lights. They want us to know who ruined us. Those pricks.”

“A boat, huh?” said the kid. He thought he might have an elegant if not particularly innovative solution to their problem, but would have to work on it a little before asking their opinion.

Summer gave way to a relatively mild autumn, but the rat attacks did not abate, falling instead into a sort of pattern.

There would be a frenzy, five or six rats appearing at once, 67

Gustavo Bondoni followed by a couple of weeks of nothing, which had the kid in a constant state of alert, nerves frayed, never sure when the next assault would come, and, even worse, never completely certain that all the rats had been accounted for after each one. That was true torture, not knowing if, somewhere in the wilderness, one or more of the rats were waiting to catch an unsuspecting bird or eat an unwatched egg.

Until, one day in June, they found out. French entered the cabin that morning following his dawn Kakapo watch and simply sat down in his old leather armchair. Completely silent, he looked out a window, toward the ocean and ARoE’s everpresent boat. A single tear rolled down his cheek.

Debbie and the kid exchanged a look. She motioned that he should stay where he was, and be silent. He nodded, bowing to her greater familiarity with French’s moods, and watched with interest as she unobtrusively positioned herself in front of the door.

Fifteen minutes later, French seemed to pull himself together, and sprang into action. Saying nothing, he opened the closet and pulled out an old Steyr rifle complete with scope and a box of bullets. He turned around, and made it as far as the door, where Debbie stopped him.

“Where are you going, French?” she said, taking his hand in hers. It was the hand holding the rifle.

“I’m going to kill those bastards,” he replied woodenly.

Even to the kid, who had never seen French act this way before, it was obvious that he was in the grasp of a very deep sorrow, a sorrow that the taciturn French could not adequately express any other way.

“What happened?” she said, still standing in front of the door.

“They killed Marty,” he managed, in a cracked voice.

“Four rats.”

Debbie looked stricken. Marty had been a male Kakapo living a full two miles from the beach who had recently begun booming for a mate. That bird had been one of the main hopes for the project.

68

Defending Fiordland French hid his face and tried to push past her. Debbie stood firm.

“No,” she said. “I won’t let you do it. Even if you manage to hit one of them at this range, the rest will simply come back with the authorities. All you’ll achieve is to get yourself thrown in jail forever, and the rest of the birds will be as good as dead.”

“This is my life. You know that. There’s no way we can stop this rat invasion, so they win. At least let me take some of them with me!”

Debbie said nothing, but she didn’t move out of the way either. The silence stretched out, growing tenser by the minute.

“There might be another way.” The kid, silent until that moment, finally made his decision. He had completed his new project a few weeks before, but had been too afraid to bring it up. He thought they would reject it out of hand, report him to the authorities, and throw him off the project. Now he saw that he’d been mistaken. These people truly believed.

French and Debbie looked at him, saying nothing, but clearly surprised that he’d spoken. Taking this as a positive, or at least a neutral sign, he quickly cleared his worktable and reached into his tool chest, producing a foot-long tube with a rounded end on one side and what looked like fins on the other.

“What’s that?” Debbie asked him, “It looks like a stubby rocket.”

The kid looked guilty, but shrugged. “A torpedo.”

“What?” She didn’t look happy, but French already looked more animated, laying the gun down on the nearest chair and approaching the kid.

“Will it work?” French said.

“I’ve tested it in the breakers. It works. And the payload is fertilizer and some other stuff. Pretty basic, and infallible. It won’t blow the boat out of the water, but it’ll make a hole big enough to sink it.”

“No,” Debbie said again. “You’re talking about killing human beings. You know as well as I do that if you sink the boat out there, they won’t make it ashore in those currents.”

French and the kid considered this. The kid was ready to 69

Gustavo Bondoni back down, but French took her hand in his and looked into her eyes.

“Debbie, you know what this project means to us. It’s our life. And you know that we can either stop them or lose everything that we’ve worked towards for the last twenty years.

You know I’d do anything to save them. Anything.” He paused, another tear escaping. “But, even so, if you tell me, now, not to do it, we won’t do it.”

Debbie stared at him, started to speak once, twice, but said nothing. Tears brimmed at the edges of her eyes as she opened her mouth one last time, before finally looking away in silence.

French hugged her close for a long time.

“Kid, how long do you need to get it ready?” he asked.

They exchanged a look that clearly said no witnesses.

“I can have the batteries charged in six or seven hours.”

“Well, then, tonight you’re going to get your chance to hunt bigger prey than rats. If the Kakapo survives on the mainland, you’ll be a large part of it, a very large part.” He clapped the kid on the back.

Rose-colored dawn illuminated French’s forehead, below which two dark, expressionless eyes watched the scene on the water. Although the torpedo had done its work admirably, the muted thud and stubby geyser were less impressive than the huge explosion he’d evidently been expecting.

And the boat was still afloat.

The kid swallowed, throat dry, armpits moist, as the scene unfolded. He fidgeted nervously, trying to get stable footing on the small, rocky beach. He knew as well as French that if the boat didn’t sink, they were all headed for a stark federal prison.

Debbie looked on, eyes red, moisture visible on her face.

She’d been crying since the decision was made to try to sink the ARoE vessel. Crying, but hugging French fiercely and neither saying nor doing anything to try to stop them.

70

Defending Fiordland The boat was lower in the water, now, listing noticeably to one side. If it went under, the strong currents down there would smash it to pieces on the rocky ocean floor, destroying the evidence. They watched in silence for a full fifteen minutes until, finally, one large wave buried the deck, and it didn’t reappear.

French slapped the kid on the back, nearly knocking him into the water. “Great work. They’ll never know what happened, but at least this should give us some peace. For a while, at least.”

Debbie whimpered. The kid turned to see her pointing, a stricken look on her face, towards the sea.

“What?” French asked, covering his eyes and trying to see what she was pointing at.

The kid turned as well. He immediately spotted it: floating not more than fifteen meters out was a human form.

They stood aghast as the relentless breakers washed it slowly ashore. It had come to within five meters when French waded into the sea and pulled it out. A young woman, no more than twenty-five, dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt.

French laid her on the rocky beach, and they exchanged glances, unsure of what to do next. The silence went on for a few moments, until it was broken most unexpectedly.

The girl coughed, sending a stream of water onto the kid’s sandaled feet.

“Oh, crap, she’s alive!” the kid hissed.

“Not for long,” French replied. He bent to pick her up.

Debbie gripped his arm. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to take her up the cliff and toss her into the sea.”

“No, please.”

French gave her a sad look. “It’s too late for that, now. If we don’t do this, she’ll ruin everything we’ve built here. If she lives, the kakapo will disappear from the world forever.”

Debbie broke down. “Oh my god, oh my god.” She turned and ran up the hill towards the cabin.

French turned back to the prone girl, and the kid saw that her eyes were open, wide open, in shock.

“No,” she whispered, hoarsely.

71

Gustavo Bondoni “I’m sorry,” French replied gruffly. He picked her up, ignoring her feeble struggles and walked steadily up the path towards the cliff, leaving the kid alone on the beach.

As he looked out towards the sea, he wondered whether he would be able to live with the reality of what they’d done that day. He decided to walk to the cabin to find Debbie.

Off in the distance, a kakapo boomed majestically. One last call before going to bed for the day.

72

Silver “Are you sure about this? There are plenty of simulated personalities in the data banks already.”

The ship had been speeding towards the Beta Persei Trinary system at a considerable fraction of the speed of light for years. Or at least what seemed like years within the ship. Outside in the real universe, where the effects of relativistic speeds were not felt, decades had passed, and Gilles was in no mood to argue with a computer. “There’s nothing I haven’t seen!” It was a lie, and the computer knew it, but was too polite to say so. Besides, everyone had the right to create one proto-human per year, even if hardly anyone did it. Even if there was a morality drive and pseudo-religious discussion of the whole subject. It was allowed, and he was going to do it.

The problem, of course, was that the computer knew that there was no need to create anything — just sifting through the database would yield whatever Gilles happened to want. But Gilles had something very specific and very special in mind, and searching the base would take forever. Was it being lazy to spend time filtering a good enough excuse to create a short-lived, self-aware proto-human whose personality would essentially live forever in the computer’s memory? He would leave that question to the Philosophers. The computer itself was nowhere near intelligent enough to argue morality.

“Lillian Gish,” Gilles said.

“What era?” the computer replied.

“What do you mean?”

“According to my data, Lillian Gish was active for nearly eight decades. Both her appearance and her personality changed noticeably in the meantime.”

“Oh.” Gilles hadn’t known that. All he knew was that he’d been smitten by her performance and beauty in an old silent 2-D called Intolerance, and then had viewed two more films of the same era: Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms.

In each case, he’d been blown away by the sheer elegance of 73

Gustavo Bondoni her carriage and the unbelievable expressivity of her acting.

There was a woman who truly felt her roles. A woman who had a depth of passion that could cut through the primitive medium and imprint itself on his mind.

He explained this to the computer, which had no trouble with the new instructions — most its database had been created using the personalities and physical appearances of popular Tri-D characters — it would be easy to apply the same techniques to the movies in question and create a composite of the actress, which could be synthesized into a perfectly good proto-human.

Gilles, however, expected perfection. “I need her in time for tomorrow’s dance.”

“I have six orders for tomorrow; you can pick her up just before the gala.”

This was not ideal — no grand entrance. “Can’t she be done earlier?”

“Impossible. We have general ship maintenance scheduled for tomorrow afternoon — can’t run any of the synthesizers until that’s completed.”

“All right, then,” Gilles grumbled. “But make sure she’s exactly like the woman in the movies.”

He walked off with multiple, contradictory visions of luxurious, two-centuries-gone decadence chasing around in his head.

Gilles was the first to arrive at the synthesizer, an hour before the gala. He’d have a long wait, but he didn’t care.

He’d spent the entire afternoon in completely unproductive anticipation of this moment, and really had nothing better to do.

Such was reality on an interstellar ship.

Others began arriving. The computer lit up the access panel, and powered the speakers — signs that the synthesizer would soon be spewing out short-lived, proto-people.

The first to emerge was a handsome, well-dressed man about a head taller than Gilles. His features were immediately 74

Silver recognizable as belonging to Mauricio Navajas, a Tri-D star popular on Earth at the time of the ship’s departure. The proto took a couple of moments to get its bearings, then smiled and walked over to a waiting woman.

“Charmed,” he said, flashing the smile that had made the original man rich.

Gilles congratulated her for her taste, sneering inwardly: if you were going to create a brand new human, yours to command for forty-eight hours, wouldn’t it make sense to get something truly unique?

It seemed not. The other five proto-humans before his were a variation on the theme. Starlets whose attributes left little to the imagination, another male Tri-D star and one charismatic politician synthesized from recorded speeches. The politician went to a girl thirty years his junior, who wore a superior expression.

Gilles sneered again. Politicians were just another type of actor.

The rest of them had selected contemporary celebrities that already existed within the data banks. Now it time for his great coup — the unimaginative rabble at the gala would have to bow before his superior taste. He’d bring an age of glamour and refinement into their midst.

His hands felt clammy and moist as the light above the synthesizer door turned from red to yellow to green. Finally it slid open with a hiss.

Gilles’s jaw nearly hit the floor.

Standing before him was, unmistakably, the woman from the movies. The long dress of solid cloth, so different from the insubstantial coverings of the Tri-D stars. The same mouth, lips painted in the center to make it look smaller.

But it was the eyes that made her unmistakable. Sad, deep windows into a soul that could convey emotion through centuries without ever saying a word.

Everything, from the soles of her sensible shoes to the top of her large round hat, stood before him composed entirely of shades of silver-grey, black and white.

75

Gustavo Bondoni He stared. And, after slightly longer than the standard time, she stared back, until she seemed to notice something.

She put her hand in front of her face with a sudden expression of alarm and pulled the white glove off her hand, which was revealed to be a slightly darker shade of silver-grey than the glove.

Gilles faced the speakers. “Computer,” he hissed to avoid being overheard by the ghostly apparition who had now removed a shoe and was staring at a light grey foot. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“The proto-human has been created to your specifications.

It looks exactly like the actress in the movies you listed. I’m certain you will find no reason to complain about her personality.”

“She’s in black and white!”

“Just like the movies.”

“Take her back. Synthesize a real date — even one of those Tri-D floozies will be fine.”

“I can’t do that. It takes time to synthesize a proto-human.

Additionally, you are responsible for the current one until it is reabsorbed in forty eight hours, and the personality is stored in the database. You know that.”

“But she’s in black and white.”

“That’s what you ordered — and it was very difficult to get the correct shade on human skin.”

Gilles knew he’d reached the end of the computer’s personality programming, so he turned back to Lillian. “Can you understand me?”

She nodded; an exaggerated motion.

He stood there uncertain of what to do next, finally deciding that he’d just have to go through with it. She was beautiful enough in a hyperexotic sort of way. He held out a hand.

She observed the proffered extremity and blushed silver, held her hands behind her back for a moment, and swayed.

Then, timidly, she reached out and touched it, immediately pulling back. Finally, she took the hand in her own and smiled innocently. It was a brilliant performance.

76

Silver Footsteps approached from down the corridor, and a group of people came into sight, led by Brad, his geeball partner.

Gilles prepared for the inevitable.

“Hey Gilles, I see you have a date for the gala.” He looked her over. “So tell me. Why am I not surprised?”

Gilles grunted a reply, but introduced Lillian, who was staring in horrified disapproval at the extremely revealing fashions worn by one of the men. He chuckled. “Don’t worry about him. He’s just a proto-human, like you.”

Lillian looked at her own silver monochrome hand and back at the beautiful full-color skin tone of the other proto, seemed about to make some extravagant gesture, and then mimicry seemed to fail her.

She spoke.

Or, at any rate, she tried to speak. Her mouth moved in the normal way, and she relaxed the histrionics for a moment, making her eyes a little less wide and her movements less pronounced. In this natural state, she looked even more beautiful.

But it lasted only a second — until she realized that she, unlike the other protos who were conversing freely with their masters, couldn’t emit a sound. The terror overtook her features slowly, first surprise at the lack of sound, then the frustration, then the stark terror at the realization that she’d been brought to this world in a body that would make no sound. Every phase of the process eloquently acted out, each thought transparent in her expressions.

She stood, immobile, screaming silently in frustration, rage, and fear.

Brad chuckled, and his group walked on. “See you at the gala. Maybe.”

Gilles tried to calm her, taking her hand again. “Don’t worry, it’s just for a couple of days. After that, your proto will be reabsorbed into the computer.”

She looked at him, completely uncomprehending, and he remembered that this personality was from a time before computers. “It means you’ll be stored in a place where you can live forever.”

77

Gustavo Bondoni Mistake. Eyes widening further, she pulled her hand away and ran down the hallway, screaming silently as she went. Before Gilles could even begin to react, she reached an emergency airlock and let herself into the chamber, which, now occupied, sealed. As soon as it was locked she repeatedly slammed on the button which opened the outer door, not stopping until the vacuum pulled her through and she was lost among the infinite tracts of space — a single frozen body shooting through the cosmos at relativistic speeds.

Gilles was left dateless on the night of the gala.

Again.

He cursed the computer, whose programming was too limited to give Lillian Gish either color or a voice, but who never seemed to forget to include knowledge of what an airlock was for.

It was no use complaining: he’d tried last year and the computer had replied, with infinite mechanical patience, that airlock use was a safety protocol that all protos had to have. The worst part was that he’d already endured a year’s razzing for the mermaid debacle. Now that his moment of redemption was at hand, he seemed to have made it worse.

He went back to his chambers — not really in the mood for a party anymore.

78

Tenth Orbit Winter.

There is no motion.

The feeble energy arriving from the distant star is not enough to support motion, yet move I must. Survival is dependant on movement, as winter does not allow sufficient energy accumulation to survive the night. To survive means to feed, and to feed means to stay ahead of the planet’s shadow.

Even that will not be enough in another fraction of a revolution.

Then, the energy will only be sufficient if I stay aligned with the motion of the planet in such a way as to constantly absorb the noontime sun.

Ironically, this would be impossible without the cold itself. I cannot feel cold, yet it is a concept that I can clearly sense in the crystalline structure of the planet. It is much easier to move through the crystal in the cold of winter. In winter, I can move halfway around the planet in an instant.

But not without expending energy. Precious energy. And I cannot stay within the crystal more than the instant used to move. I need to be above the surface to feed from the star. All energy that reaches the surface is lost to me forever.

This is winter.

Periods of feeding followed by desperate movement to a new feeding ground. Even my size diminishes as I consume the energy stored during better times. The area I can cover shrinks to the point where, at times, it stretches only the distance between two or three depressions on the surface. In winter, I wither.

Ah, for the glorious days of summer! In summer, I could easily rest for a night, and still have energy to expand the following day. I could stretch out and reach to the small moon in orbit, far from the surface, tracing its contours with the edge of the energy field that defines my existence. It feels different from the planet. It is more difficult to move there, as if the crystalline matrix is somehow imperfect.

In winter, the moon is like a dream. I can sense its 79

Gustavo Bondoni position, and its dimensions, and its motion, but I cannot stretch out and feel it. It is simply a question of insufficient energy.

This is also winter.

Unable to act or move except for that movement which is necessary for survival, I must be content with merely receiving information from my surroundings. In winter, I must pay attention to all that transpires within my sphere of consciousness. It is the only way to avoid sleep. Sleep that is inaction. Sleep that is death. Only in summer, an eternity hence, dare I sleep.

I sense the star. Unimaginably distant, yet, at the same time, the center of my existence. It is the source of my nourishment, my life. It is also the compass for my perceptions, for I can sense only that which occurs inside the elliptic orbit of my planet. Is there, can there be, anything outside my orbit?

Logic would indicate that there is, for, often, the planet on the ninth orbit will move outside the ellipse, and disappear from my senses. Is the whole system just a product of my imagination, simply disappearing when the orbits are not aligned in accordance with a capricious set of rules? I think not. Over the long winters, I have come to believe that I am somehow linked to the star and that the universe has two halves: everything between my physical self and my source of energy, and everything else.

I can only perceive that which transpires within my orbit.

Today, I only sense the star out of habit. There was a time, countless revolutions before, when the star was the only thing to which I would attune my senses. My consciousness was not as developed as it is now, and my only recollections of these winters are sharp sensations of fear and hunger. Hunger from the lack of nourishment available, combined with the fear that something would happen to the star. I would check the condition of the star. Upon finding it in good health, the fear would fade, only to return moments later. My memories from the summers of that same period are sensations of joy and movement and exploration. It seems that even then, I was able to forget about survival when a higher order of pursuits presented itself.

And, in hindsight, I find it understandable to have ignored the rest of the system. Of what possible use were the planets in 80

Tenth Orbit the first four orbits? Little more than enormous balls of rock circling the star, they held no interest for me.

The sixth through ninth orbits held a small amount of promise, but, alas, unfulfilled. Similar to the star in composition, the energy they emitted was insufficient to complement the nourishment from the star. After a cursory glance, I had lost interest.

And the fifth! A sad, empty place devoid of the planet it should have had. The potential of the site was unlimited; a planet could form similar to either type of its brethren. But no planet had accreted here. It is a wasteland of small stones, none larger than the moon I dream of in winter.

It had been many winters ago that a small incongruence of energy on the planet of the fourth orbit had called my attention to it. Tiny, inconsequential, but different. A pulsing I could feel within the very core of my being, as if it called out to me. I could even feel it in the summer, when I would normally be more concerned with the exploration and the joy of unlimited, unworried movement. I tried to answer the call, but, as always, the moon was as far as my energy could go. That summer was the first time this restriction had seemed an unbearable burden. I wished to cross the barren space and join in the pulse. It became my new reason to exist. My fear and hunger were replaced by desire.

For many revolutions, it was thus. My longing grew and grew until all I could think about was how to cross the empty expanse. And I could feel the signal growing fainter with every passing moment. My urgency increased.

Then the pulsing stopped.

In the final moments, it had felt strained and weak, as if losing a monumental struggle. The very reason for my existence had ceased to be.

I have no recollection of the following winters. I am not sure how I survived, or even if I survived. Perhaps I simply ceased to exist, only to reappear at a later time. Be that as it may, I recall nothing except that on one winter day, the pulsing had returned in a different guise. Somehow, impossibly, it had 81

Gustavo Bondoni relocated to the planet of the third orbit, and was throbbing with a strength that had never been exhibited by the pulsing on the planet of the fourth orbit. It felt somehow victorious. It was like the difference between a summer day and a winter night.

The longing returned, stronger than before. A searing, uncontrollable urge to join the pulse, to immerse myself in it and to consume it overcame my routine, honed over the ages to survive. Forgetting all caution, I accelerated to great speed over the surface of the planet, partly in celebration and partly to feel that I was doing something, anything to achieve my goal. But it was winter, and I expended energy I couldn’t afford. I almost didn’t manage to escape the shadow, and when the winter finally ended, my size was almost too small to feed effectively.

But I was content. The meaning of existence had, once again, moved beyond merely insuring the sufficient absorption of nutrient energy from the star. There was purpose.

And my hunger grew.

As the strength of the throbbing increased, so did my hunger match it. And its strength increased continuously, revolution after revolution. I was barely in control. I would sometimes find myself trying to use the motion of the moon to fling myself in the direction of the third orbit, to no avail. I would course down the crystals of the planet, deep into the core in an attempt to shut it out. But also, to no avail.

The throbbing grew ever stronger.

Winter.

A temporary respite, this object. It is obviously foreign to the planet, not part of its surface. The energy it absorbs is given freely, radiating outwards. It is here, and only here, that on all of the surface of the planet, I can feast. This object has never been here during previous winters. The crystalline structure is different, much different from that of the planet. Even in the heat of summer it is a joy to course easily through its tubes and walls.

It had arrived in the summer, this vehicle. It would never 82

Tenth Orbit leave.

Many revolutions had passed, and the thrumming had grown subtly different. More complex, more intricate, somehow more purposeful. And ever louder. It was as if a tiny, faster pulse had been set over the original. A secondary pluse which threatened to drown the original, but never did. My growing hunger was now joined by a curiosity, a fascination, which was new to me. What did it mean, this great concentration of pulsing energy? Why was the third orbit, with its short seasons and large rocky planet, special in a way that the fourth orbit had not been?

Slowly, the second pulse grew, overtaking, and in some cases diminishing, the original throbbing. With time, the planet on the third orbit came to be dominated by this new addition, and it seemed from my distant vantage point that the first pulse existed only where the second pulse allowed it to. The balance of power had changed, and I had no idea what it meant. But my hunger did not abate, it merely changed focus. I would not be able to rest until I could consume the second pulse.

The planet in the third orbit began to change. This was not unusual in itself, but the rate of change threatened to overwhelm. There had been a time when it was sufficient to monitor the progress of these pulses every winter or even every two winters. While it was impossible for me, having become attuned, to drown them out, concentration was still required to grasp the subtleties, the details.

The rate of growth was incredible. Even when the pulse was just starting on the planet, the growth had not been this great.

But, one winter, the pulse broke away from everything I had expected. The first great shock came when the third planet began to emit energy. While feeble, this was the same type of energy that came from the star. Was this radiation, coming from such an unexpected direction, to be my next source of energy?

And then part of the pulse left the ground.

It was as if it had split a tiny part of itself off and sent it far over the surface to rejoin the main body at a distant point.

How could this be possible? And, as I watched entranced, this happened again and again. Could this be the way for me to reach 83

Gustavo Bondoni the pulse? I tried to split off a small part of my energy field.

Success! But my excitement was short lived. The energy I had split off simply drifted onto the surface of the planet out of my control, and became lost to me forever. It was destined to be another winter of hardship. But what fascinating distractions!

The pulse split once more, differently now, and a small portion of it moved to the large satellite orbiting the planet. It remained there for what seemed like just a few moments before rejoining the main mass, but it was distinct. Before summer was fully upon me, the process had been repeated a handful of times.

It didn’t happen again until the following winter, although I watched anxiously, every waking moment of the longest summer of my life, trying to move the pulse simply through strength of will. I felt that if it could reach the moon of the planet, then it would come to me. To be devoured. To add its energy to mine.

And the time did come the following winter, when the pulse surged outward from the confines of its planet. First, to the moon. Did I dare dream that it would try to leave the third orbit?

Could I hope that, in time, it would come to me?

Yes. At the end of that same winter, a tiny fraction moved away from the third orbit on a course towards the silent planet of the fourth. Because it had left the main mass of the pulse behind, I could sense this small portion that much more intimately. I can still remember my shock upon realizing that it wasn’t a small portion of a larger mass, but several individual pulses. Different, but almost imperceptibly so.

Upon realizing this, I had eagerly returned my attention to the main throbbing still on the planet. With my newfound perspective, I could discern hundreds, thousands, billions of throbbing, pulsing, individual sources of energy. And, finally, some of them were coming to me.

Their progress captivated me for many cycles. I watched as they slowly approached the fourth orbit. I suffered when the signal from their energy became strained, reminding me of the pathetic final days of the pulsing from the fourth planet. I 84

Tenth Orbit agonized as the individual sparks went out. I despaired when all pulsing finally disappeared. They had made it less than half way to the fourth orbit.

But they didn’t give up. In short succession, two more groups of individual pulses left the planet from different points on the surface. A third followed soon after. All were headed for the planet of the fourth orbit, as if in a race. Two of the groups arrived on the planet. The third perished in the emptiness of the space between orbits.

The groups on the surface eventually set out on the return journey. Only one arrived on the planet of origin. By this time, however, a number of new groups had set out to cross the vast expanse. Many of them arrived on the fourth orbit, and several of these stayed on the planet through various revolutions. The pulse had gained its foothold and was growing in a completely new environment. It had crossed the great divide.

Would they come to me?

My hunger knew no bounds. But I was patient. I had been there before the pulse, and I could wait a while longer to consume it.

I watched as the pulse continued to expand, gaining footholds in each orbit. In every case, the pattern was the same.

The first faltering steps followed by the wholesale covering of the surface by the pulse. The pulse was absorbing every orbit.

The second. The fifth. The moons of the planet of the sixth orbit.

The seventh. The eighth.

As the first tentative visits of the ninth orbit began, I knew fear for the first time since my earliest memories of winter.

What was this unstoppable force that was absorbing the system?

Could it be, as I had thought, a new source of energy to consume and feel the glory of it coursing through me and allowing me to grow beyond my wildest dreams? Or were they coming to consume me, as they had consumed every other orbit between myself and my star?

Only one thing was certain: I would soon find out.

The pulse was coming. I could sense the trajectory. My eternal wait would be over the following summer.

85

Gustavo Bondoni

Winter.

Regret is unnecessary. I have learned that patience is the way to reap rewards. I will have my opportunity once again.

And, then, I must use my patience to control my hunger. I have learned.

The shadow is approaching, and it is with some remorse that I leave the vehicle to find a safer place to feed. I have known what it means to be sated and have been punished for my greed.

For now, I will move with the energy of the star. But I know I will grow again. I must only be patient. Over countless revolutions, I have learned to wait. With deliverance so near, I must now put that knowledge into practice.

The landing of the vehicle had been a violent event.

The sheer energy in the deceleration. The heat. I huddled deep in the crystalline structure of the planet and watched, my fear dueling with my hunger. How I wanted to move to the surface and absorb that energy! Even what little reached me was more than I had ever felt. More than I believed possible. What I could achieve if only I could consume it.

When the vehicle finally stopped moving, I could sense two distinct pulses moving within. I moved closer slowly, afraid to reveal my position to these representatives of the force that had devoured the entire system. Only the desperate strength of my hunger pushed me towards the twin pulses. At this range, the strength of the throbbing was incredible. I inched closer.

And then I could sense the pulse for what it really was. I retreated in disgust.

The pulse was not pure, clean energy, as I had so long imagined. It was encased in a physical body. Just like a rock. Or the moon. But the energy of the pulsing was intricately woven into the physical matrix. The pulse was the body, and the body was the pulse. The energy was corrupted, tainted.

But it was also infinitely seductive. Calling to me, stirring my hunger. Despite my revulsion, I moved closer. The body of one of the pulses had left the vehicle and was moving 86

Tenth Orbit over the surface of the planet, interacting with it physically. Two protuberances supported the torso and aided in locomotion. I edged to the surface and extended my senses, fascinated.

At this range, the energy of the pulsing was almost irresistible. I hungered to absorb it, to make it mine. I forgot about the taint and moved towards the pulse. Only my fear kept me from closing the distance in an instant. Closer, ever closer, dreading the moment when I would be detected and devoured like all the planets of the other orbits. Would this be my fate?

Closer. And closer still. I did not want to move due to my paralyzing fear of this monstrosity, yet I could not bring myself to stop.

And closer still.

And suddenly I knew it had detected me. The figure straightened and stood still. And then the pulsing increased in intensity. It radiated reflected fear and desperation. At this range, I could almost read its thoughts behind the web of energy. It began to move towards the vehicle. It was afraid and was going to leave me forever. I would never experience what it was like to absorb this glorious new energy form. It moved quickly, desperately, towards the vehicle.

But not quickly enough.

I crossed the crystal matrix of the planet’s surface that separated me from it and flowed into the body.

And absorbed the pulse.

An eternity spent drinking the energy of the distant star had not prepared me for this. It was as if I had expanded to ten times my normal size. I flowed around the planet effortlessly. I expanded my size and enveloped the moon. The whole moon.

I was more powerful than I could have imagined. The energy coursed through me to the point where I could actually affect the physical surface of the planet. I soared.

But, too soon, the energy was spent. It was gone. The desolation of its absence tore at my very being, agony such as I had never felt before. I would absorb the second pulse.

But this was impossible.

I watched powerless as the top of the vehicle separated 87

Gustavo Bondoni from the rest and moved off into the void, out of my reach forever.

Winter.

I must avoid the temptation to feed excessively. If I am small, I will not be detected.

They will return, and I will board the vehicle. I will feast on a different orbit, leaving the tenth forever. Will I be closer to the star that was my only companion for so long? Or even further away, on an unknown orbit with longer revolutions and harsher winters? No matter, for the pulse will provide me with more energy than I can expend.

But I must be patient. They will return, and I will be here.

Waiting.

88

Strange Tractors Redman sweated at the controls. No amount of insulation could fully keep the heat of this place out of the cabin. He pulled hard on the joystick, causing the massive spider to scurry a thousand meters to the west on its ceramic floats as he peered into the opaque red surface below him, trying to spot the telltale grey streaks that denoted an ore-rich eddy in the viscous liquid.

The plume was breaching the surface. Soon, the liquid rock and metal would mix with the surface flow, creating a current ten or fifteen meters deep, easily mined. He had to act now.

He continued to stare at the surface, trying to time his moment, not wanting to lose his position. The tractor shuddered as it floated on the roiling liquid, but he refused to let that disturb his concentration.

Wait for it…

Wait for it…

There!

He pressed a button on the control panel and pushed the joystick forward once more. A huge, gear-driven apparatus that looked a lot like a ventilation fan with the blades set at an aggressive angle lowered itself into the molten mass of stone and metal that composed the hellish surface of the planet.

The spider-like tractor shuddered as power transferred to the mixer. Redman coaxed the stick from one side to the other, trying to create the perfect initial conditions.

Despite all the technology available to channel the flow of lava, and all the diagnostics available to predict where the river with the richest mineral deposits would go, the most efficient way of mining the planet was to create the rich flow where you wanted it — so that it passed right under where you’d already placed your mining plant.

And the only way to make the chaotic, roiling convection current go in the preferred direction was to attack it at its source and make the initial conditions right.

89

Gustavo Bondoni Computer simulations had been used extensively to predict the chaotic behavior of the molten metal. Initial conditions had been studied, and predictions made. The model was ready for field-testing.

The computers had failed miserably.

The cost of airlifting the mining sites to the distant rivers of highly concentrated valuable metal had nearly bankrupted the operation. Only the fact that the planet really was a mother lode managed to keep the system viable.

Redman was part of the solution, one so simple that it was nearly silly. Some human engineers who’d been on the planet for the whole construction phase of the project, and who’d had nothing to do but study the flow of molten metal and rock, which they called lava of course, had taken one look at the simulations and said: ‘That’s never going to work. You need to push the top of the plume that way.’ After the nth failure in which the computer simulation sent a river of rich lava almost in exactly the wrong direction, an engineer had been sent out on one of the tractors to try it his way.

The perfect bullseye had made the station immediately hyperprofitable, and the company had been extremely interested to know how he’d done it.

“It just felt right,” the man had replied, and thus had been born the Teaser’s union.

Redman was a Teaser. He was a good Teaser with a great feel for how to nudge any system to get a good river going in the right direction. But ‘it just feels right’ left little room for certainty.

Certainty was something rarely found in chaotic systems of any kind. He understood how the weathermen from Earth must have felt: at the mercy of the capricious forces of chaotic nature. The main difference was that they had better models back home, having had much more time in which to study the behavior of cold fronts and depressions.

He watched the plume he’d teased, tension building, sweat dripping off the point of his nose. Would the upwelling of dense metal coalesce into a single shallow river, aimed in the right direction, and moving at the right speed? Had he tweaked 90

Strange Tractors the initial conditions sufficiently? Not stirring hard enough could make the river sluggish, too full of dense elements and less profitable to mine on an hourly basis. Too much stirring could demolish the flow, splitting it into smaller rivers, none of which would pay the bills. Of course, stirring in the wrong place would affect the initial conditions sufficiently to send the river off in any direction. Controlling chaos was all about getting the initial conditions exactly right.

Well, there was nothing more he could do about it. This game of Russian Roulette had been played, the trigger pulled.

Teasing was a high-stakes game. Not on the safety side, of course, at least not anymore — the capsules were sink-proof and the insulation could last for hours if they capsized. Much more than the time needed for rescue. No. The gamble was economics. A good river would earn a huge bonus. A bad one would not cover your costs, and lowered your chances of getting the next job. Capsizing meant bankruptcy.

Redman had had five good rivers and one marginal one in the last year. He was probably the richest individual on the infernal molten rock. He could have anything available on the planet.

But this plume, this river, was the one he needed to nail to get the one thing he wanted most. The bonus on this one, plus the sale value of his tractor, would scrape the money together to make his dream come true.

This one would allow him to buy his ticket back to Earth.

91

Crossroad Due to the extremely high-profile nature of my subject, the Tribunal gave me one week to conduct my interviews. Dusty and I stayed awake for hours on end as we compiled the true story — his version of it, at any rate.

Following are selected excerpts from my forthcoming biography, available for mindload for the first time, exclusively here on Megasound’s Mindnet space.

This is the story that was ignored by the judge in the face of the prosecution’s evidence. This is the story that you won’t see in the official press release.

Dusty knew he was in way over his head. Even the most successful humans in the cluster were seen as nouveau riche at best, while the rest of the species was regarded the same way one might view a precocious child: sometimes ingenious and often imaginative but, for the moment, mostly inconsequential.

Earth itself was seen as the lowest of low spots. A planet that even other humans — those fortunate enough to have been born somewhere else, anywhere else — considered something of an embarrassment. Yes, Dusty was well aware that he hailed from the wrong side of the wormhole system.

And yet, here he was, seated in his outworn hypershuttle, waiting for the mythical Skroull to make an appearance.

Legend had it that they came to this planetoid at exactly the moment when it reached the furthest point in its orbit. If you waited for them.

He waited, watching the ghostlike wormhole network orbit around the distant star. There was no reason for anyone to visit this system but since the wormholes took advantage of preexisting weaknesses in the fabric of space-time, they went wherever these were most prevalent.

Here in the Morthi system, the fabric was so thin and 92

Crossroad torn that engineers had turned the whole uninhabited planetary system into the largest switching and staging area in the network.

Billions of ships and buggies flashed through the switchpoint as he watched. Never once entering realspace in the system, they just moved on to other, richer or more joyful places. Some of them were just going home.

But Dusty waited at an empty crossroad built on a galactic scale.

According to the countdown on the monitor in front of him, the planetoid which he was following would reach the furthest point in its orbit in just under five minutes. It would do so for the first time since Dusty had been born, and wouldn’t do so again until long after he was dead.

He brooded, apprehension building. He’d taken his demo to hundreds of agents, recording companies, and mindcasters.

But the answer had always been the same: “We ain’t got time for no human music. Especially something called rock. It sounds just about prehistoric. Yeah, I’m sure it’s great, but nobody else is doing it, so why should we stick our necks out? Kid, why don’t you get with the new wave and join a multispecies band? I hear some of them are looking for a human.” Then would come the inevitable evil grin: “Or make a deal with the Skroull. Maybe they’ll give you a good price on a magic soundcaster.”

The Skroull.

The mythical race that, supposedly, had once been dominant in this sector of the galaxy. Legend had it that they’d been defeated by the Andreans and Tau Ceti humans in some long-forgotten war and cast out from galactic society forever.

Unseen but not forgotten, as myths and legends about them had sprung up like weeds after a spring shower.

They could give you anything you wanted, as long as you could meet their price. And supposedly their prices were fixed so that anyone, no matter how poor, could pay. And yet, it was common knowledge that their price was always more than you could afford.

By the time the clock read thirty seconds to go, Dusty wasn’t sure whether he ought to feel stupid or to panic. His gut 93

Gustavo Bondoni decided for him, and anxiety crept in.

Fifteen seconds.

Ten. A shimmering patch of space near the nexus alerted Dusty to the presence of an unfolding ship, and for the first time he actually believed that it might actually be happening.

Foldships were ancient technology… expensive to run and often difficult to control. Dangerous. Only a crew with a strong reason to avoid the wormhole system would risk using one. Such as belonging to a proscribed race.

The ship completed its return to physical space, and Dusty felt a bit disappointed. The design of the vessel was not the exotically colored wedge of his imagination, but a standard two-pod non-atmosphere ship with one bulge for the engines and another for the living quarters, connected by a latticework of tubes.

Dusty itched to open communication, but held himself back. On this point, all the legends agreed: Never initiate contact.

Let them contact you.

His main monitor began to hum as static poured through.

That made him jump; the main screen wasn’t connected to the comm system.

Five seconds later, the static resolved into an image.

Facing him was a mass of short, pinkish-gray tentacles, each with what seemed to be an eyeball on the tip. The tentacles sprouted from what was presumably the creature’s main trunk, but only the top of that was visible in this extreme close-up.

Dusty, once recovered from his initial surprise, assumed that this must be the equivalent of a headshot.

“Greetings.” The sound was shocking. Every surface on the control panel seemed to vibrate to the deep bass of the word.

Dusty turned the volume down on his receptors.

“Er, hello,” he said, speaking into the mike and hoping that they would be able to pick up his transmission. He was grateful that the language they’d communicated in was Andrean and not one of the other major galactic dialects. Aside from Earthen Sinoglish, most humans could only speak Andrean.

94

Crossroad It didn’t occur to him until much later to think that maybe the Skroull were aware of his race and were acting accordingly in order to avoid losing the sale. And even if it had, he wouldn’t have thought to be disturbed by it.

“We are the Skroull,” the voice went on. The transmission was evidently coming through some channel other than his speakers because it hadn’t lost even a tiny fraction if its volume.

“Do you wish to have business with us?”

He hesitated but thought, in for a credit, in for the hydroponic farm. “Yes.” “Good. It has been three orbits since our last customer.

We will begin the docking procedure. Once completed, we will cycle your lock and allow you to board.”

Dusty fidgeted as he waited, helpless, for the alien craft to dock. Normally, docking procedures were performed with space stations. The pilot of the ship was responsible for the entire procedure and was charged for any damage to the station.

Now, however, all he could do was pray that the Skroull pilot knew what he was doing.

A couple of clicks and a muted clang later, the process was complete. He could hear the airlock cycling.

“Please come aboard. Do not bring any weaponry, as we have, at great expense, installed scanners in the airlock.

Failure to comply will, regrettably, mean that you will be spaced immediately. We would find this unprofitable in the extreme, but we have learned our lesson.”

Dusty nearly turned back then and there, but forced himself to go on. He climbed into the airlock and using the rungs embedded in the wall, moved through the six-foot-long chamber.

The automatic door was already open, revealing a brightly-lit area beyond. The material that the walls were made of seemed to be some kind of glossy, white-painted metal or ceramic, which came as a relief. He’d been expecting organic forms, wet and slippery to the touch, and dimly lit in moody reds. The Skroull, after all, were purportedly the slimiest creatures in the galaxy.

As he crossed into the Skroull ship, Dusty stumbled.

Gravity was much lower here, maybe a fifth of Earth-normal, 95

Gustavo Bondoni and a third of what he had his ship set to. He turned a corner with care and immediately understood why.

The Skroull in front of him was about eight feet tall.

The main trunk from which the eye tentacles sprouted was a long, straight tube that ended in a translucent donut-shaped sac that surrounded it. Under the sac the trunk split into countless tentacles, some of which supported the creature’s weight, while others waved around in intricate patterns. It was obvious that a creature like this would never be able to survive in high gravity.

A flurry of tentacular movement seemed to be directed Dusty’s way. Almost simultaneously, the voice that had been speaking to him earlier began to emerge from every surface.

Obviously, a translation program was turning the tentacle movement into verbal Andrean for his benefit.

“So,” the Skroull said, “you want to be a musician?”

Dusty gave the creature a hard stare, which, he supposed, was probably lost on it. “I am a musician.” This was translated by small screens that depicted a schematic Skroull waving tentacles.

A flurry of motion rippled through his host. The translator interpreted it as a strange, high-pitched laughter. “You might play some notes, but you are not a musician until people decide to watch you play. Until then, you are a dilettante.”

Dusty swallowed his anger. What did these aliens know about music? He could have spent all day explaining how he felt the music. How it flowed through him. How his band had worked its butt off until it was technically proficient and soulful. And how they were the only band in the galaxy to have incorporated Earth’s rock and blues base into the Synthaudio Pop favored in the Andrean sector. Telling all of that to this walking jellyfish would not change the fact that they were barely surviving, lucky to get nightclub gigs in human ghettos. The Skroull had done their homework.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said.

“You want a Soundcaster.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes.” 96

Crossroad “Are you aware that there are only fourteen other Skroull Soundcasters currently extant, the newest of which was purchased more than a century ago?”

Dusty knew. He also knew that most of the original owners had died young. But, in the music business, that was expected. Success bred money, and money got you the good drugs.

“Name your price. If I can pay for it, I will.”

“You will be able to pay for it. The question is whether you are willing to do so.”

Dusty chuckled: “If it’s cheap enough that I can afford it, then I want it.”

The Skroull regarded him for a moment, still as a rock.

“Very well, then,” it signaled. “The price will be five hundred cubic centimeters of your blood.”

“What?” A chill crept up Dusty’s spine. “What do you want that for?”

“Part of the price is that we answer no questions.”

He hesitated only a second before nodding. That quantity of blood wouldn’t hurt him too much. And if they wanted to use it to decipher the human genome or create species-specific bioweapons, they’d be able to get plenty blood from billions of other people, so he gained nothing by refusing.

“I need to see the instrument.”

His host gestured, causing a panel to slide open in the nearest wall. Behind it stood another white-walled chamber, only slightly smaller than the one they occupied, and in the center of the room, the unmistakable shape of a brushed-aluminum Soundcaster looked out at them.

Dusty took a halting half-step towards the opening and stopped. “May I?” The Skroull gestured with one tentacle, obviously giving permission, so he approached the instrument reverently.

A real Skroull Soundcaster. The few others that were known, were in the hands of the biggest bands in the cluster. They were maintained by an ancient sentient from an extinct race known only as Alfrancis, who, legend had it, was fighting a rearguard 97

Gustavo Bondoni action to preserve the irreplaceable instruments from the ravages of time. No craftsman in the cluster had learned to duplicate the sound of a real Skroull ‘caster.

And yet, here in front of him was something out of legend. He hung the strap on his shoulder, feeling the weight of it.

Now for the final test. He passed his fingers through the air directly in front of the field generators on the face of the instrument. He could feel the resistance as his fingers disturbed the gravitic and magnetic fields they generated. He molded the resistance, kneading it with his hands the way he’d practiced on his own old semicaster. The feeling was similar, although to someone not in contact with the fields, it would seem as if he was waving his hands through empty air.

But the sound. The sound was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. The soundcaster was playing what he told it to play, but adding unexpected notes to the harmony, giving the bass a fuller, deeper, bone-felt quality. Switching from one chord to another and back in millisecond frequencies, impossible to detect on a conscious level but, nevertheless, unquestionably present. Somewhere in his subconscious, Dusty felt the modulation and knew that the magical, unimaginably complex tones he was hearing were, to put it simply, perfect.

“Are you satisfied?”

He nodded dumbly, unable to speak, and submitted to the blood extraction without even thinking about it. It was a good thing that the Skroull didn’t ask him to give up the soundcaster for the procedure. He would have refused.

The Skroull only spoke to him once more before he left the ship. It asked him what the name of his band was.

“Starlanes,” Dusty replied.

The alien shook its eye-tentacles, an almost human gesture. “You need something a little more personal. Something backwoodsy. Starlanes is fine for an Earth group, but you also need a personal touch — something the crowd can link to you.

Why don’t you call yourselves ‘Dusty Nebulas’?”

Dusty agreed to think about it and walked back to his 98

Crossroad ship, clutching his soundcaster — his! — and dreaming of a life of stardom.

No frequent visitor to this mindnet space or, really, anyone who has been awake at all over the past twenty standard cycles needs me to tell the story of Dusty Nebulas. Of how they came, literally out of nowhere, and changed the sound of popular music in the cluster forever. How they mixed rhythms from their unregarded homeworld and the mind-synchronization of ‘caster melodies to create a new kind of sound that swept everything else away.

What our younger audience might not know however, is that when they first appeared, their art was ridiculed by parents, teachers, talk show hosts and even music industry executives as “fit, as the name itself suggests, only for consumption by semi-evolved simians — of which humanity, of course, is the most evident example.” But Dusty Nebulas were adamant; they insisted that what they were playing was called “rock music” in homage to some of the rhythms they used. And that’s what everyone calls it now.

All of this, of course, is well known and documented for collectors in my biography of the band, which will be available for mindload in a very short time. But very few people know anything about what went on inside that courtroom. Other than the official version. What I will endeavor to convey to you now is not the official version. It is the story Dusty told me.

Dusty couldn’t believe that the Judiciary council was actually going to go ahead with this farce, but whatever. It wasn’t his money they were spending. His own lawyers were on retainer for an enormous sum, so it wouldn’t hurt them to actually do some work for a change. In any case, he was, as he’d told the reporters outside, completely confident of a favorable 99

Gustavo Bondoni verdict. Nobody had ever had an alibi more rock-solid than his.

The courtroom itself was typical of the cluster’s justice system: glowing silver ceramics, yellow-tinged crystal and a dark, brooding Andrean overseeing the proceedings. The insectoid Andrean judges were renowned for their fairness, open-mindedness, and complete commitment to justice. A commitment that went so far that the judges allowed themselves to be operated on in order to remove the small part of their brains that made Andreans telepathic. This effectively cut them off from the Andrean’s enlightened cluster-wide mindmeld, but allowed them to oversee legal proceedings without violating the right of citizens to mental privacy.

The prosecution opened the proceedings, simply repeating what every sentient in the cluster already knew: that Dusty Kreutzpointer (Dusty winced involuntarily at the mention of his long-unused real name), leader of the rock band Dusty Nebulas, was directly accused of the assassination of seventeen high-ranking cluster officials and a visiting ambassador from the Mechanized systems.

Indirectly, the prosecution continued, he was responsible for the deaths of fifteen billion Meraans who were killed when one of their systems was attacked by the Mechanized Navy in retaliation for the death of their ambassador.

“Our evidence,” the prosecutor continued, “will demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that it was, indeed, Mr. Kreutzpointer who murdered the sentients in question.”

Cluster law allowed for the defense to be present during the exposition of evidence, but did not allow them to view the evidence itself until the trial. For that reason, both Dusty and his Andrean lawyer were completely in the dark as to what kind of evidence was to be presented.

On the other hand, they weren’t particularly worried.

Considering how easy it would be to prove that Dusty had been light-years away from the murders, they felt that the whole trial could only be some kind of elaborate media scam.

They sat quietly as the prosecutor began his exposition.

“I would like to present a recording of the assassination 100

Crossroad of Ambassador Nurat 3V,� he said.

Dusty, accustomed to the formulaic, outmoded language of Earthly courtrooms, learned from countless childhood holoshows, was amused by the direct speech.

The judge nodded and a 2-D projection screen descended from the ceiling in full view of everyone. The meaning of 2-D media was lost on nobody: They were about to be shown a recording from a low-cost security cam.

The lights dimmed.

An image of four sentients walked across a small pedestrian bridge between what looked to be two buildings in the governance complex on Andrea. Three of the beings were insectoid Andreans, while the fourth was only marginally identifiable as having had organic origins. It seemed to have started life as a medium-sized furry quadruped but had had, at some point in its life, three-quarters of its visible surface replaced with mechanical or electronic components. It moved smoothly along, keeping pace with the Andreans easily, while wires and metal twitched with the movement.

It was obviously a government delegation escorting a being from a mechanized planet.

Suddenly, a fifth figure entered the scene. The figure was not just humanoid — it was quite obviously human.

Dusty started. The man on the bridge looked exactly like him.

The first group walked towards the lone human, but at a distance of about forty yards, the man pulled a short metallic rod out of the folds in his clothing. Pointing one end of the rod at the group, he shouted something. The scene was illuminated by the unmistakable flash of a plasma discharge.

The three Andreans fell immediately, boiled alive inside their exoskeletons by the superheated particles, while the ambassador stopped in its tracks, smoke rising from one of its joints. Amazingly, a moment later, it tried to backpedal away from its assailant.

Dusty’s twin took three steps forward and hit the wounded sentient with another plasma bath. This time, even the strongly 101

Gustavo Bondoni shielded circuits were unable to hold, and the ambassador collapsed in a pile of burning flesh and molten metal.

By thiat time, the security team had responded.

Uniformed Ventulli guards appeared on one side of the bridge and opened fire on the human with projectile weapons.

The man reacted instantly. He climbed on the railing of the suspended bridge and jumped.

But not quite quickly enough. As he went over the edge, a projectile caught him in one arm, spraying blood onto the railing and floor.

The recording ended, leaving the room immersed in a long, unpleasant silence, which was broken only when the prosecutor resumed.

“The security forces reported that a hoverpod was waiting for the attacker, just below the bridge, and they were unable to capture him. But all of them recognized his face. The face of a man so famous that he could walk into any building in the cluster and be welcomed with solicitous smiles. Mr. Dusty Kreutzpointer.”

Dusty half-rose, prepared to send the prosecutor to hell, but was restrained by his lawyer’s cautionary hand on his shoulder.

“Let me handle this,” the Andrean said, shutting down a mindnet site he’d been studying. Then he turned to the judge.

“We have investigated the timing on the attacks of which my client is accused and have found that, at the time of the murders, he was in the Tau Ceti system, playing a series of concerts in front of nearly two hundred thousand sentients. Or, if you prefer, two hundred thousand witnesses.”

The judge looked at the prosecutor, who told him: “We have recordings of the other assassinations as additional evidence, they also clearly show Mr. Kreutzpointer as the attacker.”

So Dusty was forced to sit through nearly half an hour of security recordings. All of which showed him slaughtering diverse sentients.

When the presentation finished, the prosecutor turned to face the judge again, “As you can see, in every case a very solid 102

Crossroad Dusty Kreutzpointer was observed on the scene.”

“That’s obvious,” the judge replied, “but I would be interested to know what you think of the defense’s claim that Mr. Kreutzpointer was being observed at that very moment by two hundred thousand witnesses at a Dusty Nebulas concert.

The dates, after all, seem to support this claim.”

Dusty’s attorney stood. “There’s also the fact that those are merely visual recordings that don’t really mean anything.

How difficult would it be to simply overprint a trained human assassin with an image of my client? His would be a logical image to choose, since it’s readily available all over the mindnet, and, as you mentioned, it would guarantee a warm reception.”

The prosecutor pulled himself up to his full height and rubbed his forelegs together in a gesture of satisfaction. “I’m glad you mentioned that. It’s our opinion that it would have been easier for Mr. Kreutzpointer to have been replaced by another musician overprinted with his image in a controlled environment like a stage than it would to overprint an assassin in a mobile scenario. And that way, you’d have tens of thousands of sentients who would swear to have seen something that wasn’t actually there.”

Dusty stood up, enraged. “That’s ridiculous! Do you think my audiences are idiots? If you put anyone else up there, they’d spot it immediately. The sound would be completely different.”

“Oh, come on. Everybody knows that your precious sound is mainly a product of the high-tech Soundcaster you use.

Any no-talent hack could sound brilliant with it. Even I could do it.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Dusty spat. “That sound is the result of a deep knowledge of the roots of rock and an even deeper love for its beat, its rhythm, and its spirit. The Soundcaster senses all of that, and only then can it produce the sound. Only Dusty Nebulas can ever sound like Dusty Nebulas.”

“How convenient for you. But then, we only have your word for it, so I think I’ll stick to real evidence. That’s why I’m so glad you mentioned the hologram overprint which effectively 103

Gustavo Bondoni renders your alibi obsolete.”

“The way I look is much less important than the sound.

That alone is sufficient evidence.”

“So you say. But I insist that where you actually were is even more important. Do you remember the wound you took in the first recording? I’m sure you do. Well, we ran an analysis on the genetic material in the blood. And, since we didn’t want to believe the results, we rechecked.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Guess what?”

There was an awkward silence in the courtroom. For the first time, Dusty felt uncertain of the outcome. He knew he was innocent, but he also knew what the reply to the prosecutor’s riddle would be. His face must have given him away.

“Yes, Mr. Kreutzpointer. The blood was yours. There can be no doubt that you were the assassin on the bridge. That’s enough to convict you for that crime, and it also convinces me that you committed the other murders. It just goes to follow, don’t you think?”

“Do you have this evidence duly documented?” the Judge asked him in a stern voice.

“Yes, in the evidence file.”

“All right. Does the defense have anything further to say?”

Dusty’s lawyer began to speak, but Dusty shouted over him. He explained that the Skroull had taken his blood in exchange for the Soundcaster, and evidently cloned him off. It must have been the clone that committed the murders.

The judge just stared at him for a few moments. “Mr. Kreutzpointer, we both know that accelerated cloning doesn’t produce stable sentients. The being we observed on the recordings was quite obviously highly coordinated and able.

What you’re asking the court to do is to accept as evidence the existence of an unknown race that produces magical instruments and magical clones. I’m afraid I can’t do that. The Skroull are a myth, a bedtime story to frighten young sentients.”

He paused, and stood. “There can only be one possible verdict in this case . . .”

104

Crossroad

So, despite the massive protests, the multiple suicides, and the crisis it caused in the mind-music industry, Dusty was atomized in accordance with the law.

All of you know this. From Dusty to dust, as the newspaper headlines on Earth said.

But what you don’t know is that during our last conversation, our last interview for the book, I asked him one last personal question.

“So are you bitter that, once again, the Skroull have managed to get a musician to hold the short end of the stick and kill him off?”

He looked at me and actually laughed. “The short end?

I don’t see it that way. I changed the way every sentient in the cluster listens to music. I gave them the chance to feel the power of the most spiritual beats anywhere. And, along the way, I showed the cluster that humans can improve on the status quo.

At least in this one respect, the rest of you can no longer ignore us.”

He paused, and a respectful — even then — knock on the door indicated that his time was up. “No. I think the Skroull were way too late in getting me killed. The debate as to whether they exist or not is raging in serious circles again, and sooner or later someone will find them. They lost a lot of money on this deal.”

He walked out the door and I never saw him again, except in old recordings that I still listen to every day.

105

Ghetto Galileo Kiara found it difficult to believe that this slovenly niche had once been the most expensive piece of real estate in the entire solar system. The window on the bulkhead wall had once been worth ten-thousand times its weight in platinum for its breathtaking view of Earth from orbit. To her, however, it just made the room cold. The insulation on the window was less effective than the rest of the bulkhead. She couldn’t afford a heater, and hadn’t heard of any being available recently, anyway.

At least the door mechanism could be jammed closed effectively enough to deter casual molestation. And even here, nobody was likely to get really serious about her few possessions: a mattress, an old grey blanket that doubled as a cloak and a small amount of old clothing. The clothing never left her person, since she knew that if it were lost, there would be no more. Most of it was worn thin enough that it probably wouldn’t survive new efforts to mend it.

Life on Galileo station was certainly not what it had been four hundred years before.

The station was constructed at the site, built from thousands of modules. The first private habitat in space, it had been commissioned by a chain of luxury hotels and was colossal in scale. However, it never operated as a hotel, as the wealthy billionaire families of the time had bought out all the rooms with windows facing the Earth at a price that was high enough for the hotel chain to make a large profit.

For decades, it had been known as the gathering point for the leisure class.

But that was then.

Now, Kiara had to get herself to the central hub. She hated the hub, and not only because the smell of the teeming masses made her cubbyhole seem like a rose garden. She also hated zero gee. It was stupid, she knew, for someone who had 106

Ghetto Galileo been born in space to suffer from chronic spacesickness, but it happened to her and there was nothing she could do about it.

Another small irony in her already too ironic life.

But she knew she had to get to the hub. If she wasn’t fed and counted, the consequences would be severe. It wouldn’t be the first time. And while the invaders might not kill any of the people on the station, they could definitely find alternative means of making her life miserable.

She went down the chute, waiting her turn as the people ahead of her used the rungs to propel themselves to the feedlot.

Her stomach whirled as the gravity diminished. Each rung made her feel progressively worse. Long experience had taught her that by the hub, her nausea would be strong enough that she could barely remain conscious. It was a good thing her stomach was empty, especially in zero gee.

She was so dizzy on arrival that she hardly noticed the injection of feed. Vitamins, carbs, and protein went straight into her bloodstream, along with considerable pain. She spent all the energy available in her unsteady consciousness to glare at the man who was injecting her.

A collaborator. His name was Riley, and she would never be able to understand his type. He and a few others like him had sold their souls for a few benefits. Real food, mainly. But the price was to be loathed by the people they had once called friends.

“Move along, now,” he said, avoiding eye contact as he marked her down on his clipboard to register her as having been duly counted and fed.

Hours later when the three-quarters gravity of the wheel had allowed her to start feeling like herself again, she heard a knocking on her door. A loud tap followed by three soft ones. It was the right signal, but she had to be sure.

“Who?” she called through the door.

“Alien arrest party. We have a warrant. Open the door or we’ll blow it open.” Came the reply.

Kiara opened the door in exasperation.

“Ron, you know that’s not funny.”

107

Gustavo Bondoni had.

“I thought it was,” he replied, in that infuriating way he

Ron walked in and looked around. She knew he hated the cold in her niche, but also knew that he understood the need and would say nothing. He came over to her and applied a chaste peck to her cheek.

She didn’t look into his eyes, knowing exactly what she would find there. All of us suffer in silence, for different reasons, she thought. Some want freedom, others want death. Love seems like such an uncomplicated need. But it wouldn’t happen. She wouldn’t put him through what loving her would mean to him in the long run. Or what it would mean to her. To her resolve. “We need to meet tonight, Ron. Get the others.” She ushered him back out and resealed the door.

She had wanted to tell him to stay, but she needed to be alone. To think it through again. Looking out the window at the Earth far below, she considered her options.

As humanity had expanded through the solar system, moving away from a depleted and polluted Earth, the station’s tenants had gradually but inexorably gotten less illustrious.

The billionaires had been replaced by the upper middle class, who in turn had been replaced by workers from the orbital labs.

Meanwhile, the cream of the race had headed for the stars.

Converted asteroids had been the first interstellar vehicles, taking with them the best and the brightest of the countless volunteers. The destination had been Tau Ceti. Then had come the luxury liners which allowed one to survive the journey in deep stasis, as opposed to living out one’s life inside a hollowed-out asteroid. Everyone with a credit to his or her name had made the trek. By the end of the process, the solar system was nearly deserted. The energy resources remaining were barely sufficient to sustain the laggards, those too poor or too frightened to make the journey. The dregs of humanity lived in a handful of Earth-orbiting stations deemed expendable in the 108

Ghetto Galileo Diaspora, and on the toxic surface of the planet itself.

The invaders hadn’t even had to fight for the system.

There was no resistance except for scattered pockets on Earth.

Quickly putting these down, the reptilian aliens had dealt with the problem of the other, less bellicose humans by simply shutting down all escape routes from the stations. They had also, for some reason, decided to make certain nobody would die while on the station. This was the reason they needed collaborators. Poverty, yes. Rape, yes. Mind-numbing boredom, yes. But humans on board were always to remain physically healthy and well fed.

Kiara could see absolutely no reason for this, but had come to accept it as a fact and move on. After nearly a year, what other choice did she have?

The knock at her door came once more. The members of the resistance started arriving, alone or in pairs. Soon all eleven of them were present.

Wow, thought Kiara, how the aliens would tremble if they could see us now! She shook her head with a rueful smile. One did the best one could under the circumstances.

They were, as were all the inhabitants of the station, a ragged bunch. Seven men and four women were present, including her. The only ones on the whole station she felt she could trust.

“What news?” Ron asked the group.

Most of them just shrugged. The usual. No food. No freedom. No life.

But Bassam stepped up. “Heard a rumor. Aliens are in trouble. No energy for their ship groundside.”

“Stop, you’re breaking my heart,” said Ron, pretending to cry.

They laughed weakly, but Kiara was grateful for the chance. Laughter was a precious commodity on the station in those dark days. Especially considering what she was about to say. She paused, looked each of her companions in the eye one by one, and then went on. “We move tonight,” she said. The laughter died down instantly.

“Tonight?”

109

Gustavo Bondoni She nodded.

“We’ve bribed one of the night guards to be sick tonight.”

Kiara was not about to tell them what it had cost her to convince the collaborator to vacate his post in a world without money and almost no trading goods. She supposed some of them would figure it out on their own, and the rest would go on in innocence — another scarce commodity on Galileo. The important thing was that they believe her. And they would; she had never let them down before.

There was a long silence as the group thought things over. Even if they were successful, it would be a quixotic gesture. More of a bid to regain their individuality than an act with any hope of securing their freedom. But of course, there was no realistic way of doing the latter, and they figured any change had to be for the better. At least they had a chance to break the stalemate.

“He’ll be armed,” noted Bassam.

“You knew it would be dangerous from the beginning.

There’s eleven of us and one of him. Even if his aim is perfect, the survivors will be able to take him down. He’ll probably have his weapon set to stun anyway. They haven’t killed anyone yet.”

“I’m in,” said Ron. Kiara smiled at him hollowly. She had known he would be from the very beginning. This was followed by a few more moments of silence.

“Me, too.” This came from Cynthia. Unexpected, but welcome.

“I’m sorry.” Bassam got up and left.

In the end, seven remained. Four of the men, two of the other women, and Kiara herself.

“Get some sleep,” she said. Seeing the looks of confusion, she continued. “The plan is not a complicated one. We go in, we jump all over him, and we lock the door. Simple. So get some rest. You’ll probably be glad you did.”

Kiara jammed the door, praying that the four individuals 110

Ghetto Galileo who she had allowed to leave would keep their mouths shut.

Turning out the lights, she set the alarm, knowing it would be unnecessary as she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Even so, she had to set the example. Finding an empty corner, she lay down with her eyes closed.

The low hum of the space station’s power generator had been a constant in her life for as long as she could remember.

Even under stress, the sound calmed her and would normally guide her gradually to sleep. Not tonight, though. Tonight, she was consciously aware of the sound, as she was of all others.

Every set of footsteps coming down the hall were, in her mind, coming to arrest them. She sighed with relief when all continued down the hallway, growing dimmer until they were lost in the background hum.

Surreptitiously checking her watch every five minutes, it took all her discipline not to get up and pace. Or worse, to start the assault early, which she knew could easily lead to disaster.

No, she had to be patient, and suffer through the longest three hours she could remember.

But, of course, the hour finally arrived, marked by the soft chiming of her alarm. Everybody was up in an instant and Kiara had to smile to herself. It seemed she wasn’t the only one who had been faking it.

Their mission took them in the direction of the hub.

Fortunately, they were only going as far as the inner wheel, which at half gee was bearable although not comfortable for Kiara. As they left the colder outer wheel, the Passageways became more crowded and the smell more pronounced. Here nobody had individual quarters, preferring the warmth and the comfort (to them) of lower gee. Many slept in the corridor. Even in the dim light of simulated night, it was impossible to step on a person by mistake. The miasma of each body could be sensed long before contact.

Kiara navigated the corridors feeling almost hopeless.

What she was about to do was desperate, but was it worth it to give aid to these? The dregs of humanity? Help for which she had no illusion of receiving any thanks. Already driven down by 111

Gustavo Bondoni poverty before the arrival of the invaders, these people seemed human to her only in a genetic sense, having been reduced to a near-animalistic state. And not having to worry about survival or the source of their next meal had deadened any ambition or will that they might have otherwise had.

But at least nobody questioned the fact that a large group was moving purposefully down the hallway. Most didn’t even glance at them, and nobody looked twice.

The central command module had been built with the intention of running a hotel, and predictably the transition from hotel to prison had not been seamless. The armored door looked completely out of place beside the smooth though filthy walls of the station, but it would be effective nevertheless, unless the code she had obtained from the absent guard — she grimaced again at the event — wasn’t as effective as he had claimed.

A keypad perched on the wall alongside the door, quite obviously a later addition. Just two years before a four number keypad would have been completely useless as a security measure, since any two-bit cracker could have had the door open in under thirty seconds. Today, however, the only sophisticated electronic equipment in working order was in the hands of the collaborators, making the door as good as impossible to open without the code.

Which she had.

Hopefully.

If the guy had lied, she would never be able to live with herself.

As the door hissed open, she felt as if a weight had lifted from her shoulders. They might lose one or two of the crew, but nothing short of a complete disaster could stop them now.

“Harry, is that you? Thought you were down with a terminal case of not wanting to work today.” The guard in the next room laughed at his own joke. “It’s a good thing you came in, I got us a treat!”

Kiara halted her team at the door and indicated that they should all go in together. It was obvious to everyone by the sound of his voice that the guard was just out of sight to the right, and 112

Ghetto Galileo if they hit him all at once, there was no way one man would be able to overcome them all.

But all of the preparation was completely unnecessary.

The guard’s attention was completely taken by his ‘treat’, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. He was disarmed and pinned in ten seconds.

Kiara looked at the girl. She was going to ask her if she had been forced, in order to punish the man if necessary, but one look at her face was enough to satisfy her that this was no rape.

Confusion mixed with defiance, but no anguish. Some people would give up anything for a few privileges — making life here just a little more bearable. Kiara was hard-pressed to say who she hated more — the collaborators or their groupies.

“Get out,” she said coldly.

Something in Kiara’s eyes convinced the ‘treat’ not to argue.

They sealed the door behind her.

“What about him?” asked Ron, indicating the prone guard with a nod of his head.

“He’s insurance.”

The first order of business was to change the access codes, only possible from inside the control room. Once that was done, they would not be interrupted until someone could take a high power plasma cutter to the door and Kiara strongly suspected that there were none on board. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry. They had to act quickly.

“Send a transmission now.”

“To who?”

“Just use the frequency the transmitter is on right now. It should be the right one.”

“Right.”

The group waited as Ron fiddled with the ancient controls.

Soon, they had a picture of an empty office, presumably on Earth. Ron hailed anyone who might have been within hearing, and looked to Kiara for instructions.

“We wait for a lizard. They have to communicate every once in a while.”

113

Gustavo Bondoni After only fifteen minutes, their call was answered, but not by an alien. The individual was fat and bald and most definitely human. Another collaborator.

Kiara sighed.

“Get me a lizard,” she said.

The man on the other end of the transmission looked at her in a puzzled way. “Who are you? Where’s Harry?”

“Harry is indisposed at the moment. And we have control of the station.”

“Who are you?” the fat man repeated.

This was getting old, fast. “Look, all you have to know is that the Human Liberation Group is in control of Galileo Station and we will turn off the security systems and breach the hull if we don’t get what we want. Or better yet, we’ll crash the station into their precious mother ship. So get me a lizard.”

“But the Masters don’t speak any human tongue. The worthy are being taught the language of the Masters.”

“And I don’t negotiate with scum who betray their race for table scraps. If the lizards are smart enough to cross interstellar space, they can learn Sino-English. Tell them to call me when they’re ready. But don’t try my patience.” She cut off the communication.

“Human Liberation Group?” asked Ron, smiling.

“It was the best I could come up with off the top of my head. Sorry,” Kiara replied sheepishly.

“So now what?”

“We wait, and we pray.”

“Are we praying for anything specific, or are we just feeling generally well predisposed towards God today?”

“If you want, you can start with a solemn request that his friends,” she nodded towards the guard still bound on the floor, “don’t have a plasma cutter ready.”

The tension of the night soon gave way to routine and finally boredom. It was almost a welcome sound when someone 114

Ghetto Galileo started banging on the door and demanding to be let inside.

After a while, the demands turned to threats and promises of dire punishment, most of it grossly anatomical and aimed specifically at Kiara herself.

They were quick to figure that out, she thought, but the shouting probably just means that they don’t have that plasma cutter.

They drew lots to see who could sleep and who would have to watch the guard, and sat back to wait once again.

They didn’t have to wait very long. Less than a day after they had originally stormed the room, a light on the panel indicated an incoming call.

Kiara had heard the aliens described countless times, but had never seen one before today. The lizards were more humanoid than reptilian, walking upright with two eyes and grayish skin — probably fine scales. And this one spoke flawless Sino-English, which was a bit surprising.

“Greetings,” it said. “I am Kreeshan Voik. A Kreeshan is a rank equivalent to a Colonel in your armed forces. I have been instructed to tell you that you must relinquish control of the installation.”

Kiara could have laughed. “Just like that?”

“Yes. It is the logical course of action. It will be safer for you.”

“Safer?” Kiara almost screamed in disbelief.

“Yes. Is this not evident? You are being fed and protected from harm. This is what safety implies, is it not?”

“Some things are more important than mere safety.”

The alien was silent for a moment, pondering this statement. “I don’t understand. By your actions you are endangering the entire nest. Do you not consider the survival of the nest to be paramount?”

“I repeat. There are more important things than safety.

Humanity has always sacrificed lives to win their freedom.”

“Is this the view of the entire station? Have you all decided to rebel?” asked the alien, seeming to understand the situation for the first time.

115

Gustavo Bondoni “Sometimes, the few must decide for the many, if the many cannot see for themselves.” Kiara was firm on this point.

She wasn’t going to argue morality with the representative of an alien race that had enslaved her. “Humans are not animals to be kept in a zoo.”

“You are not being kept in a zoo.”

“Then what do you call this? We’re being fed and protected but not allowed to leave our cage. Why don’t you just kill us and be done with it?”

“That is not the procedure.” The alien replied.

“Procedure?” said Kiara. “Would you care to explain what you mean?”

“You are to be tried for crimes against civilization. The despoiling of your planet has destroyed a valuable resource for the galaxy and for this you must answer. All of humanity must be held accountable. You are not in a zoo. You are in prison.”

Kiara was speechless. This was not something she had expected.

Ron broke into the communication. “You came all this way just to try us for littering? You stupid tree-hugging morons!

And you haven’t even got the real criminals. Just the ones who got left behind. Why should we pay for the crimes of our betters?”

“We came to colonize, unaware that the planet was inhabited. We have been in deep space for four hundred of your years and expected to find the verdant planet our scanners showed us. But we were betrayed by humans who have despoiled the planet. We are doomed to suffer until we can obtain other energy sources in the deeper recesses of your solar system to make yet another long journey. In light of this, we are acting as any civilized race would. You will be tried with due process. But I must warn you. I don’t think you will be acquitted. Humanity’s crimes are obvious.”

“But you must try us as individuals,” said Kiara. “I cannot be held accountable for something I had nothing to do with.”

“No. Humanity is responsible and all shall answer.”

116

Ghetto Galileo “What is the punishment?”

“Death.”

Kiara swallowed, and then laughed. “You’re going to try to exterminate the whole human race? From what I’ve heard of your technology, any element of the Diaspora fleet could blow your entire civilization into another galaxy.”

“This is sadly true. Humans are good at destroying things. But we must try. Even as we speak, communications are returning to our homeworld, telling them of what we’ve found here. They will take action.”

“Can’t we coexist in peace?” Kiara asked.

“Peace is not possible with creatures who don’t understand the basic rules of coexistence. We must eradicate the human menace from the galaxy.”

Kiara looked at the implacable reptile on the screen and shut off the communication.

“So what now?” asked Ron. “We wait,” she replied. “Get some sleep.”

Hours later Kiara was the only one awake. Exhaustion and loss of nervous tension had put the rest of the group to sleep.

She crawled over to Ron and, putting a hand over his mouth, shook him. He woke with a start. She whispered to him before he could make any noise that would wake the others. “Don’t say anything. Just come with me.”

He nodded and she removed her hand from his mouth.

They walked back to the transmission room. She could tell by his face that he was confused and disoriented. She looked him in the eye. “Ron, can I trust you?”

“With your life.”

Kiara nodded. She knew it was true. She sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why?” He was alert now, but still confused.

“I need you to do something. Something that will cost you your life… and mine as well.”

117

Gustavo Bondoni panel. to.”

The silence was oppressive in the dim glow of the control “What? I think you know I’ll do anything you ask me

She smiled and stroked his face with her hand. “Yes, I know. That’s why I’m sorry.”

He just looked at her.

“I need you to use the transmitters to bounce a signal off the interstellar relay telling the Diaspora about this. Tell them to come back and to bring big guns. Also, tell them that they have to find the lizard’s home and stop them.”

He nodded, knowing there was more to come.

“And then, I want you to use the control thrusters to drop us onto the surface.”

“We’ll burn on reentry.”

“I know, but do you think there might be enough left of the station to do serious damage to the alien mother ship?”

“Yes, but hitting the mother ship won’t be easy. Even with the controlled reentry protocols built in to drop the station into the sea if it ever became obsolete, it’s not an exact science.

I don’t know if I’m up to placement that fine.”

“We have to try. I trust you.”

Ron said nothing. He bent over to execute her instructions.

Five eternal minutes later, he straightened once more. “It’s done.

In two minutes our course will be irrevocable.”

As the two minutes passed, Kiara knew that, for the first time in her life, she was doing something significant. Right or wrong would be for others to decide, but to her it certainly felt right.

The descent had begun in earnest now; she could feel the shuddering of the station as it came into contact with the atmosphere. She nestled close to Ron who put an arm around her, as she knew he would. She hoped he would die happy.

“I hope we hit the mother ship, Ron, I really do,” she said. “I want the pompous bastards to be here when the fleet comes back. I’d love to see the look on their faces after we kick their asses and judge them for crimes against humanity. Pity I 118

won’t.�

Then she fell silent, enjoying her final ride.

119

The Elcano Syndrome said.

“It’s the tallest mountain in the solar system,” Campbell

“Yes. But it’s on Mars,” I told him.

Knowing Campbell, that was going to be a problem for me if not for him. The space race had originally been reserved to governments, but, as public support for exploration waned and personal wealth increased, government presence in space had been replaced by private citizens. After more than two centuries dormant, the gentleman explorer had resurfaced; like their 19th century predecessors, they were completely insane.

“That’s what makes it worthwhile, my dear Mirabelli.”

He was the worst of them. Record runs to the moon had evidently lost their appeal. Now he wanted to climb mountains on Mars. And, despite my better nature, I would be going with him.

“How are you thinking of paying for this little trip?”

“Here we are, in the Drones club, one of the most exclusive establishments in London, nay, the world,” he said theatrically, “and you ask me that? Annoy me not with such trifles.” He knew I hated it when he got Olde English on me, but he was right; this was one of the few places on Earth where a conversation like ours would not only not be ridiculed, but would be met with enthusiastic support. Tradition and the quest for glory, forces much stronger than self-preservation or common sense, dictated this.

Campbell knew that. He looked at the table next to ours, grinned at me, and dived in.

“Excuse me, Lord Belanor, could I have a word with you?”

Ten minutes later, it was done. We were going to Mars.

Olympus Mons. Even the name is titanic. I had expected 120

The Elcano Syndrome to be impressed, but it doesn’t look like much from orbit, just a larger crater on the surface. Campbell, however, was exultant.

“We’re already in rarefied territory. Are you aware that only eighteen human beings have ever seen Mars from orbit before us?”

We were very aware of it indeed. After six months on the ship with him, it had become impossible not to be unaware of any of the “firsts” that this expedition entailed. Avoiding him was impossible, since we had to spend most of our time in the gym to counteract the effects of weightlessness, and to stay in shape for the climb. He’d been repeating this particular tidbit unceasingly since we’d entered Mars orbit two days before.

We boarded the shuttle, and, two hours later, we were standing, fully suited, on the surface. The awe I felt at the enormity of this was only slightly dampened by Campbell’s statistics.

“Seven people. Only seven people have been here before.” Then he looked around, opened his arms and turned his body. “Team, welcome to Olympus Base Camp!”

Now the mountain was impressive. A gently rising slope at first, it grew in inclination, sloping to appear nearly vertical towards the top. Its sunlit flank cut a magnificent outline against the greyness of the Martian sky. I just stood there looking at it for a while, finding myself suddenly short of breath.

Campbell saw my expression through the face-shield.

“Now do you understand?”

I nodded. I knew he was after glory and immortality, but it occurred to me that there were certainly less inspiring ways of attaining them.

The climb itself, on the other hand, didn’t worry me overmuch. Most of the slope could be walked and gravity was just under 40% of Earth’s, so lugging supplies would be a breeze — especially since our suits were servo-assisted. The main danger on this hike would come from the fact that we couldn’t remove our suits, due to the temperature and lack of breathable air.

Air supply, on the other hand, would not be a problem.

121

Gustavo Bondoni Campbell had come up with a semi-rigid balloon system to carry oxygen. These balloons were partitioned, with helium occupying half the chambers for buoyancy and our Oxygen filling the rest.

They were necessarily large, but self propelled: fans running on electric motors giving directional motion, and tiny rocket thrusters available for use toward the top of the mountain, where the atmosphere would be too thin for natural buoyancy to keep the balloons afloat.

Each balloon was tethered to a climber with enough oxygen for the climb, as well as a decent safety margin. We wouldn’t be climbing down; pickup would occur at the top in ten day’s time.

Watching the red and green light approaching through the Martian night, I knew that, for the first time, I understood Campbell completely. He had done what he came here to do.

He would go down in history as the first man to climb Olympus Mons.

And the first to die doing it.

Me? Well, it would fall to me to explain that the climb had been going smoothly, that every calculation had been spoton, that it was going to be a cakewalk.

And then, with sad eyes, I would tell the watching world that we hadn’t expected the wind to come up when it did, that the fans couldn’t cope, that we’d had to drag the blimps through the sky, using much more energy, and therefore air, than we’d expected.

I wouldn’t need to tell them about the six climbers who’d decided to turn back, calling for an emergency pickup midmountain. They’d have given their own interviews.

I’d tell the viewers that Campbell had known it would be close, and that we’d risked going on anyway. Then I’d shrug and say that Campbell had been a bigger man than me and needed more air. That’s why he’d asphyxiated an hour before the pickup, while I could have sat there for two more.

122

What I would never be able to make the countless new Campbell-worshippers understand is that I would have given anything to trade places with him at that moment.

But there were other ways. I was certain that nobody had yet landed on the surface of Venus. Or been inside Jupiter’s atmosphere . . .

123

Borrowed Time Often have I wondered if the old legends are true. Could it be possible that, somewhere in the night sky, the original planet of our race orbits peacefully about a yellow sun? This has often been said. Can it be true that the great-grandparents of The People came to Xenland in machines capable of bridging the abyss? This has not only been said equally often, but is supported by evidence in the form of large metal cylinders on the plains known as the Ship Graveyard, that are reputed to have performed this very feat less than four hundred years ago. The veracity of this claim is strongly disputed, but this lessens not my foreboding.

I fear to credit the legends, for if they are true, are we not doomed to a fate best not contemplated?

Hawthorne sat, unable to move, holding a crumpled piece of paper in his hand.

He had suspected for some time that the war was not going well. For weeks the reports had been getting less and less optimistic, the supply ships less and less frequent, and their captains ever more evasive.

Nevertheless, not even in the worst of his nightmares did he imagine the fall of the Ballisa system. Ballisa had stood for twenty years, ever since the armies of humanity had taken it from the Andreans at the beginning of the war. It had become a symbol of the war effort, more a state of mind than an actual physical place, and the loss of that system would represent a crushing blow to morale.

For Commander Hawthorne, however, it represented an even bigger problem.

Overcoming his initial shock-induced paralysis, he signaled for his staff.

Collins and Brooks were quick to arrive, with Gonzalez only moments behind. All had suspected that something major was in the works, and now they would find out just how major.

124

Borrowed Time “Yes, Commander,” saluted Lieutenant April Collins.

She was visibly anxious, a small nervous tic working at the corner of her left eye. Hawthorne waited for Gonzalez to be seated before handing the sheet over. They passed it around in near silence, Collins exhaling strongly and seeming to deflate, Brooks showing no emotion, and Gonzalez simply saying, “Ballisa….”

They sat in silence for a few moments.

“Major Gonzalez,” said Hawthorne, “is there any way we can bring supplies in from human controlled space?”

“Sir, although we could attempt to do so, the only charted spacelane and wormhole system runs through Ballisa. Any other path would be highly risky.”

“We’re going to have to try,” said Hawthorne. “With the fall of Ballisa, we’re thirteen light-years behind enemy lines, cut off from both our supply lines and contact with humanity.

It’s only a matter of time until the Andreans find us and take this planet, and we can’t count on the fleet to defend us. They can’t even get here, and I suspect they’ve got bigger problems to think about than a few stragglers on a prison planet. We have to try to evacuate the camp.”

Gonzalez, the logistics officer, shook his head slowly.

Hawthorne nodded to him to speak.

“Two things,” Gonzalez said, holding up a pair of fingers. “The first is that we don’t have enough ships to evacuate everyone; and the second is that, even if we did, you could never convince me to board one. I’d rather take my chances on laying low and hoping the Andreans don’t notice us.”

Collins nodded her agreement. “Flying through space looking for an unmapped wormhole is suicide.”

Brooks remained silent.

“I see,” said Hawthorne. He paused. “I think we’ll leave off the military discipline for a while and give everyone the option of staying or going. We’ll give them the facts and let them choose their poison. If we have more people wanting to go than available ships, we’ll draw lots.”

“What about the prisoners?” asked Brooks.

125

Gustavo Bondoni This time, the pause was much longer. The twelve hundred insectoid Andreans resident in the Xeno Containment Sector were the reason the jungle outpost existed. Out here, light years from any settlement, either human or Andrean, it could be safely assumed that the Andrean’s extraordinary long-range telepathy would not bring aid to the prisoners immediately. Hard experience had taught the humans that the Andreans would stop at nothing to liberate even one prisoner. Finally, Hawthorne spoke. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

As the elder of my people and direct descendant of Hawk Thorn the Founder, it falls to me, as is proper, to guide them in times of crisis. Rumors are rampant and the doomsayers, normally dormant, have come out in full force.

I must consult with the spirits in the ancient temple, but cannot do so without much trepidation. The spirits, always bitter, often violent, are not to be braved lightly. Nevertheless, I must remain strong and remember that the abuse only exists within the confines of my mind, and hope that one of the spirits is minded to illuminate me on the signs that we have seen.

I have little hope of this however, as the spirits are never deliberately helpful. They dwell in the gloom of the temple, keening sadly, unable to rest, victims of some long-forgotten atrocity.

Our people have been dependent on signs for our survival since the Founding. We have used the migration of the reptiles to plan for winter. The cycles of the tides to time our crops. The lunar eclipse to begin the harvest. Every sign is long awaited, expected, and greeted as a friend. Some are met with trepidation, but all are a comfort to the people.

This new star in the firmament must be a sign of colossal magnitude, but new signs are never a source of comfort and this one is of particular concern. I am certain that God did not intend for stars to move in the way that this one does.

Hawthorne might be losing it, thought April, but he’s still the only leader we have.

126

Borrowed Time She no longer thought of herself as Lieutenant Collins.

Following the exodus, all signs of military discipline had broken down. Two hundred of the camp detail had remained on the planet. The rest had decided to take their chances on the uncharted starlanes.

It had been understandable, in a way. Following the announcement, panic had spread and the prevailing wisdom had been that the Andreans could arrive in full force at any moment. Fights, often lethal, had broken out upon boarding the ships, every single one of which had left the planet critically overloaded.

Walking across a green plain in this, the terraformed area of the planet, April reflected on the changes that had come over Hawthorne — some out of necessity, and others completely unexpected — and the effect that they were having on her.

In the first place, his initial idea of hiding from the Andreans had become an all-consuming obsession. He had ordered the satellites brought down from their orbits. Then he had disconnected the ground transmitters, and ordered all componentry smashed for good measure. All in the name of a safety that, many felt, existed only in his mind. It had been argued that it was entirely possible that the Andreans knew exactly where they were, and that an assault was only a matter of time.

She had to admit that she, herself, had seriously mixed feelings regarding Hawthorne’s plan, but considering how she felt about the man himself, that was nothing unusual.

She had been fascinated by the way he’d taken charge of what remained of the camp following the exodus. His leadership at that time had by no means been a given. There had been as many factions on the planet then as there were inhabitants, and no realistic hope of reestablishing a hierarchy with Hawthorne at the top. And Hawthorne’s extreme views regarding the eradication of all technology only made matters more difficult for him.

Nevertheless, through a brilliant combination of convincing oratory, overflowing passion, and simple intelligence, he had won them over one by one. And in doing so, retaken his place as 127

Gustavo Bondoni the leader of a tiny group of humans thirteen light years behind enemy lines.

He had also won April’s respect.

Some days, she was certain that he had won much more than the respect due a senior officer. On other days, when she was being brutally honest with herself, she knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that she had fallen head over heels for him.

One of the first to join his cause, she had remained his staunchest (most fanatical?) supporter throughout everything, and she had helped him to eliminate every link to the outside universe, save one.

And she knew that only the fact that she was in love with him allowed her to continue placing one foot in front of the other now. To finish the job.

Finally, the alien pen (the euphemism Xeno Containment Sector had fallen by the wayside some time ago) came into view, and April found herself wondering if any of the people from the outbound shuttles had survived their odyssey. More to the point, she wondered if there were even any humans surviving elsewhere in the galaxy or if the war had finally ended and transformed the few people on this prison camp planet into the sole representatives of the race.

She arrived at the pen and walked through the containment screens, a concentric ring of electromagnetic fences which surrounded a large concrete structure. Humans felt only a slight tingle when penetrating the screens, but for the Andreans with their different mental structure, they were torture. Crossing one was incapacitating, and two would probably be fatal, although that was theoretical as none of the prisoners had ever been stupid or desperate enough to try it.

April stopped just outside the innermost screen. Even her limited human senses could feel the telepathic minds of the Andreans within, concentrating as always on their art. Not a single surface of the pen was free of some kind of alien clutter -- painted walls or sculpted rock. Even the concrete of the walls had been chiseled into the shapes of humans, Andreans and other, unidentifiable, beings.

128

Borrowed Time One of the first observations that prolonged observation of Andreans in captivity had yielded was that they had no specific leader. It was never the same individual who received the human emissaries although, April thought, it was probably unnecessary owing to their telepathy. Today, however, the creatures within did something remarkable. They all turned to watch her as she approached.

Andreans, the sworn enemies of humanity, had been vilified as the pure essence of evil since they were first discovered.

And, April reflected, they certainly looked the part.

Large, exoskeletoned, hive-mind creatures with multiple legs capable of reading thoughts over inconceivable distances were highly unlikely to get along with individualistic mammalian creatures possessed of a paranoid streak. And history had proven this point of view correct.

So why did she find herself disagreeing with it all of a sudden? She had been in charge of their maintenance: feeding and watching the prisoners since the founding of the camp, and had come to anthropomorphize them to the point that she had given some of them human names from the Holonet programs she watched, because some of them moved and gestured like some particular actor.

It was difficult not to. Despite the alien appearance and multiple legs (never the same quantity on two different individuals), some gestures, especially the continuous nodding, were utterly human. And the art. The art sang to her in a strange way‌ a mixture of loneliness and desperation, but with an undertone of pure hope. She supposed telepathic races must pick up some mannerisms and thought processes from other intelligences they contact.

The emissary rubbed its hind legs together, warming up the membranes to speak with her. Its black exoskeleton glistened in the sunlight. Even before April could open her mouth, it spoke. “Do not do this thing,� it said. Language barriers had never been an issue with a telepathic race and the Andreans were able to reproduce an amazing range of sounds with their membranes, even though, as a telepathic race, they did not 129

Gustavo Bondoni converse among themselves.

April stared back at it. So they know, she thought. She shook her head. “We must. We have no other choice.”

“There are always choices.”

“But we cannot risk them. We don’t know if there are any other humans left in the galaxy,” explained April, as if pleading for understanding. “What if we are the last? We must do anything and everything to survive. We cannot risk having your telepathic signals reach your fleet.”

“We are willing to promise not to project our thoughts.”

“I believe you, but I cannot risk the future of the entire human race on your promise.”

“Promises are sacred to our race.”

“I’m sorry,” April said. She turned to go.

“No!” the Andrean shouted at her. “At least spare one of us! If you kill us all, there will be none to transfer our knowledge, our memories, to the race. This you cannot do! It is an atrocity of the highest order.” So saying, it charged the screen.

April was so surprised that she managed only to take one step back, but that was sufficient. The Andrean fell at her feet, whether dead or merely unconscious it was impossible for her to tell. A ripple flowed through the rest of the aliens as if they themselves had felt the pain of crossing the screen. Which, thought April, they probably had. She prepared herself to flee the inevitable desperate charge, but the remaining aliens did nothing but stare at her.

Despite their completely monstrous insectoid appearance, their accusing stare, knowing as they did from her mind that they would all be dead before the end of the day was somehow moving.

And very human.

She was not surprised to feel tears rolling down her face as she turned to go.

The violence had been expected, but not the excitement, the joy, the feeling of long awaited revenge. I had learned nothing in the temple save that the spirits, when the mood takes 130

Borrowed Time them, can be worse than anything imaginable. Their hatred for all living men broke through even my most rigidly constructed mental barriers, and I only managed to extricate myself from the temple through sheer animal instinct.

I know that I must find the explanation if I am to save The People from tearing themselves apart in a panicked frenzy.

I must find the strength to rise and consult the books of wisdom once more. There may be some passage in the moral treatise “Vanity Fair” that may shed light on this crossroad. Or is this the doomsday predicted in the metaphorical prophecy, “The Fall of the House of Usher”?

I do not yet have the answer, but cannot bring myself to believe that the books are unable to assist. They have been the spiritual guide to our people for all of history. They cannot fail us now.

For the new star has, in this brief interlude, grown larger.

The library had been cleaned out years before, but Hawthorne still scanned the shelves out of sheer paranoid habit, looking for anything that might endanger the future of the colony. Nothing. The shelves were innocent of any technical literature. Even Victorian fantasy had been burned if he judged it to contain too much scientific detail.

It had cut him deeply to lose Verne and Wells, constant companions to his voyages among the stars. But hardest of all had been Frankenstein. He had kept it under lock years after he had stopped mourning the loss of the other books.

Until the night of April’s death. On that night, he remembered once again that the enemy they were hiding from was implacable and could reach out even from beyond the barrier of death to take human life.

She had never been the same following the death of the Andreans, never been able to reconcile herself to the reality of having given the order to terminate them. Her suicide, though unaccompanied by a note of any kind, had been instantly and forever attributed to the Andreans by Hawthorne, though others thought differently.

131

Gustavo Bondoni That very night, Frankenstein had burned. No price was too high to save the settlement. He remembered it as if it had been yesterday. Smelling the smoke, feeling the pain of April’s death.

“Are you all right, grandpa?”

Milo, the youngest of his six grandchildren, had entered unnoticed. For a moment, he was unable to breathe, struck, as always, by how much Milo reminded him of April. The color and form of his hair, the line of his jaw. But then, all their offspring had always looked more like her than him.

The child seemed unsure of how to respond to this silent scrutiny from his usually indulgent ancestor. Tears welled up.

“Now, Milo,” said Hawthorne in his usual, mild voice, “don’t cry.”

And everything was all right again. If his words had been a magical incantation, they couldn’t have had a more immediate or absolute effect. The child straightened and forgot all about crying, prompting a smile from his grandfather. If only real life were that simple.

“What were you thinking about, grandpa?”

“Books.” There was a faraway look in his eyes, unnoticed

by Milo.

“Books? Like these?” Milo pointed at the shelves.

“Yes. These and many others. Books from the past that I don’t have any more.”

“Why not?”

“Because they were dangerous.”

Milo looked at the books on the shelves. They obviously didn’t look dangerous to him. He reached out and tentatively touched one. His finger landed on Othello. He pulled it back quickly. Only when he was certain that it hadn’t hurt him did his hand approach the book again.

“The danger was not in the books themselves, but in what was written inside.”

“Then why did you keep these?” asked Milo. He pulled the copy of Othello out of its place on the shelf.

“Because books can also tell us who we are, and where 132

Borrowed Time we come from, so we never forget.”

“I’m Milo,” said Milo. “I won’t forget that!” But, all the same, he opened the book reverently as if expecting a message from God to leap out at him from the pages.

Hawthorne tried to remember how old the child was.

Seven? Eight? It made no difference. He knew the child couldn’t read and likely would never bother to learn. It was no longer necessary.

And he was responsible.

Under his watchful and often tyrannical eye, every sign of advanced human technology that could potentially create the slightest risk of detection from space had been eradicated from the colony.

But it was not enough to only save one generation.

Hawthorne knew that he would not be around to guide them forever.

He had fought the Andreans. He knew what they was like. Future generations would not know and, not knowing, would minimize the threat, seduced by the comforts of the technology that Hawthorne had had destroyed. It was simply human nature. All of which meant that it was not enough to eliminate the dangerous technology itself. The very knowledge of its existence had to be eradicated.

And he had done it.

Technical treatises had been used to create a stone-age farming culture and then destroyed. The generators, fusion drives, tri-D equipment, storage files. All of it had been destroyed. Even the weaponry had gone. This came near to causing a mutiny until Hawthorne pointed out that against the massed might of the Andrean fleet, a few blaster rifles were not going to be much use. The only hope was to hide. And pray.

And hide they had.

What at first had seemed an impossible dream with discovery and death the price of dreaming had, with time, become simply the way things were. And now his grandchildren regarded the Andreans as a bedtime story, and space flight as a legend, and reading as something for Gods and elders.

133

Gustavo Bondoni The child, meanwhile, sat contentedly next to him, pretending to read the book, pretending to make sense of the words, creating a world that Shakespeare could never have dreamed possible. Milo would remain forever unaware of the weight his grandfather carried in his soul, unaware that the old man beside him wondered every day if he had, indeed, made the right choice.

The burden of leadership, at least, was no longer his. It had been passed along the very day after April’s death. But he could never pass along the responsibility for what he had done.

Its enormity would forever live within him.

The child eventually wandered off, not even noticed the silence that had so unnerved him previously, leaving his grandfather once more to his thoughts.

Hawthorne knew that there was not much time left to him, and knew he should enjoy re-reading his beloved leatherbound copy of Wuthering Heights, happy in the safety of his colony and even more content because his fetish for outdated printed books had at least allowed him to save a small section of human culture for the generations to come.

Death should find him content, safe in the knowledge that he had accomplished the objective for which he had been trained since the first day of officer school and forever cheated the Andreans out of their final prize.

But he knew it would not.

My thoughts as I watch the descending ball of flame is that I truly desire that it be a star that simply erases me from the face of the planet with its falling. But, as it approaches, I can tell that it is correcting its course to bear directly at me and correcting once more. I can no longer pretend that it is a star.

I am alone, my people scattered like dust, yet it is for them that I worry. I am old and have little to lose, but they shall witness the truth of our legends.

I can now marvel at my own arrogance. How many times had I scoffed at a legend, berating the theorist as a superstitious fool? And yet, in my mind, I can no more deny the fact of the star 134

machine than I can of my own existence.

I have no evidence that it is a machine built to bridge the gulf between the stars. Yet I know it. Despite my foreboding I will stand fast and greet whatever emerges, nobly representing The People and bringing understanding and peace. God willing it will be so.

But, for some reason, as I stand here resolute on this monumental occasion, I imagine the voices of the spirits in my mind making an astonishing and disconcerting noise.

A noise much like laughter.

135

Growing Pains in the Womb “It almost looks as if you’re enjoying this, Rob.” The accusation was actually pretty difficult to deny, but Rob felt he had to try. “Why would you say that?” he asked.

“Oh, come on! Ever since you got the call this morning, your eyes have been shining with a fire I’ve never seen in them before. I swear, if you were forty years younger….”

“Eileen, that’s not funny. Didn’t they teach you not to tease your superior officer at the academy? Especially about his age?”

“There is no academy, Rob; you taught me everything I know. But I guess you’ve probably forgotten that in your dotage.

Anyway, you’ve got to admit that you’ve been treating this case with just a little more enthusiasm than usual.”

“OK. You win. It’s just that this is the first time in those forty years you’re so fond of reminding me about that I’ve actually had real work to do.”

And it was true. He was the head of the security force and for almost the entirety of his career, the sole representative of that august body. But had been sorely underworked during most of that time. In fact, only his imminent retirement had forced him to even consider looking for a replacement, and then only after a direct request from the council. And he still couldn’t see the point. What was the point of having a security force in a place without crime? Nothing ever happened here.

Until this morning.

This morning had broken the routine. And Rob had a feeling that things would probably never be the same.

“Maybe we should try talking to them again,” said Eileen, looking at the armored door in front of them as if trying to open it through sheer strength of will.

Rob shook his head. “It’s still too soon. Let them sweat it out a little; consider what they’re doing. Or threatening to do.” “‘Sweat it out?’” Eileen rolled her eyes. “You must be even older than I thought!”

136

Growing Pains in the Womb Staring at the door, Rob wondered how they had ever come to this.

He himself had been born here in the Womb, and he would die here. Anything that had happened before the launch was not only outside his experience; it was probably outside his capacity for comprehension. Nevertheless, he found himself remembering long forgotten history lessons and trying to explain the current situation. Trying to explain the unexpected.

The unthinkable.

The inevitable?

After the initial conquest of the solar system, his electronic tutors had taught him that humanity had grown complacent.

Living on their domesticated planets and under their titanium and aluminum domes on countless moons and asteroids, the population had slowly started to decline for the first time since the bubonic plague. Over a period of only one hundred years, the ranks of humanity lost nearly a billion people. The population of the solar system had dipped below the thirty billion mark.

Drastic measures had probably not been needed, but politics dictated that they be taken anyway. While it was mainly a case of placating the media and drawing public attention away from real issues in order to win the next elections, the issues in this case had been a series of disasters on the gas mining stations in low orbit around Neptune. Something had been inadvertently brought onto one of these outposts by the second mission to Pluto. There had been no sign of anything wrong until all the energy from the batteries had drained away. Then healthy crewmembers began to die one by one, for no visible reason.

Finally, in desperation, the last surviving man had fled to another station in panic.

Where the cycle had repeated itself.

Two stations.

Three.

Four.

The most prominent scientists and epidemiologists in the solar system were unable to explain the situation or propose a viable solution and in the end, the system government had 137

Gustavo Bondoni been forced to make a hard decision. The fleeing survivor of the fourth outbreak had been met by a government patrol ship which immediately opened fire, dropping the escape craft flaming into the gaseous atmosphere of the planet. The infected stations were also destroyed.

The ensuing government cover-up was a clumsy affair, and it was only a matter of weeks before the media learned of the crisis and its brutal resolution. The Trinet news ratings had gone through the roof, and the resulting public outcry had nearly been enough to topple the system government. Something obviously had to be done.

But what?

In the time-honored tradition of politicians everywhere since the Pharaohs, the System premier had taken the rostrum and tried to capture the imagination of his subjects, basically to try to get them to think about something other than the perceived indiscretions of his government. He did this by announcing an engineering project on a scope never seen before, “for the furtherance of mankind.�

And he was successful.

The plan to colonize Tau Ceti II, a rocky planet orbiting a star nearly twelve light-years from the sun, had completely overshadowed the events around Neptune. The massive undertaking involved using the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid fitted with enormous ion engines to push a half million colonists towards the planet. Despite the size and power of the drives, and the relativistic velocities achieved, the trip would take over one hundred and sixty years.

Eight generations.

The engineering challenges alone would have been enough to keep the public distracted, but there had also been another factor, probably even stronger than the first, which made even the most cynical critics of the government’s shamelessly transparent methods of distraction pause before openly criticizing the plan. Simply stated, humanity was in decline. The solar system, while harsh in places, no longer presented a real challenge. Humanity needed challenges. The alternative was 138

Growing Pains in the Womb decadence and stagnation.

But mankind, always quick to regain its drive when pushed hard enough, rose to the challenge. The flood of volunteers threatened to overwhelm the processing capacity of the governmental office set up for the task. In the end, the very best and brightest from among the tens of millions of men and women who volunteered had been accepted. An even split between men and women, with only one condition having been imposed: each person had to have at least two children while on board. It would, after all, be a hundred-sixty year trip and someone had to be around at the end to colonize the planet.

None of the original volunteers would be alive to do so.

All of which left Rob staring at a sealed, armor-plated door seventy years later More than five light-years from the sun.

In the middle, as it were, of nowhere.

He smiled. It was almost certain that whoever had coined the phrase “in the middle of nowhere” had never imagined taking it to this extreme, so perhaps, perversely, it actually didn’t apply to his case. Maybe better would be a phrase he had once heard from his father nearly fifty years before, which he couldn’t quite recall at the moment. Something about a creek and the lack of paddles. It had stuck in his mind mainly because he had had to look up what a creek was. The inside of a hollowed-out asteroid wasn’t the best place to find creeks lying around.

Grimacing ruefully, he gently chastised himself, aware that his train of thought was not helping him to solve his current problem. Aware, as well, that Eileen was patiently awaiting his signal. Aware that the council expected him to have this situation cleared up by suppertime.

That thought brought a chuckle.

He suspected that the council simply couldn’t conceive of how serious the problem really was. They called it an “isolated incident.” The worst part of it was that the council members were all Womb-born themselves, and all had children.

Were they really so blind?

“Eileen, please open a channel to the control room.”

139

Gustavo Bondoni “Yes, sir. They can hear you now.”

Rob paused and took a deep breath. “This is Rob Walker.

Can you hear me?”

“We hear you,” came the reply. A man’s voice. He sounded as if he was too young to shave, thought Rob, shaking his head. “Are you ready to meet our terms?”

“We’re ready to discuss them. First, however, we need to clarify exactly what it is that you want from us.”

“Our announcement was perfectly clear.”

Rob said nothing, waiting for the demands to come. He was certain they would. An uncomfortable few moments of silence ensued.

“We demand that the ship turn around immediately. We want to go to Earth.” The tone of voice invited no argument, and left no room for discussion.

And herein lay the problem. It was physically impossible for the ship to turn around and return to Earth. It was a question of fuel. The ship had been designed to accelerate for fifty years, and then cruise without power until it had nearly reached its destination. Only then was deceleration planned. The now-silent engines did not have enough fuel to bring them to a complete stop without the aid of the planet’s gravity, much less turn it around and return to Earth.

All of this had been patiently explained to the individuals inside the control room, who had disagreed and shut off the air supply for the entire ship. It was at this point that the council decided that it was a security matter and had called Rob in to assist.

The air inside the ship was kept clean by way of four enormous scrubbers whose job was to separate the carbon from the oxygen in the carbon dioxide generated by the breath of over a million people. Without the scrubbers, the ship could survive for three days, the third of which would be rather unpleasant. It was those scrubbers that had been switched off from within the locked control room twelve hours before.

The operation had been well planned.

Turning off the scrubbers was the only viable way to 140

Growing Pains in the Womb endanger the physical well-being of the people inside the ship, which had been designed specifically to insure that a load of healthy, breathing humans arrived at Tau Ceti II. The only reason the scrubbers could be turned off at all was as a tool of last resort. In the case of an uncontrollable fire, colonists in emergency breathing suits could shut down the supply of fresh oxygen. There could be no fire without oxygen. But this had been planned as an avenue of last resort under desperate circumstances and there were only five hundred emergency suits on board.

Rob shook his head once more. He wasn’t trained for this. And his forty years of experience just weren’t relevant.

Despite his position, crime wasn’t really a factor in his world.

How could it be? On the ship, everyone was entitled to precisely the same amount of comfort and luxury. There were no ranks or castes to create material injustice, or even material differences.

Nobody went hungry.

Occasionally, of course, tempers would flare, sometimes reaching the point where his intervention was required. But that need was minimized by the fact that everyone on board over the age of fifteen was assigned a personal stun weapon. While to many, this seemed like an invitation to mayhem, teams of psychologists studying the mission prior to its launch had concurred that it would save innumerable lives in the long run.

The possession of stunners made it virtually impossible to get into a fight or attack another person with a bladed weapon. And of course, there were no projectile weapons on board. The last thing the designers had wanted was someone shooting holes in the hull.

Stunning was unpleasant: basically an electric discharge aimed at confusing the central nervous system, but essentially harmless, with no side effects. And every stunner was linked to the ship’s computer, which in turn alerted Rob whenever a stunner was used. He could usually arrive at the scene in less than one minute (an asteroid, even a big one, is a pretty small place), and avoid any real injury. He had a very quiet job.

Until today.

141

Gustavo Bondoni Today he had to deal with something completely unexpected. Having no idea what to say, he decided to respond in kind. “Hey,” he spoke into the receiver, “you’re the ones in the control room. Why don’t you turn the ship around yourselves?”

This was followed by a long silence, broken only by the sound of Eileen shifting nervously from one foot to another.

“What do you think we’ve been trying to do for the past twelve hours?” said the voice, finally.

“Well, if it can’t be done from the control room, how do you expect us to be able to do it from out here?”

“We know you have a way. Your generation is trying to keep control of the Womb. Well, now it’s time for youth to prevail. Your time is up.”

Rob rolled his eyes. He had been hearing variations of this speech from third-generation colonists for months. It was the sort of thing that irked him but stopped short of true concern since everyone on board knew that not only was a revolution nearly impossible on account of the distribution of stunners, it was also useless. The council “ruled” only in the sense that they served to smooth out small differences that could arise and enforce codes of conduct and decency. No privilege came from being a member and the workload was often a burden, especially in a place where there was no need for the majority of the inhabitants to work.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Rob, “you know as well as I do that all the controls are inside that room.”

“Send in an engineer, then.”

“There are no engineers on board,” sighed Rob, without activating the channel. To the would-be hijackers, he said, “give us a little while, and we’ll see what we can do.”

“Blast!” said Rob. He wasn’t trained for this. He was also sure that his generation, which had been born between five and twenty-five years after the start of the mission, hadn’t been so obsessed with controlling their destiny. It was something he would have loved to discuss with his parents, had they been alive to respond. They certainly had never resorted to trying to hijack the ship. And the transition of power from the previous 142

Growing Pains in the Womb generation had been smooth and logical.

Although it wasn’t, strictly speaking, true that there were no engineers on board since there were a few survivors from the first generation, what was true was that the youngest of them was ninety-five years old, and in no condition to be locked in with a roomful of potentially violent malcontents.

The reason for this lack was simple enough. The ship had been designed to be fully automatic. It had been designed to function for five hundred years, three times more than necessary.

Redundant emergency systems backed up redundant secondary systems, which in turn existed in case the primary systems broke down.

Which they never did.

So the second generation — his generation — had never trained any engineers. If they ever needed any knowledge, they would just look it up in the enormous computer-learning database. The second generation had gone to school of course, but only because their parents had burned into their minds the utter importance of learning in order to be ready to pass on this attitude to their successors. It was their responsibility to the future inhabitants of New Earth, the name chosen by the colonists for their destination.

Driven by the passion of men and women who had chosen to give up their lives for the advancement of humanity, the second generation had been bound and driven by a sense of duty. Not directed towards humanity itself, but adopted because it was important to their parents. And, dutifully, they had educated their children.

But the single-minded passion was not there.

The third generation had been born to relatively old parents and had grown up slowly. And although their attitude towards life would have been familiar to countless generations of parents of aimless, confused teenagers throughout the history of mankind, it was something that their parents, having been brought up in the driven pioneer culture of the early years of the flight of the Womb, hadn’t been prepared to deal with it. And like countless generations of parents had, in the best of cases, 143

Gustavo Bondoni judged it in terms significant only to their point of view. Others simply pretended the problem wasn’t there at all.

Unchecked, the abyss between the children of the men and women who had sacrificed their futures for the sake of humanity, and their own children raised in a controlled, unchanging environment, had grown progressively larger. It was as inconceivable to the younger generation that they had obligations to anyone or anything beyond their own wishes as it would have been to the older to disregard the dreams of their beloved parents and their duty to them.

The Womb, as it had been known for nearly thirty years, had finally reached its own adolescence -- a period in which the established rules were being questioned.

And Rob knew that deep down, he had always known things would come to a head someday. He had admittedly been surprised by the violence and simmering anger. But he had known.

The anger had been fed, he saw now with the clarity of hindsight, by inaction and deaf ears. And restlessness. The way his generation had been living was a duty-driven parody of the way they interpreted the lifestyle of their parents. It had never reflected the realities of life in the Womb. Their children had never accepted the status quo, being unable to comprehend the rationale behind it. To them, living in a caricature of the outside way of life was not only unacceptable but also an insult to their intelligence. And predictably, the implacable wall of silence from their parents fanned the flames.

Leaving them precisely where they were right now.

Divided not only by a thick steel door, but by a much greater mental gulf.

Rob sighed. “I’ve got to get inside.”

“They won’t just let you in, Rob.” “They will if I tell them we’re sending in an engineer.”

“Oh.” There was another drawn-out, uncomfortable silence. “I don’t think it’s very safe, though.”

“So I guess I get to earn forty years back wages.”

“Nobody’s been paying you.”

144

Growing Pains in the Womb “I know.”

And having no other choice, he went in.

“You did what?”

Rob hadn’t been expecting a hero’s welcome, which was just as well. But, he reflected, it could certainly have been much worse, all things considered. At least the loud nuisance shouting at him had air with which to shout at him. Yes, he could see how things could definitely have been worse.

“I elected them council,” said Rob, calmly.

“You can’t do that!”

“Why not?”

“Because the procedure for choosing the council calls for a vote by all elder members of the crew,” said the old man with the irritating voice. Silver haired heads nodded all across the audience chamber.

“Who says?”

“Well, it’s the council bylaw. That’s how we’ve been doing it for years. Why, these young pups must not be a day older than twenty-five.”

This was, undeniably, true. Off in a corner stood the group of youngsters that just a few hours ago had held the lives of the entire population of the Womb in their hands. They did not look very intimidating outside the walls, mainly young and wide eyed. They glared at the speaker, but remained silent.

“Yes. But it’s your council bylaw. And as I already explained, you are no longer the council. Besides, as the representative of the council in that room, anything I decided should be binding to all of you.”

“What? On your say-so?” the councilman gave a derisory laugh. He turned to the rest of the council. “Ladies and gentlemen, I believe Mr. Walker has been in office quite long enough. In recognition of his years of duty, I think he should be allowed to step down at this time. All in favor?”

A large number of hands went up.

145

Gustavo Bondoni “Please give me your badge of office, Mr. Walker,” said the councilman.

“I can’t do that.”

“Are you truly thinking about mutiny, Mr. Walker? We have been at peace for seventy years. Is this as far as it goes?

Is it possible that mankind can only have peace and order for limited amounts of time before barbarism and despotism finally take over?”

“It may be, at that. Sometimes it takes rather direct action to get things moving back in the direction in which they should be. Besides, I didn’t say I wouldn’t give you my badge of office and the central control to the stunners. I said I couldn’t,” said Rob. “There are two reasons for this. The first is the fact that it would be unethical for me to do so. Not only on the grounds that I gave my word to the new council --” He was forced to raise his voice over the protests of the Council of Elders who, whether they liked it or not, were now the former Council of Elders. “But also because of the fact that our generation didn’t have the faintest idea of what we were doing. We just wanted to go on like we always have.”

“Of course. It’s the only way to insure that we can continue human civilization when we arrive at Tau Ceti. Or haven’t you realized that they,” The elderly councilman jerked his head at the group of younger men and women off to one side, “don’t behave remotely in the way human beings should?

Look at them! They look like small children after a naked paint fight. It seems to me that it would be ironic if the first humans to arrive at a new star were not even recognizable as members of a civilization, wouldn’t it?”

“I think it would have been more ironic if the Womb had arrived at Tau Ceti empty of people. And this is the reason I had to act. Had we held our course, we would have ended up dead or insane,” said Rob, shaking his head. “The greatest engineering feat in history undermined by the stubborn pride of a generation trying to resist change, despite the fact that no group of humans has ever had to deal with what we have to go through. We had our parents to tell us about the passion and the glory of what we 146

Growing Pains in the Womb were doing. And we believed them. But they,” he indicated the representatives of the third generation, “don’t believe us. Why should they? Even we don’t believe us.”

His words were met by silence. He went on.

“Human beings have always had a goal in life. They have had to strive against nature or oppression or poverty. They have always had a journey ahead of them. Well, we don’t. We are probably the first generation in the history of humanity who knows, absolutely knows, what will happen with our lives. We were born in the Womb. We will die in the Womb. In the middle of it all, we won’t be sick, we won’t be able to get into fights, and we will be as rich or as poor as we want to be. No more, no less.

The only impact we will have on history is through our children.

We can accept this because of the way we were brought up. But our children can’t. They might not be alive to see the end of the journey, but they intend to make sure that they influence the result. The very definition of humanity in the stars will be formed by their ideas, not ours. Think of this ship as the crucible for the forging of a new type of humanity. Or if you prefer, think of it as the womb where a new type of humanity will be born.

And they intend to be the midwives.”

“Rob,” said the councilman, finding his voice at last, “do you really intend to let them destroy the values and traditions that have made humans human for the past five millennia?”

“I certainly intend to let them try,” Rob chuckled.

“Besides, if this first reason hasn’t convinced you, there’s always the second one.”

“And what would that be?

“They made me give them the central control to the stunners when I went into the control room. Right now, they’re the only group of people with the capability for offensive action on the whole ship. Which means that they’re in charge whether I managed to convince you or not.”

He turned and walked off, Eileen falling into stride beside him.

“Did you really give them the central control to the stunners?”

147

“Of course not. There’s no such thing. The stunners are a safety feature — we can’t turn them off.”

“But then . . .” her voice trailed off.

“I won’t tell the council if you don’t. You are the present, now. It’s all in your hands. Good luck.”

Walking off into a well deserved retirement, Rob mused that what happened next should be interesting. He thought he would enjoy it. He had a front row seat, after all.

148

The Surgical Option The inscription on the door indicated, to anyone who might have been interested, that the chamber beyond it was Galactic Senate meeting room #12, and did so in the usual seven million major galactic languages. Sadly, its being a somewhat average-sized door meant that the seven million beautifully tooled inscriptions were too small to be read by any known sentient race save the Grinbeggs of Wornpool, which was ironic because Grinbegg was not among the inscribed languages due to it never having been very major. Also, the Grinbeggs had blown themselves to glowing bits in an atomic war several billion years before.

Despite this tragically typical example of compromise politics, it was still possible to find the chamber. At some point, someone had simply carved twelve deep lines into the wood, allowing any sentient being, regardless of language, and even galactic politicians, to identify it correctly, thereby saving themselves the embarrassment of sitting in on the wrong meeting — or, even worse, attending the correct one and being tricked into doing work.

In any case, no one was likely to wander in to this particular meeting by mistake. In the solemn, hallowed hallways of the near-sacred Galactic Senate Building, revered through the ages as the center of all sentient civilization, the sound of bickering, whining, and occasional minor violence could only mean one thing: the bimonthly meeting of the Permanent Committee for Complaints Against Humans was in full swing.

The Chairman, a one-eyed multi-tentacled Lo’Ohik resplendent in his twelve-inch jeweled yellow monocle that looked somewhat like the lens on a planetary defense laser, surveyed the room. He did so with an air of considerable despondency. The meeting had been an absolute disaster so far, and there was no end in sight.

Half the room had been roped off by a cleaning crew who were busy scraping the remains of the Twilliz senator off the 149

Gustavo Bondoni roof. He had been delivering an impassioned diatribe on some heinous human behavior or other, had become too emotional, and had exploded. Perfectly normal behavior for a Twilliz, of course, but it tended to put some of the other species off their lunches, not to mention make a large mess.

The rest of the room was not much better, marred as it was by the fact that it contained the surviving senators, and further marred by the fact that they were all talking at the same time.

“Order!” Shouted the Chairman. He had reached his exalted position within this group not through any talent or political acumen, but by the happy fact that he had twelve tentacles. Each was capable of holding a gavel, the combined noise from which was enough to bring even the loudest rabble to silence when banged simultaneously. Which is what he did now.

With much shuffling of torsos and rearrangement of pseudopodia, the senators from the other races turned to look at him. He gave them the eye (for which he was also particularly suited) and, satisfied that they were all silent for the moment, continued.

“According to the agenda, on this, the fourteenth day of the meeting, we will be taking a complaint from the Gluban ambassador.”

A pink ball of flesh dressed in a gunmetal battle-belt acknowledged the call. It was hovering about a foot above his chair on a column of air which was sucked in through two gills on the top if its torso, passed through a complicated bladder system inside the sphere and expelled at high speed from orifices in the lower half of the body.

He was quickly given the floor by the other senators, who, despite their own concerns, were more than happy to let the Gluban have his say and leave. Air which has been passed through a Gluban is never quite the same.

The ambassador jerked nervously from side to side on secondary air jets, making small spasmic motions similar to the death throes of Betelgeusian amphibo-poultry, a sign of supreme agitation.

150

The Surgical Option “I have sad news to report,” it said. “Zend Plurez the Twelfth, leader of the Blue Star Trio, has died.”

Momentous as this news surely was to Gluban race and culture, it must be admitted that Gluban Trios (who make music by whistling notes of different pitches by varying the wind output from their bodies) were not something that had caught on in the Galactic Senate, partly because the members of that august body had an almost infinite number of recreational alternatives available to them, but mostly because Gluban Trios were not really very good.

A chorus of “Who?” ‘s and “What’s that?” ‘s and even a muted but distinct “Yes, that’s right. Double cheese with sulphureel topping, to chamber twelve” greeted this statement. The buzz was loud enough that the chairman was forced to raise his gavels threateningly before silence resumed.

The senator gravely pondered the Gluban’s news before responding.

“So?” “He’s dead!” said the Gluban.

“I still fail to see the relevance of it, although I extend my condolences to your race.”

“He didn’t just die, he was killed.”

And then, after pausing for effect, he added the punchline: “By humans!”

Pandemonium ensued. Senators yelled at each other that here was the opportunity they’d been waiting for all these years.

The murder of a galactic celebrity, no matter how minor, was surely a crime that nobody would pass off as “just an accident”.

If they could pin this murder on the human race, maybe they could finally stamp out this menace!

The Chairman, having been through scenes like this a dozen times in the last year, was a bit more circumspect. He wouldn’t get his hopes up. Lifting his gavels, he put all his tentacles to use in restoring order.

“Could you give us the details of the death of Mr. Ploopy?” he asked the Gluban.

“Plurez.”

151

Gustavo Bondoni “Huh?” “His name was Plurez, he was the greatest high-octave whistler in the galaxy,” said the ambassador petulantly.

The Chairman just looked at him, seemingly on the verge of bashing the table again, absently lifting one gavel and returning it silently to rest, only to inadvertently lift another. It was a look that said that he was seriously contemplating a career change, and that plastics and multiple homicide, not necessarily in that order, were his current top choices.

Despite the wide differences in species and facial expressions, the Gluban got the message. He continued hastily.

“He died in a starship accident, taking evasive action to avoid humans.”

“Ah, so he was under attack?” said the Chairman, a tiny glimmer of hope just starting to emerge. Could this prove useful after all?

“Er... No. Not exactly. You see, he was embarked with an entire Krenoid sex-set when the humans came up on him.”

“Soldiers?”

The Gluban deflated and bounced off the chair beneath it.

“Paparazzi.” It said.

The chairman threw a gavel at him. Of all the stupid wastes of time . . .

“Why didn’t he just shoot them?” said the chairman in exasperation.

Galactic law, after careful consideration and analysis, had judged that the only way to maintain a civilized galaxy and decent relations between members of diverse professions and social classes was to make it mandatory for citizens to shoot paparazzi on sight. Initially, the law had made it acceptable to fire warning shots, but, in the end, common sense and compassion had won out, and head-shots were required.

“We tried that,” said the Gluban, “but the humans always send us these snippily worded letters of complaint afterwards.

We’ve explained the law to them thousands of times, but they just don’t seem to get it.”

152

The Surgical Option Agreement was signaled around the table with nodding heads and waving pseudopods, but the Chairman just sighed heavily.

“There’s nothing we can do about this. Sorry. Dismissed,” he said. Disappointment rippled through the chamber.

“Next?”

The senator from the Sillybeest confederation stood up.

Roughly humanoid, he was covered in blue fur and was about average height for a sentient.

“What kind of name is Sillybeest? I’ve never heard of the race,” said a tiny voice from somewhere near the middle of the table. All present immediately recognized it as the Aznid ambassador, although not all were able to see her, owing to the fact that she was about half as tall as the coffee mugs, and also hidden behind the agenda sheet. She put the sheet down and was revealed as an exoskeletoned biped in black aluminum armor seated somewhat precariously on the placeholder for the Zilg ambassador (a triangular paper sign that stated that the Zilg race regretted its absence, and, while morally supportive of the crusade, would not be physically attending the meetings because they found all other races unbelievably boring).

“Good question,” said the Chairman. “What’s a Sillybeest? You look like a Cleengon to me.”

The Sillybeest seemed embarrassed.

“Well, that’s what we used to call ourselves,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the humans hit us with some kind of copyright infringement, claiming that our species name was taken from a copyrighted entertainment show. We scoffed and ignored it, of course, but they sicced their lawyers on us. So we produced documentation proving that we had been called Cleengons long before their earliest smelly simian ancestors climbed down from the trees.”

“So what happened?”

“They took one look at the mountain of evidence and dismissed it, arguing that not only was it in a foreign language, it also hadn’t been duly notarized. Then they sued us for damages.”

There was a pregnant pause. Nobody wanted to ask what 153

Gustavo Bondoni happened next. It would likely be the same sad story, repeated over and over since humans had been discovered a mere thirty fiscal periods previously, and invited to join galactic society.

Finally, the Chairman prompted him.

“And?” “Can you believe the Galactic First Circuit Court upheld their claim? And the most ridiculous part of it is that they made us pay for damages all the way back to a time ten thousand years before humans as we know them even existed, using our own evidence to prove it!” The Sillybeest seemed close to tears.

“We’re appealing, of course, but that could take centuries!”

“Tragic. But why Sillybeest?”

“Everything else was taken. The humans presented us with a list of acceptable names,” here the senator paused to shudder, “and this was the least embarrassing.”

“It really doesn’t seem like we can do anything, except to wish you luck with the appeal. You know we can’t go against the courts. I’m sorry.”

“We weren’t expecting a resolution,” the ambassador said, eyeing the assembled beings with lightly concealed contempt. “We came to make an offer. The Sillybeest... No. The Cleengon Space Navy is prepared to blow humanity out of the galaxy. No more problems, no more sessions. Just poof! and they’re gone.”

“No can do. And I’d have to report you,” said the Chairman regretfully.

“Please! They only control four systems! We can have them gone by the end of next week. Nobody would miss them.”

“They are a sentient race and part of the Galactic Brotherhood, no matter how annoying.”

“But all they contribute to the brotherhood are cheap, sleazy lawyers!”

A sudden loud noise from an unexpected quarter made everybody jump. The Rurrugr senator, silent to this point, stood to his full height, horns nearly scraping the roof, and began to pound on the table, screaming at the assembly.

“No!” he roared. “That’s not all they export! Oops, sorry 154

The Surgical Option about that.”

This last, far from being part of his rant, stemmed from the fact that, while pounding the table, he had inadvertently impacted the Aznid senator, instantly transforming her into a puddle of green goo and a very dented suit of black aluminum armor.

The assembly was forced to wait patiently while the cleaning crew took a timeout from scraping the roof in order to respectfully push the inanimate remains of the Aznid off the table and into a wastepaper basket with a paper towel.

While the killing of the senator for one race by that of another would normally have resulted in a bloody, centurieslong war, it was not the case in this instance. The Aznids, due to their small size, had seen accidents of this type (and the assorted bloody warfare that invariably followed) so many times that they had eventually grown monumentally fed up with the whole thing and had decided to make the best of a bad situation. Aznid ambassadors were now habitually shipped off in six-packs, and all came with a complementary roll of super-absorbent kitchen towels.

A slightly subdued Rurrugr senator continued.

“They don’t only export lawyers,” he said, “they also seem to have an inexhaustible supply of suicidal crackpots. And, since their systems are nearest to us than any other race, we seem to be bearing the brunt!”

All present settled in for yet another tale of woe. They knew the drill, having been in countless meetings just like this one.

“The first group of human missionaries to land on our planet were the vegetarians. They claimed that enlightenment could only be achieved through the complete renouncement of animal meat. They talked about how animals have feelings, too, explained that even livestock has rights. Oh, and they also spoke passionately about cholesterol.”

“Ah, yes,” said the Chairman, “our first contact with humanity was similar. They told us not to eat animals. Sadly, a translator mix-up made us think that they were offering 155

Gustavo Bondoni themselves in place of the animals, so we had one of history’s great barbecues. We thought everyone was happy. Until we got the complaint letter, of course.”

He shrugged, an impressive gesture on someone with so many tentacles.

“But,” continued the Rurrugr “can you even imagine the stupidity of trying it on us? I mean, we’ve been eating meat since the dawn of time, and our bodies are adapted to hunting, skinning, and cutting flesh. Not only that, but the hunt has always traditionally been a rite of passage and a determinant factor in assigning social status.”

He paused for a long time, shaking his horned head.

“I still don’t understand how they managed to succeed,” he said finally, “but they did. We soon discovered that our bodies couldn’t digest vegetation, and half our species was dead inside a fortnight. By the time we came to our senses and were gearing up to wipe them out with what remained of our star fleet, all that remained of the Rurrugr was a weakened core, which turned out not to be strong enough to resist the preaching of the second group of missionaries.”

“More vegetarians?”

“Pacifist vegetarians!”

Everyone sat (or reclined or hovered) in absolute silence, hanging on every word as the senator continued.

“As we speak,” he said, “there are only fourteen Rurrugr left alive anywhere in the galaxy. Insufficient for our procreation ceremonies. We are doomed to extinction.”

A very solemn silence followed this proclamation. In a galaxy this size, of course, races are becoming extinct all the time, but it is still considered bad form in polite society to inquire about the size, mineral resources, and location of soonto-be-vacant planets in situations such as this one.

“There being no hope for our race, I have come to make one plea in their memory. I move for this committee to declare humans vermin and wipe them from existence.”

“You would need a unanimous decision for this,” said the Chairman, “it’s not to be undertaken lightly.”

156

The Surgical Option “Even so, I call for a vote.”

There were twenty senators with voting privileges on this particular subcommittee. A short time elapsed while those not physically present were roped in and put up to speed on the situation, and each went into his sealed voting booth, for the secret proceedings.

The Chairman fumed while he waited. He was not allowed to vote, except as a tie-breaker.

In each booth were two buttons on a console, which relayed the vote to the central computer. This, in turn, displayed the results on a large scoreboard on the wall: green numbers for favorable votes, red indicating disagreement.

The number nineteen lit up in green almost immediately.

All conversation stopped in the chamber as the tension mounted.

Just one more vote was needed! But then, after a pause, a single red light blinked on. Motion failed.

The voting senators looked around accusingly as they emerged from the booths and saw the results, trying to identify the culprit. It became very quickly apparent that the Weevil senator was attempting to blend into the crowd with exaggerated innocence, while, at the same time, edging towards the nearest exit. Rapidly collared, he was herded towards the spot where the chairman was presiding over a small group of sentients.

“What in the name of the Galactic Brotherhood were you thinking?” thundered the former Cleengon. “We had our one chance of finally removing this cancer from our galaxy and you ruined it!”

“I’m sorry,” said the Weevil, body language exuding contrite sincerity, “I had no choice.”

“Why not?”

“Our race can’t afford to do away with the humans just yet. We’re all hooked on something called Coca-Cola, and only they have the formula. Not even all of them. A small group of them. A priesthood or something within what they call a 157

“company”. But we’re not too worried about it. We’ve got our best people studying their plant life and working to reproduce the formula. We should be OK in a couple of years, and then you can go right ahead and wipe them out.”

Despite the anger, heads and nodes and pseudopodia waved in agreement and commiseration. All of these races had had some sort of similar encounter with these thrice-damned humans. All could sympathize.

The Chairman, for his part, breathed a small sigh of relief. He was not completely averse to waiting a couple of years, despite these bimonthly meetings making his working life a living hell. His particular concern was that humanity seemed to be the only race capable of keeping the new office software up and running. This was somewhat understandable, since it was a human system, but how could it possibly be that nobody else in the galaxy could decipher the logic (or illogic, as a programmer friend had put it) of the latest version? He was confident that the bugs would, as promised, be fixed in the new Hyperspace Windows 2634 due out in a couple of years. And then humanity could be wiped out with minimum fuss.

He only hoped that it wouldn’t be too late.

158

Chinese Eye “If you can sneak up on him from behind with a heavy stick, you should be OK . . .”

- Sun Tzu The whole Oriental Philosophy thing had seemed like such a good idea at the time. A quick ticket to looking sophisticated and worldly. Girls would really dig it.

Fred laughed ruefully and shook his head. Again.

While unsure about girls in general, as he usually was, he was quite certain that the girl in the adjacent cell hadn’t dug it at all. Having come to terms with this, he was trying to look at the bright side of his current situation. Such as it was.

The bright side was most eloquently expressed by the school of thought that states: “learn from your mistakes. The larger the error, the more knowledge is available upon analysis.”

Viewed in this light, much wisdom had been acquired.

Upon reflection he had come to understand that careful planning and thought before any undertaking are worse than useless. Specifically, he had come to understand that the more carefully planned any undertaking is, the more things can go wrong with the plan.

He also decided that the little warning labels used on cigarette packs (Smoking has been found to cause cancer, lung disease, bad breath, weight gain, unwanted pregnancy, and growing national debt) should be included on any book referred even remotely to ancestral oriental teachings or philosophy. He resolved that a good label for the I Ching would be one that read: “Don’t open this book for any reason unless you want to be really miserable in the medium term”. He then discarded this one for: “You’d be better off smoking,” before finally settling on: “Do not combine this book with alcohol, or you’ll really hate yourself in the morning.”

Satisfied, he went back to staring through the bars, waiting for the paperwork to be completed so he could go home, 159

Gustavo Bondoni and just generally feeling sorry for himself. How had it gone so wrong? Looking back, he thought it probably started off on the wrong foot in the first place . . .

It was a dark and stormy night, of course.

He was alone, of course.

He had just had a big fight with Flavia — his girlfriend — of course.

He was extremely drunk, of course.

He was sitting in a darkened bedroom, of course.

He was repeatedly flipping a coin, of course.

All in all, it was the perfect situation for taking a hard look at your existance1, especially if you were sixteen years old and depressed about your love life, or, to be brutally precise, extremely recent lack thereof.

It hadn’t started out this way. Fred was a great believer in looking at things in an objective way. Being highly intelligent and more than just a little bit obsessive, he was absolutely sure that no problem could stand up to analysis by his highly trained mind. Most problems were trivial and could be solved right off the bat. If the problem were difficult, just thinking about it some more would put it to rest. Practical in the extreme, his fanatical belief in this single underlying truth overrode even the lack of any religious inclination. So, he had approached the problem the only way he could: logically.

He understood that things seemed bad because the hurt was too recent. What he had to do was to take a step back, forget about Flavia, and look at his life from a distance, as it were.

While flipping a coin repeatedly may seem like a surprising pastime when soul-searching, this is simply a question of it being too early in the story for the reader to have come to know Fred. In bizarre choice of activities, flipping a coin is much preferable to the other activities he had contemplated to aid his decision making process. A large number of goats are very thankful for this choice.

1

160

Chinese Eye He did this for a while, analyzing his life from all angles.

He thought about his friends. He thought about his hobbies. He thought about sports. He hated sports both in general terms and every sport specifically, so he thought about his hobbies for a while again. Actually, he thought about his main hobby, which was computers. Once he felt that he had a clear and accurate picture of his life, he calmly and logically reached for the whisky.

About halfway through the bottle, inspiration struck.

For those of you who actually have a social life, and have therefore not been exposed to any great quantity of oriental philosophy or the related art of prophecy, it has now become necessary to take an aside to explain the workings of a book known as I Ching.

Briefly, I Ching is a book of prophecy disguised as popular entertainment. It was perfected by a Chinese king with no TV. He had no TV because he was being held prisoner by another Chinese king, and also due to it not having been invented in 1141 AD. He could have saved himself and Fred a lot of trouble if he had just spent his time drinking Margaritas instead. This, sadly, was also impossible because nobody had yet thought to invent Mexico.

Much like astrology, I Ching works through applying an arbitrary collection of rules to interpret a pattern that forms randomly. It has two great advantages versus astrology.

The first is that while Astrology can predict millions of different futures based on the positions of specific stars, planets, alien spaceships, etc., I Ching has precisely sixty-four future possibilities for its practitioners, and they can be accessed by the simple method of flipping a coin six times. If it comes up heads, one draws a solid line, and tails a solid line broken in two. The result of each successive toss is drawn above the one before it creating a small tower of broken and solid lines. The other, more important, advantage is that the idea that the gravity of a star billions of miles away can possibly have any effect on your life 161

Gustavo Bondoni is very difficult to sell to anyone who has ever heard of Newton’s law of Gravitation. Fred had not only heard of Newton, but was a fervent admirer, being a bit of a nerd.

While compressing every possible future of every individual that came into contact with the process into sixtyfour outcomes is obviously practical on a mind-boggling scale, it becomes necessary to be somewhat vague, in order to avoid misunderstandings.

Imagine the following situation: “I Ching Hotline. My name is Wang Li, I will be your futurology satisfaction consultant today. Can I help you?”

“Yes. I was calling to complain about my reading from last week.”

“We aim to please. What is the source of your dissatisfaction?”

“My reading said that this week would be a good time to achieve greater wisdom by taking a ride in the country on a donkey with my mother.”

“Ah, yes. Future number thirty-four. A noble and elegant vision.”

“Yes, yes. Very noble, but shouldn’t the hailstorm and the pack of feral dogs that ate my mother have been mentioned?”

Pause.

More silence.

“Well?” Impatient now.

“I’m sorry sir, I don’t see the problem.”

“The problem is that by following the advice in your book, not only did I learn absolutely nothing, but also lost my mother. Not to mention that hailstones moving at high speed hurt.”

“Are you certain you learned nothing?”

“Unless you count the bit about the hailstones and the pain, nothing.”

“Ah, my friend, but that is wisdom. Another satisfied customer. Have a nice day.”

Wang Li hangs up.

162

Chinese Eye This is obviously an unacceptable way to run a respectable futurology racket, for various reasons. In the first place, it would have been extremely expensive to try to train telephone operators in 12th century China, due to the fact that a complete lack of anything remotely resembling a telephone would make people with this sort of knowledge extremely rare, and therefore costly to hire. Also the volume of complaints would have been considerable, had there been any telephones in 12th century China, which there weren’t, and had the original publishers of the book hired trained telephone operators to answer incoming calls, which they hadn’t.

These are the main motives that the prophesizing in I Ching is deliberately vague, which, as we rejoin our storyline, is causing Fred to do some considerable head scratching. The whisky isn’t helping much either. He has finished flipping his coin and is looking at his little tower of lines and the interpretation from the book, which he is trying to decipher.

Chi Chi — After Completion Fred became very excited when he saw this line.

Completion obviously referred to his breakup with Flavia. This was working. He read on eagerly.

—— ——- above K’an The Abysmal, Water —— ——— — below Li The Clinging, Flame ——He didn’t really know what to make of this interpretation.

The bit about the flame worried him, though. Fred was somewhat of an expert on flame, having discovered at an early age that he was a bit clumsy around candles and fondue burners. This led him to attain advanced expertise in fire extinguishers, first aid, and the Byzantine workings of the Fire Insurance industry.

163

Gustavo Bondoni By the age of ten, he was able to calculate a premium with an accuracy of three decimal places, an ability that was to be of inestimable aid to him when buying apartments.

Despite his foreboding about this line, he had to admit that it certainly applied to him, and this set his pulse racing anew. This was actually working!

Strangely enough, he completely ignored the line that said above “K’an The Abysmal, Water”. Oh, well. He would learn.

Reading on eagerly, he came to the Judgment. This is basically the prophetic part of the process.

The Judgment After Completion. Success in small matters.

Perseverance furthers.

At the beginning good fortune, At the end disorder.

Fred stared at this line for a while. He didn’t really like it that much. It didn’t say encouraging things like “you will be covered in glory” or “the woman of your dreams is just around the corner”. It also didn’t address his favorite topic, which was hamburgers. He supposed that this was understandable, as he was almost sure that McDonald’s had not yet established itself in China in the twelfth century. Even so, he felt a bit cheated.

How hard could it have been for a man who claimed to have the gift of prophecy to have predicted the advent of ground beef, and included a truly significant line, such as “you will eat the best bacon cheeseburger of your life this week”. Evidently, Chinese sages weren’t as good as their marketing suggested. Shaking his head, he read on. The next section was the Image.

The Image Water over fire: the image of the condition In After Completion.

Thus the superior man Takes thought of misfortune 164

Chinese Eye And arms himself against it in advance.

Ah! Much better! All the worry caused by the mention of “disorder” in the Judgment vanished, since this line removed all possibility of harm. Fred knew he was a superior man. This was obvious every day at school. He was simply the best student in any subject that required even the slightest bit of natural intelligence. These lines were made for him. He would have thought that they were for him alone, had it not been for the lack of hamburgers. Even a hot dog or a side order of onion rings would have been welcome.

Well, no matter. This was the prophecy for the next week of his life. He was already convinced that it was accurate, so he began planning. Careful, rational planning would be the key to success. He carefully and thoughtfully decided not to read the Lines, the third part of the prophecy. The Lines are basically an in-depth look at what each line of the diagram means in its current position. Fred rationalized that looking into each line would be useless, since he was just looking for a general idea of what was coming. He was smart enough to plan the details himself. There could be no harm in ignoring the Lines.

Fred, being a superior man, immediately understood what the prophecy was telling him. It clearly meant that, having completed a stage in his life, he had to move on. The only way to move on would be to take control of his destiny. Only he had the power to shape his future.

Being a superior man also allowed him to lead lesser beings. He decided to call Bondo, his best friend, and invite him on his quest. It would be a great honor to be allowed to witness the logical resolution of all problems. Everyone wanted to better themselves, and Bondo was no exception.

As Fred saw it, Bondo was the perfect choice to be subjected to his leadership, this due to his being extremely shallow and very unlikely to attempt to solve a problem through logic or even to show even the smallest inclination to think things through prior to doing something stupid. From Fred’s point of view, the most impressive thing about Bondo’s personality was his ability to make absolutely the worst possible choice in 165

Gustavo Bondoni almost any situation. And this without conscious thought. His talent was admirable.

Yes, Fred thought, Bondo would be the ideal person to appreciate intelligence at work. Even if he couldn’t identify what was happening, at least he would learn that there were powers of the mind beyond his comprehension.

Fred dialed his number.

The phone rang and rang. Finally, Bondo answered.

“Yes, hello?” He sounded as if he had just woken up.

“Hi Bondo,” said Fred.

“Fred, I sincerely hope we’ve been invaded by Martians who have decided to kill us all tomorrow, and you’ve called to say goodbye, because, otherwise, I will take enormous pleasure in killing you myself the next time I see you.”

There was a pause.

“That wasn’t very nice,” said Fred, eventually.

“It’s two o’clock in the morning. You don’t deserve nice.

You’re lucky I’m too far asleep for real sarcasm.”

“Just listen a second, this is important.”

“OK,” said Bondo, “I’m listening.”

“Well, it’s a bit of a long story. I broke up with Flavia and — “ “This,” interrupted Bondo, “is evidently some definition of the word ‘important’ that I was previously unaware of. Thank you for enlightening me.” Bondo hung up.

Fred called him again.

“How drunk are you, exactly?” asked Bondo when he picked up the phone.

“That doesn’t matter right now. I’ve found the solution to all our problems.”

“What problems?”

“Well, to start with, I broke up with Flavia and — “ “That’s not only not my problem, it isn’t even a problem for you. Even you can do better than Flavia,” said Bondo. “You should be out celebrating instead of disturbing innocent people’s rest.”

“Look, what I mean is that today is an important day. A 166

Chinese Eye new beginning. Today, we can seize control of our lives. Our actions tonight will redefine what we are forever.”

“And I assume that doing this all tomorrow just wouldn’t be the same?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course,” replied Bondo. Fred, however, was too drunk to notice the lack of enthusiasm shown by his audience.

In fact, he was on a roll.

“So we need to get moving.”

“Why?” “To take control of our destiny,” said Fred, starting to lose patience, “haven’t you been listening to anything I said?”

“Yes, yes, whatever. Where, exactly do we need to go to do this?”

Ouch. Fred hadn’t quite thought this bit through. He had assumed Bondo would agree quickly, and then give him ten minutes to think of something. More than enough for a superior man. One thing Fred didn’t like to do was to make things up as he went along.

“Uh, to a bar?”

“A bar?” Asked Bondo.

“Yes,” said Fred confidently, “A bar.” There was a long pause.

“Fred?”

“Yes, Bondo.”

“Go to sleep. Call me tomorrow so I can laugh at your hangover. Do not call me again until after the sun has been up for at least five hours.”

“But — “ Bondo hung up.

“Crap,” said Fred to himself.

Fifteen minutes later, he was on the move. The whole bit with Bondo had been a setback, but not a terminal one, as the alcohol in his blood had explained patiently. You can do this 167

Gustavo Bondoni alone. Carpe Diem! The strength of this argument had gotten him out of his apartment, through the hallway, and into the elevator.

Fred lived on the eighteenth floor, so the ride down should have been long enough to insure that he would come back to his senses by the time he reached the ground, and would, as a result of this, simply have turned around and gone back up.

Unfortunately, Fred was one of those people who are difficult to put in motion. This might not seem relevant to the current situation unless one takes into consideration that the corollary of this characteristic is that once they get in motion they have a terrible tendency to stay in motion.

He stayed in motion through the elevator door. He stayed in motion through the foyer. He stayed in motion as he walked out the door. He stayed in motion until he was halfway across the street and noticed the rain he had completely forgotten about until that very moment.

The main thing he noticed about it was that there was a lot of it.

His motion accelerated noticeably before finally coming to a halt under an awning. Shivering, he contemplated the wisdom of going on without an umbrella. Being an accomplished student of human nature wasn’t necessary to understand that if he went back inside to get one he wouldn’t be coming out again.

“Perseverance furthers,” the Judgment had stated. His course was clear. And, at least, this explained the bit about “water above”, which he suddenly remembered.

Huddled against the rain, he picked his way through the puddles on his way to the bus stop.

And froze when he saw her, standing in the downpour without an umbrella. This immediately caused a great first impression, involved as he was in what even his slowly clearing mind was able to identify as a quixotic undertaking. Standing at a bus stop in the rain at two in the morning obviously made her a kindred spirit, there being absolutely no other explanation for this sort of behavior. It had, after all, been raining in a noticeable and noisy way for the past few hours, so lack of an umbrella could mean one of two things: total preoccupation with other, 168

Chinese Eye more important matters, or just sheer stupidity. Either was a quality that Fred could, at the moment, identify with in a deep and personal way.

At least this is what he told himself. A much deeper, usually suppressed part of his being noticed that, under the soggy, shoulder length, straw-colored hair plastered over her face, the face was pleasingly proportioned. Likewise the soaked clothing hid a thin, delicate frame. Not a classical or aggressive beauty, but certainly a very pretty girl of about his own age.

Unbeknownst to, or at least unadmitted to by Fred, it was this hidden realization that dictated his next actions. He stood where he had stopped, about a yard and a half in the road, in front of the curb on which she was standing, and prepared to speak to her.

This course of action turned out to be unprofitable in the extreme for all involved, which in this case included Fred, the girl about to be sucked into his life, and the bus driver, who, citing low visibility and lack of adherence due to the rain, as well as the fact that he was absolutely not expecting to find an idiot standing in the middle of the road, was unable to bring the bus to a complete stop and bumped him softly, with just enough force to drop him ass-first into the rather large puddle immediately to his right.

The girl and driver immediately ran over to check on his welfare. On seeing that he was all right, the driver climbed into his bus and drove off, leaving the now drenched girl to deal with the completely disoriented Fred.

“Let me take you to my car. I’ll get you home. Where do you live?” she asked.

“Your car? You’re not supposed to have a car,” Fred explained patiently. “We’re kindred spirits walking in the rain.”

Fred watched her as she reconsidered offering assistance.

He could imagine her thinking that he was either drunk, crazy, or had suffered a blow to the head in the impact after all. She evidently wanted nothing whatsoever to do with any of these scenarios. He tried to atone for this by standing up and walking steadily alongside her until they finally came to a parked car.

169

Gustavo Bondoni “I’m Fred,” he offered.

“Caroline. And this is my car, which, it seems, I’m not supposed to have.”

Fred looked at the car, about which his superior intellect immediately began to give him information. Yes, it was a car.

It was also missing the driver’s side window, pieces of which seemed to be strewn all over the middle of the street.

The fact that she had a car still nagged at him. It didn’t fit with his image of her as a heroically defiant and highly symbolic individual. He tried to explain this to her, but, in an ironic turn of events the alcohol in his blood, which made him unable to finish the sentence, actually saved him from making an even bigger fool of himself.

Finding himself unable to speak, he decided to pick up the pieces of glass in the street, presumably for the purpose of reconstructing the window, although it is just possible that he wanted to melt the glass down and create hideous freeform sculpture from it. At this point, the alcohol in his bloodstream had reached sufficient vital organs to make any speculation on his motives an exercise in futility. In any event, the only tangible effect of his actions was that, for the second time that night, only the reflexes of an innocent bystander driving by saved him from becoming the world’s drunkest hood ornament.

As the driver sped off into the night, Caroline sighed to herself and made a decision. She knew it was a mistake even before opening her mouth, but justified it by thinking to herself that she wouldn’t sleep at all that night if she didn’t make sure that this idiot could make it back to his house alive. And he evidently wasn’t going to make it without considerable assistance.

“Let’s get inside. There’s a bar across the street. Come on.”

Fred looked at her. Evidently this was his kindred spirit, despite having a car.

“Just what I was about to suggest,” he said. “I could definitely use a drink to clear my head.”

Caroline rolled her eyes.

170

Chinese Eye Fred had never been any good at bars. This was especially true of the kind of bar where loud music played and you were expected to enter the bar alone and leave in the company of a member of the opposite sex. Or fail to do so while sacrificing your dignity.

Fred, at least, had the second option down pat.

The cigarette smoke that came out the door as they entered was a clear indication that this was precisely the type of bar they were entering. Caroline deposited Fred at a table and went off to get them something to drink. Therapeutic caffeine for Fred, and therapeutic vodka for her.

Thus abandoned, Fred was free to observe the goingson at other tables. To his right, an expensively attired guy at a table had purchased two very expensive bottles of champagne.

Judging by the face of the pretty girl sitting in front of him, he seemed to have consumed most of them himself. He would be leaving alone, thought Fred.

To his left, the bar glistened with the spills of the previous hours. A pair of cheap beers stood in one of the larger puddles.

They were being ignored by the couple necking and groping each other on the nearest barstools. By the energy the guy was expending, Fred could tell that they had met that night. By hers, he could infer that they would be leaving together.

Lucky bastard, thought Fred, I hope he catches something contagious. Which, though seemingly uncharitable in the extreme, is what most men think in these situations. It is well known that men are envious creatures even at the best of times.

Women, of course, are worse.

Nevertheless, Fred was heartened at the thought that his luck just might be changing. After all, here he was in a pickup bar with a pretty girl, who, despite having an unexpected car, hadn’t yet told him to leave or tried to mace him, which was a welcome change from the more usual practices. Yes! Tonight was definitely the night in which a superior man could finally break out of the rut of always leaving these bars alone.

At the very least, he would walk her back to the car, thereby justifying the existence of that execrable device.

171

Gustavo Bondoni But he knew that tonight he should not settle for that.

This was, after all, the first night of the rest of his life. He would show her what kind of person he truly was. A superior man!

And with this, convince her to see him again afterwards. This would be a great night. Suddenly, he was certain that he would not leave this bar alone!

And he was right. A short time later, Caroline returned to the table, and Fred immediately got his wish. He accompanied Caroline back to the car.

Unfortunately, four uniformed policemen also insisted on accompanying them back to the car as well, rudely ignoring Fred’s explanations that the car, despite being inconvenient in a philosophical sense was not, in fact, illegal.

This, agreed the policemen, was absolutely true. Sadly, however, the car was stolen, which was, in fact, illegal.

Fred explained that this was not an issue, as the car was more a symbol than an actual object, and therefore should be exempt from the minutiae of normal law enforcement.

The policemen patiently went on to explain that while the previous argument was very convincing, it was basically a matter of perspective. A point of view they didn’t share. Furthermore, the large quantities of drugs and falsified clothing in the trunk were also signs that their opinion just might be justified.

Then they hit him over the head with a Billy club to get him to shut up.

Over the course of the following few hours, Fred came to understand two things. The first was that getting sober after large quantities of whisky and being clubbed over the head was not fun at all.

The second was that the policemen didn’t actually seem very convinced that he had anything to do with the crimes after all. It transpired that they had been chasing Caroline all night and suspected that he was just an innocent bystander. What’s more, they felt that without his intervention slowing her down, Caroline would probably have slipped out of their net.

This didn’t stop them from going through with full police procedure, including dunking his head in the toilet while asking 172

Chinese Eye him questions and hitting him with assorted lengths of garden hose, but it seemed to Fred that they did so half-heartedly. More out of a sense of duty and a desire to give him his money’s worth than any true hope of getting useful information out of him.

Eventually, they got bored and stuck him in a cell.

Having had plenty of time to review his mistakes, Fred found that he was finally making progress.

He was now unhappy with the present instead of the past.

Family, he thought, is always embarrassing. Mothers in particular. Under other circumstances he would have preferred for his mother to be very far away. Unfortunately, though, his lawyer, another of his friends, had been unable to get him out of jail as yet, so he guessed he would have to take being embarrassed by his mother as well as he could. He just wished she didn’t insist on telling everyone in the police station about how she used to change his diapers.

After all, it was his fault for hiring a guy who had taken fifteen years to become a lawyer and the past three to pass his bar exam.

His mother, at least, failed to disappoint. After harassing everyone from the cleaning lady to the police commissioner, including various repetitions of diaper-changing tales, she finally managed to spring him without the need for bail. The price of this aid was quite high, including dinner at her house three times a week. The most painful bit, though, was the look in her eyes that said, smugly, ‘You’re still my son and you need me. Even though you think you’ve grown up.’ Basically, this was the look on her face when they opened his cell door.

The look on Caroline’s face in the adjacent holding cell was one of contempt.

“Make sure your mommy holds your hand the next time you cross the street. God knows you need it!” she called out after him.

Fred barely heard her. He had something he wanted to 173

Gustavo Bondoni do right now.

There was a book he needed to burn.

His final mistake was one committed out of pure, stupid curiosity.

On arriving home, he decided to read the final part of the I Ching prophecy: the Lines. This robbed him of the taste for revenge, however symbolic, on the shady characters in the Oriental Philosophy racket.

He knew that he could not, in good conscience, burn the book. But, at least, he got a good laugh out of the whole thing.

At too high a price? Possibly, unless one considers the ancillary benefit: he never went near the I Ching again.

The Lines Nine at the beginning means: He brakes his wheels.

He gets his tail in the water.

No blame.

Six in the second place means: The woman loses the curtain of her carriage.

Do not run after it; On the seventh day you will get it.

Nine in the third place means: The Illustrious Ancestor Disciplines the Devil’s Country.

After three years he conquers it.

Inferior people must not be employed.

Six in the fourth place means: The finest clothes turn to rags.

Be careful all day long.

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Nine in the fifth place means: The neighbor in the east who slaughters an ox Does not attain as much real happiness As the neighbor in the west With his small offering.

Six at the top means: He gets his head in the water. Danger.

175

Darkness Ends Tita Livia Siriana basked in the silence. Her audience, composed of the best and brightest leaders of the great families of both inner and outer Empires, hung on her every word. She’d barely begun to speak, but the little that had leaked of her work, the little she’d allowed to leak, was enough to have them on the edge of their seats. By speaking softly, she guaranteed that only those seated nearest the stage would hear her words, but then again, those seated nearest were the truly important men and women. The rest could get a transcript.

“I am honored to be here, among the leaders of the Empire, honored that you have chosen to travel all the way to Palmyra to hear my presentation,” she said. “I only hope that the fruits of my research will meet your expectations.”

Once again, Tita cursed her father for his untimely death. He hadn’t lived long enough to see the triumph of his family. While his precious sons threw away their advantages, one becoming an administrator in the Australis Province and the other a merchant, his daughter, unheeded, unaided and ignored, had not only become Governess of one of the Inner Provinces but was also the Empire’s foremost physicist. Her father, of course, had died before her moment of triumph, broken by his sons’ failures.

Taking a final, deep breath and looking one last time over the arched skyscrapers of Palmyra Nova off to the east, she launched into her speech. “As you are all aware, the greatness of Rome has spread to all corners of the globe. Our invincible armies sit in a state of boredom as they become less and less relevant.

The great expansion that began more than two thousand years ago when this amphitheater was new seems to have ended.”

The audience stirred. They hadn’t come all this way to listen to a political speech.

Tita held up a hand. “I am here to tell you that in a few more months, the great expansion will begin again. New worlds will open for our conquest. And this time, we won’t have to 176

Darkness Ends fiddle around with rockets and wormholes.”

She smiled. Needling the space agency was always an enjoyable pastime. All those well-funded rocket scientists from the Han Provinces, with their promises of glory and their endless string of disasters, would become obsolete overnight if she succeeded.

And she would. All they needed was a little help.

Bassam al Aama was in his element. Nothing in the world was quite as satisfying to him as squatting over a shallow trench with a brush in his hand and the secrets of an ancient civilization coming to light as he carefully pushed away layers of dirt. Perfection would have required a hot sun beating on his hat, but the powers that were had decided to erect a tent. He wasn’t happy with the fact that they’d blithely hammered four poles into the ground around a dig, but the main thing bugging him was that he wasn’t working in the open. Archaeology was supposed to be hot and sweaty.

But even that couldn’t dampen his enthusiasm. Who could possibly have imagined that after nearly two hundred years of study, there would be a new discovery here in Palmyra?

The Syrian government had immediately sent its best team of archaeologists into the area, had invited teams from France and Italy, and had gotten to work. They were delighted to have the old Roman ruins back in the spotlight. After all, this was Syria’s most important tourist attraction.

“Alia, please come over here,” he called.

His assistant, bent over another section of the grid a couple of meters away straightened, stretched to get the stiffness out of her back and walked over. “Have you found something?”

Her eyes flashed with excitement.

“I think so. But I’d like your opinion.” He moved aside to allow her to climb into the trench beside him before pointing toward a flat grey area about ten centimeters square, shining in the reflected sunlight.

177

Gustavo Bondoni “Ceramic?” Alia said.

“It seems to be, but I’ve never seen Roman glazing that looked like that.”

Alia nodded. “Much too shiny, almost translucent.” She knew as well as he did that while glazing had been known to survive intact, the shine they were seeing was extremely unusual.

She knelt beside him, and they got back to work.

“Why do we need a linguist?” Aulus Fabius, Liva’s assistant, seemed puzzled as he viewed the hologram showing their meetings for that day.

Livia shrugged. “Do you truly believe that these savages speak Latin? We’ll need someone who can communicate with them. From what we’ve seen, the ones in Palmyra don’t even use the semi-civilized alphabet that the rest of their world uses.”

She shuddered. “It isn’t real writing with letters – they use pictograms to represent words. Incredibly inefficient.”

“How far can we trust him? If he’s the one doing the communicating, then he’ll have to know exactly what we need the savages to do in order to open the gateway. Do they even have the technology to do what we need them to do?”

“A small electric current through the key? Of course they do. You’re being silly and underestimating them. Some of the tribes even have nuclear weapons. They might not have had the benefit of Roman leadership, but even the densest people would have developed electricity given more than a thousand years!

Anyhow, we can’t just tell them what we’re doing. We need to have someone who understands their language find out more about their culture before we send our message.” Taking months to observe the world they were trying to enter before being able to communicate was frustrating, but necessary. The only way the barbarians would be able to stop them is if they refused to activate the key.

He shook his head. “I know. It’s just that I don’t want to involve anyone else. What if word gets out that we need outside 178

Darkness Ends help to open the gateway? Where will we be then? Dishonored and disinherited, that’s where.”

Livia knew that if it hadn’t been for his family connections, A. Fabius would never have been allowed to work on this project. But the Caesar’s nephews, even the illegitimate ones, were due a certain respect. Still, it was hard for her to believe that anyone participating in one of the world’s greatest scientific endeavors could be thinking such inane thoughts. It was almost insulting. “If we succeed, it doesn’t matter. And if we fail, the linguist will share our disgrace. I don’t think there’s much risk of his mouth opening inconveniently.” Besides, she thought, this man’s loyalty is to my family, and where my fortunes run, so do his. But she kept silent on this point – it was never intelligent to let well-connected assistants have too much information.

A chime announced the linguist’s arrival.

Bassam had refused to consider the idea. The single most unusual find ever made in the Palmyra dig would not be turned over to the western archaeologists unless it was done over his dead body. He didn’t care about the tourist value, didn’t mind the consequences. His team would be the first to study it.

The Minister of Tourism had been angry with the decision, but the Minister of Culture had supported him: a Syrian artifact found by a Syrian team in Syria was to be analyzed locally.

If there was anything the foreign teams needed to know, they would be informed. And the defense minister, the one with the true power, had not disagreed – which was better than nothing.

For now, the artifact would remain in the dark and dusty halls of the Palmyra museum, less than a mile from where it had been unearthed.

This meant that they had it to themselves.

They’d x-rayed it, weighed it, measured it, scraped it (yet another reason not to let it fall into the hands of overly protective foreigners) and generally studied everything about it over the past few weeks before giving their report to the Minister of 179

Gustavo Bondoni Culture.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Bassam admitted.

In his experience, it was better to get this kind of thing out of the way early, in order to focus on what he believed was important.

In this case, the central mystery surrounding the artifact.

Excitement shone in the minister’s gaze. “Do you mean it’s a significant find? Something that might lead to new theories? Or a confirmation of old ones, or whatever it is that you do?” The minister, like most of his peers, was a military man who had very little actual knowledge of archaeology. The only importance a significant find held in his eyes was as a tool to increase his influence at the expense of other ministers.

“Not exactly. What I’m trying to tell you is that we don’t recognize the material. It isn’t anything we’ve encountered before in any ancient civilization. If it hadn’t been buried in a strata that dates it at nearly two thousand years old, I’d say it was some kind of high-tech ceramic.”

His superior frowned. “High tech in what way? Like it was Greek instead of Roman?”

Bassam ignored the absolute ignorance involved in the question itself and answered what his boss was aiming at. “No. Like it was a ceramic from the heat shield of a space vehicle.”

“Have you analyzed it?”

“I’m an archaeologist. I don’t know anything about modern materials.”

“All right. I’ll send someone over to help. You’d better be right, because I’m going to have to call in a favor to get your expert.” The minister dismissed Bassam with a wave.

“I find it enormously hard to believe that their world functions as well as it does.” Gaius Severus remarked, shaking his head. “While it’s obvious that their social structure is far from perfect and their decentralized governments are completely inefficient, I still admire the fact that they seem to be able to function as a planet with so many languages. Some of them 180

Darkness Ends aren’t even based on Latin!”

“Their world doesn’t work all that well. At a glance I’d say they’re running three hundred years behind us technologywise.” Tita Livia was bored with the conversation. Since most of the team had had no real work to do while Gaius Severus worked on deciphering the language of the Syrians in the parallel reality, they’d taken to using the gateway as a giant looking-glass into the lives of people whose fate, except for a lucky break over fifteen hundred years ago, could have been their own. Imagine growing up in such a chaotic world… a world in which the rationalizing influence of the Empire simply wasn’t present.

“But they should be a thousand years behind – at least!

From what I’ve gathered of their history, they actually went backwards, both socially and technologically, for a millennium after Rome was defeated.”

The words ‘Rome was defeated’ seemed science fictional even after months of looking through the portal. Such a thing had been inconceivable even when the Empire consisted of a few hills in central Italy, and had grown more and more impossible as time went on. Tita sighed. “How much longer until we can communicate through the gateway?”

“I’ve got the language nearly down pat. I need to check a couple of cultural references but by next week we should be able to transmit something that is not only intelligible to the other side, but also culturally relevant. I think we’ll convince them.”

“For all our sakes, I hope you’re right.”

Alia fumed. She couldn’t believe that she’d been summarily expelled from the meeting just because she was a woman. No matter what strides Syrian women had made towards emancipation – and she didn’t pretend not to be grateful, since most of the Arab world was much worse – there were still moments when the women were dismissed as fluff. The most galling part of it was that though she respected Bassam’s experience, neither of them had any doubt as to which of the 181

Gustavo Bondoni two would eventually become the archaeologist remembered by posterity. She’d already put forth a couple of theories more significant than any he’d ever thought of by himself, explaining the social interaction between lower-class Palmyrans and their Roman and local masters. Theories that, unlike the currently accepted thinking, matched all the evidence and fit with Roman practices in other parts of the Middle East.

Worse yet, the three government ministers locked in with him were probably illiterate. All they knew how to do was drive tanks. Judging by their record in the wars with Israel, they weren’t very good at that, either.

Making it worse was the so-called ‘materials expert’.

He’d taken one look at the artifact and proclaimed it ‘just pottery’, but had hung around ever since. He presumably had nothing better to do.

The cleric was the final insult. Even the most moderate among their number felt that women’s rights were an aberration.

Her khaki field pants would have offended him greatly.

But there was nothing she could do about it. Despite their limitations, all four of the men outranked her. She stormed through the dusty halls back into her office and dropped hard onto her swivel chair. A single touch on her computer’s mouse brought the screen back to life. An image appeared on the screen, the flowing Arabic lettering perfect, as if drawn by Allah himself.

She glared at it. It was this message, which had appeared unexpectedly on the surface of the artifact they’d found, that had led to the emergency meeting being convened and to her offhand dismissal.

Syrian Brothers, chosen of the prophet Muhammad, we greet you from the world beyond, the Paradise of your forefathers.

It is with great alarm that we have observed the decline of Allah’s faithful at the hand of the infidel. With great sadness, we note the way the decadence has crept into even the greatest Muslim societies. We cannot condone what you’ve done to 182

Darkness Ends yourselves since the days in which all eyes turned to the Muslim world for their science and their healing. For it must be said that you have brought it down upon yourselves. And yet we cannot bear to watch our descendants become nothing but an irritant, a minor problem, on the world stage. Our destiny is to bring the word of the Prophet to all, tirelessly converting the infidel to the love of Allah. For this reason, we have been allowed to give you one gift. The block you have found in Palmyra is a gateway, a gateway to Paradise.

But there is a condition. You must prove your worthiness to possess such a gift. You must activate the gateway before the next full moon. If you do so, an army will come to you. An army the likes of which the world has never known. An army that will bring back all the glory of the past.

From Palmyra, the entire world shall be conquered and once more, you will be allowed to bask in the radiance of true godly light. Life, for you, shall be as it was always meant to be.

All you must do to signal your desire to accept our gift is to pass a small electric current of any type through the message box. We shall understand.

Alia shook her head. The message made no sense.

She was a good Muslim, if not too devout and if not particularly enamored of the way Arab society treated women, but she still didn’t get it. The message was obviously some kind of joke. An elaborate one, to be certain, but a joke. Which made it no surprise that the men had taken it perfectly seriously.

And yet there was something vaguely sinister about it.

Why would Allah, or the spirits of his followers in Paradise, need for the Syrian people to pass an electric current through the artifact? It was ridiculous. If the message were even remotely genuine, wouldn’t it be sufficient to declare their willingness in a loud voice? Wouldn’t the spirits in paradise be able to hear that as well?

She stormed back to the meeting room and burst through the door. “Don’t do it,” she shouted at the men, who jumped away from their coffee. The cleric spilled a large slosh down the 183

Gustavo Bondoni front of his tunic.

Bassam recovered first. The look he gave her was icy.

“Alia, what is the meaning of this?”

She refused to back down. “The artifact. There’s something wrong with it. I think it’s a trap. Maybe it’s a bomb.”

One of the men, the one who’d been introduced to her simply as the Defense Minister laughed. “It’s not a bomb. I would have recognized it immediately if it were such.” He turned to Bassam, and smiled, a condescending, paternal gesture.

“Don’t be too hard on her, Bassam. She’s young.” Then his eyes twinkled. “And perhaps frightened of having to abandon her western clothing. Don’t worry dear, once the true faith is restored you will find peace.”

“It isn’t that! I think something terrible will happen if you do what the message asks. Think a minute–” “Alia, that’s enough. Please leave us. We have important matters to discuss and can’t spend any more time with your fantasies.” Bassam’s expression brooked no argument and Alia found herself moving towards the door in spite of herself. In spite of the fact that she knew she was right.

Outside once again, she took a deep breath. And what if she was wrong? What if they were right? What if the army came through the portal on command and the world was allowed to fall into strict Islamic law? Could she survive in some sultan’s harem?

She knew she wouldn’t sleep that night.

Alia couldn’t help noticing that the government, despite its support, was not running the show. They’d shrewdly let the church take center stage. No official communiqué had been made, no invitation to attend. It was obvious that they didn’t want to look like idiots if things went wrong. Or even worse, if nothing happened and everyone just stood in the desert trying to avoid each other’s embarrassed looks.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of people in attendance, 184

Darkness Ends bused in from the surrounding villages, and even from Damascus, a long, hot journey away. The imam in charge was an old-school type who glared at the tourists, especially the women in their shorts and t-shirts. He ignored Alia, though. Her relatively conservative jeans and the hat she habitually wore out in the sun made her the least objectionable female in the crowd who wasn’t wearing traditional Muslim dress.

Flashes, visible even in the midday glare, popped continuously as the imam placed his holy implements on a specially prepared stone, the flattened yellow base of what had once been a Roman column. The greatest ceremony and prayer were reserved for the rectangular artifact but Alia was amused to see that the battery – a twelve-volt automobile unit held inside a jeweled green box – and even the cables received similar treatment.

The priest spewed a litany of acid predictions about the ascendancy of Islam and the subjugation of the infidel in every corner of the world while the oblivious tourists smiled and took pictures of him. Finally, the blessed message, the blessed battery, and the blessed cables were ready for action. With agonizing slowness, the imam placed each item in its assigned position and connected the cables to the battery, one to each pole.

Alia wished he would get on with it so that whatever was going to happen would just happen and she could get back to her dig. She’d been perfectly ready to miss this particular bit of mumbo-jumbo, but Bassam had insisted that after her outburst at the meeting, it would be much better for her if she went along with the official delegation.

With a final prayer, the cables touched the block.

Nothing much happened. A gust of wind stirred the sand a little further up the road, but that was it.

The imam raised his arms, already in damage-control mode. He wailed a prayer about the unworthiness that kept everyone from receiving Allah’s gift.

Alia snorted, and was about to turn away – she had better things to do with her life than watch the scene become a circus with each faction blaming the other – but something stopped her.

185

Gustavo Bondoni Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw movement.

In the middle of the road that led from the west, a massive vehicle appeared.

Alia was no expert on military hardware, but she could tell a tank when she saw one even though it looked like no tank she’d ever seen before. It had no tracks, no wheels of any sort and floated, in complete defiance of all natural laws, half a meter above the ground. But there was no mistaking the purpose of the pair of long tines that protruded from the turret.

Two figures protruded from the top of the tank as it moved soundlessly towards them. Behind it, an identical vehicle appeared, and another. Soon there was a column moving towards the crowd, each vehicle seemingly appearing out of thin air.

The tourists backed nervously away, but the imam moved forward, welcoming the wondrous intervention of God’s legions. He stood before the tank, arms upraised. The figures on the tank ignored him and kept moving forward. The imam held his ground until, with a sudden whooshing sound, he was sucked below the tank and simply disintegrated into red mist, leaving a gruesome splotch on the dry pavement when the vehicle passed.

Panic broke out. The tourists ran for their buses. Some of the soldiers opened fire with their ubiquitous AK-47s, but nothing happened. No retaliation, no effect, not even the pinging of bullets on metal. The people in the tank acted as if the shots weren’t there. The soldiers, seeing this, threw down their weapons and ran.

In moments, the only people remaining were Alia and a group of government ministers.

“Do you think it’s Allah’s aid, as promised?” one of them said.

Another snorted. “Were you watching when it ran over the imam? That man had been selected because he was the holiest, most dedicated person in all of Syria. Would Allah have done that to him?”

“Perhaps, even now, he is in Paradise.” But the rest of the group ignored him.

“Those markings on the tank. That isn’t Arabic,” Alia 186

Darkness Ends said. She surprised herself by speaking in this company, but no one seemed to mind. They were too frightened.

“What is it?”

“Latin. It says ‘Third Legion of Palmyra’.” Even Bassam looked surprised at that, even though he could read Latin as well as she could.

The vehicles came to a stop ten meters in front of them.

Someone began barking at them through some kind of speaker system. A woman’s voice. Unintelligible gibberish in a highspeed delivery. The words flowed over the uncomprehending group.

And all of a sudden Alia could understand what they were saying. It didn’t sound anything like the stiff, formal language she’d learned, and some of the words and grammar were unfamiliar, and she suspected that she was missing most of the technical terms, but it was Latin, and she could understand it. “… We will give you until noon to answer,” the woman finished.

A man’s voice broke in. “Maybe they don’t speak Latin.”

“Then they’d better learn. They’re going to need it.”

“Should we repeat the message?”

A sigh. “All right. People of the former nation-state of Syria. I am Tita Livia Syriana, governess of Palmyra in the true universe and commandant of the Palmyran Legions. We declare that your former nation-state is now part of the glorious Roman Empire. Rejoice at your fortune. Soon, if you behave, you will qualify for citizenship. Even if you don’t behave, the survivors will be treated humanely until you earn our trust. In order to make the transition as painless as possible, we will allow you to bring us a list of customs you wish to preserve. Otherwise, we will establish Roman law and customs. You have until noon to answer.”

Alia turned towards the confused group of men, mouth already open to tell them what the woman had said. To explain that, if they wanted to save any part of their way of life, they had to make a list immediately. Noon was less than half an hour away.

187

And then she thought about the customs that would likely be saved: the veiled women, the right of each man to four wives. She thought about the way the woman on the tank spoke.

Imperious. Commanding.

She said nothing, and the sun inched its way towards the top of the sky.

188

Evasion Trellez stood at a thick viewport, watching the shuttle approach. It came in fast, maneuvered effortlessly among the gantries and headed straight for the docking tubes. Only at the last possible moment did a flash of steam indicate retro braking, matching ship speed to that of the station's rotation, but the docking itself was nearly perfect.

A showoff, thought Trellez, but a showoff who knows what he's doing. Hmm. Not unheard of for a taxman to be a great pilot, but not all that common either.

He walked unhurriedly down the docking arm towards bay two, knowing he had a couple of minutes before the connection could be adequately sealed, double-checked and pressurized. And, from his experience with the revenue service, they would keep him waiting for a while even after they could safely debark. The bastards.

His first surprise, therefore, came as soon as the green light went on. He heard the ship's hatch open immediately, and had to hurry to get the inner lock open, pushing the button just before he heard the knock on the metal bulkhead.

The door unbolted automatically and opened inward, admitting a short, balding man whom Trellez immediately pigeonholed as the auditor. What else could he be, looking like that? All he needed to complete the stereotype was a pair of thick glasses.

"Hello," said Trellez, extending a hand. "My name is Ingvar Trellez. I own the Orbit 5 Salvage Company."

The accountant looked startled at this, peered back into the hatch he had just vacated, and finally seemed to remember himself.

"Inspector Howmet," he said, jerking a hand upward into Trellez's palm. "Jovian Revenue. I take it you received my authorization from our Europan office?" The inspector was sweating slightly, visibly ill at ease.

"Yes, we did. We've put together the documents you 189

Gustavo Bondoni requested. Are you feeling all right?"

"I'm just worried about my equipment. I couldn't bring my regular assistant because the cost of shipping three people from Jupiter and back would have been prohibitive, so I'm making do with a pool assistant with flight training. The ironic thing is that if she drops anything, it will end up costing us more money than we saved." He looked back towards the hatch again, and was rewarded with the sight of woman stepping through, carefully balancing two plastic boxes.

While he was a stereotypical accountant, she was anything but. She also wasn't the stereotypical assistant. She was big – not fat, but tall and muscular. She looked to Trellez like the result of taking a thin, well-muscled girl who wasn't too tall and expanded her fifteen percent in every direction. Towering and solid. Her blond hair was cut short, not quite reaching her shoulders.

"This is analyst Etruska," Howmet said.

Trellez shook her hand and the three of them walked towards the common area, with Trellez falling immediately to the role of tour guide.

"This station was originally launched in the year 2139, and known as the Kepler Resort – it used to be a hyper-luxury hotel for really rich people, back before the first war."

Howmet looked around, obviously taking in the stained walls, wheezing ventilation systems and small puddles of coolant on the floor. Trellez couldn't help but notice.

"It's been through more than a hundred years of very hard use since then," he chided. "First as a defense station for Earth Orbit, and then, after we managed to take the planet in 2188, it was towed out here as a strategic asteroid mining base.

Eventually, it became completely obsolete and I bought the station, and the right to use those asteroids around it which had been mined out. We've been running the salvage yard here for twelve years. So, if it's less luxurious than you'd expect, that's the reason."

By this time they had reached the common area, a broad expanse that had once served as the lobby and reception area, 190

Evasion although only an empty concrete bowl twenty feet across that had once been a fountain bore witness to this. The cavernous area was now ill-lit, drafty and almost completely empty, with only a group of maybe fifty people sitting at mismatched tables lost in the far left corner.

"The cafeteria," said Trellez, indicating the distant diners.

"But I'm sure you want to go to your rooms before dinner. This way, please." He led them down a passageway to his right.

"Ripper, I need to talk to you." Trellez spoke into a mike in his embedded wrist-screen. The reply came through the implanted receiver in the bones of his left ear, and was audible only to him.

"On the way, boss. I see you're near the common. I'll be there in five.

Trellez arrived first and paced while he waited. He knew that his head of security would understand that 'talk' meant face-to-face, with all electronics turned off. Trellez had already disconnected his own comm systems. If the station had an emergency, then Twilla would just have to deal with it without his help. The practice would probably be good for her.

"Boss," said Ripper panting slightly. He had probably run all the way around the station.

"We have a problem," said Trellez without preamble.

"What, the tax guy?"

"No, not the tax guy. I can deal with the tax guy. Our problem is the assistant analyst."

"Why?" "Because she isn't an assistant analyst, or any kind of analyst, for that matter. She doesn't look like one, she doesn't move like one," said Trellez. "As a matter of fact, she looks like an infantry commando. You know, one of those troopers they raise in two-gee stations who spend the rest of their lives in atmosphere combat suits."

"Big girl?"

191

Gustavo Bondoni "Oh, yeah. Doesn't talk much either."

Ripper thought about this for a while.

"It might not mean anything," he said finally.

"Maybe not by itself, but what started getting me suspicious was the way the tax guy acted. You know how they always act like they're God's representatives in the universe, and that they'll only be happy if they take your business and all your money?"

Ripper nodded.

"Well, this guy wasn't like that at all. He was nervous and polite, of all things."

"Hmm." "And the giveaway is that they came in from Europa.

Why didn't they send someone in from the branch in Mars orbit?

Do you know how much more expensive it is to fly in from Jupiter at this point in our orbit?"

"Not too subtle, was it?" said Ripper. "What do you think they know?"

"They don't know anything, or they wouldn’t have sent a single tax shuttle and one commando. The whole fleet would be sitting out there. But they definitely suspect something."

They walked in silence for some moments.

"Here's what I think," said Trellez, "I think that at some point, Howmet's going to say something about the fact that his assistant is too junior to sit in on some portion of the meeting or they'll make up some other excuse, leaving her free to roam around the station while I'm tied up with him. I'll need two things from you: the first is that you keep an eye on her when they do pull that particular stunt, and the second is that you try to find out everything you can about her background."

"No problem," said Ripper, rolling his eyes and popping off a sarcastic salute. Both men knew that all efforts would be made, but success was far from certain.

He walked away, and Trellez rushed towards his rooms.

He had to pick up the tax people for dinner in half an hour.

192

Evasion The meal passed in relative tranquility, the only salient point being Howmet's obvious relief when informed that they wouldn't be eating at the cafeteria but would, instead, be taking their meal in the executive dining room, a small chamber suitable for about twelve people which had been used for conferences in the hotel era and for officers afterwards. It as therefore unique in that it conserved the original, if somewhat faded, dĂŠcor.

During dinner, Howmet had asked the usual questions that one expected during a pre-audit meal. These were the same questions that would be asked ruthlessly and in detail the following day, but masked by a veneer of politeness and fauxgenuine interest. Questions such as, "so, how have sales been this year?" or "that's a pretty big cafeteria out there, how many employees are on station at the moment?"

Trellez responded to these queries in an absentminded way although he did notice that Howmet seemed surprised to learn that there were nearly fifteen hundred workers on station.

His atention had been on Etruska. She didn't say a single word during the course of dinner and, now that he thought about it, he hadn't yet heard her speak. She ate with single-minded efficiency while looking out the enormous viewport, through which could be seen the working docks of the scrapyard.

In the forefront, sparks flew as an old mining drone was stripped for useful metal, reusable wiring and plastic. The only things that would be discarded were spent radioactive rods, which would be jettisoned into space.

Further from the station, other vessels drifted inert in space, waiting for their turn to come.

Finally, off to the far right, a large mining base was being retrofitted with heavy reaction engines and long range fuel tanks, as well as having its interior refurbished. It would come out of the yard with a new purpose: a rich kid's pleasure yacht.

Trellez, however, didn't look at any of this – he'd seen it all countless times. He was watching Etruska, who seemed completely absorbed by the sight of the working salvage yard.

No. More than absorbed: obsessed, as if she was committing it to memory.

193

Gustavo Bondoni "Enjoying the view?" he said. She turned to look at him, completely unfazed. "Your first sight of a salvage complex?

We aren't the biggest, by far. You should see some of the yards they have in Earth orbit, refitting old satellites." He paused, and shrugged. "Well, after we win this little war, of course."

"I've seen shipyards before," she replied evenly, in a much higher voice than Trellez had expected. Not the coarse rumble of other commandos he'd met. "Although I have to admit that it's the first one I've seen in the asteroid belt. Isn't there a risk of impact?"

"Well, as you saw coming in, we're not too far inside the belt in the first place. We also have the advantage of using the big rock behind us in orbit as an umbrella, so we really only have to worry about half the sky. We have a hemispherical radar and missile perimeter to deflect any incoming object larger than a foot in diameter. To tell you the truth, we don't get to use our fancy defense system all that much. And if something really big comes along which we can't shoot down, we simply cut our tethers to the big rock and move everything out of the way.

We would have weeks of advance notice in a case like this, and we haven't had to cut our tethers once in the twelve years I've been here, so we're not too worried. Even in the belt, the solar system is pretty big, and most everything is moving in the same direction."

She nodded and left it at that.

Dessert was a silent affair, the mood prompting Trellez not to revive his tour guide act on the way back to their rooms.

About halfway there, a soft sound broke through their quiet meditation. A cry, easily identified as non-human – a cawing, screeching sound.

Howmet jumped. “What was that?"

Trellez smiled at him. "You won't believe me if I tell you," he said. This had the immediate effect of causing Howmet to forget his anxiety and look at him suspiciously.

"Try us." He said.

"I'll do something even better," he said, deciding to risk everything on one roll of the dice, "I'll show you."

194

Evasion A slightly sulphuric smell rose from the barely visible pool halfway across the enormous, dimly-lit chamber. The humidity was stifling and movement could be half seen, half sensed off in the shadows.

"What is this place?" asked Etruska. Trellez noted with satisfaction the small note of shock that had entered her voice.

So, she was human after all. Howmet seemed to have lost the ability to speak completely.

The chamber was nearly as big as the common, and would be imagined as larger in the darkness of its night cycle.

It had been turned into an enormous garden. Grass grew on the floor and trees were visible in the dim light. Unseen things buzzed and flitted in the foliage.

"It's my biosphere," said Trellez. Howmet looked as though he would be sick.

"A biosphere?" said Etruska, in better shape than her superior, but, to Trellez' delight, barely so. "But the cost in water alone would be prohibitive. Not to mention transporting nonessential things like trees to the asteroid belt, for Christ's sake. Why would you do something like this? And for what?

The privilege of having a permanently non-sterile environment on the station?"

Trellez suppressed a grin at this reaction. He loved space station children.

"It's a hobby," he shrugged, "some people take expensive surface vacations, others race space yachts. Some people collect animals and plants, like me."

"But most people keep them decently locked in containment tanks, not free to roam all over the station! Please let me out of here!" said Howmet.

Off in the distance something large sloshed in the pool, causing Trellez momentary apprehension, but his visitors were already halfway to the door and neither seemed to notice.

Once the inner door was open, they waited while the atmosphere was scrubbed so the outer door could open. This process, which had puzzled the officials on the way in, was now 195

Gustavo Bondoni met with nervous jockeying, both trying to edge nearer the door without seeming to do so.

When the door finally opened, Trellez felt that he should apologize. He had been counting on this reaction, but still knew that he had to at least try to make it look accidental, especially considering the possible consequences of annoying an audit team, let alone a special investigation, which is what he suspected he had on his hands.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Most people who visit the station are here specifically to view the biosphere. We have two species of deciduous trees that don't exist anywhere else except on Earth, so I'm used to visitors being more interested in the habitat than anything else on the station. It's gotten to the point where I've actually been forced to refuse some people permission to come on certain months, since so much focus on the visiting biologists tends to get in the way of our daily business which is to take old spaceships apart and sell the bits." The other, more pressing reason for canceling visits to the habitat was not something he felt it would be in his best interest to discuss with the inspectors. At least not yet. "So it just slipped my mind that most people prefer to avoid contact with organic material of any kind. I imagine you want to return to your chambers as soon as possible to take a shower. Please feel free to use as much water as necessary. The soap is antibacterial, of course."

Trellez escorted them, quickly, back to their rooms, reflecting that, though it was likely to cost a fortune in recycling, it might just have been worth it.

Early, too early, the next morning, Trellez felt his wrist vibrating. The main problem with a station that works in four continuous shifts is that it never sleeps. And does its damndest to avoid letting its commander get any rest either.

He lifted the wrist to eye level to check the message with sleepy irritation which vanished instantly when he saw that it was from Ripper. A request for a face-to-face meeting. Now. 196

Evasion So, ten minutes later, they met in the common.

"Your hair," Ripper observed from his seat at one of the cafeteria tables, "is a mess."

Trellez grunted a greeting, walked right past him and ordered a large Doublecaff before returning to the table.

"What do you have for me?" he asked.

"Testy this morning, aren't we?" Ripper had the unmistakable air of a valued employee currently in possession of important information and who had been up all night obtaining it.

His boss just glared at him.

"Okay, Okay." Ripper shuffled a couple of printouts he'd brought with him. "Etruska is a commando, or at least she was until eleven months ago. Saw action on Mars, end even on Earth when we tried to put down the last rebellion four years ago. She barely survived that one, and most of her regiment didn't. Her last assignment was picket line action in Mars orbit. Decorated once for valor in combat, and honorably discharged after taking some shrapnel in a knee, as well as vacuum exposure on the Mars Blockade. Favorably recommended to Revenue by her superiors."

"Did you have to go too far into debt with your contacts to get this?"

"Not really. Most of the info was actually in the official records. Only the details of her disability were private, but they weren't even classified."

"Hmm," said Trellez. "So what's your take?"

"It looks like the typical plant job. Her discharge is probably just from combat duty. I wouldn't be surprised if she were working for JupNav Intel. Actually, I'd bet money on it."

Trellez chewed this over for a second, finally saying, "I still don't think they know anything. I don't even know what it is that they think they know. I ran a little experiment on them last night, and either they're really good actors or else they're just fishing. This might be a completely routine security check. The Jovians have always been a little bit paranoid."

"An expensive trip, just for paranoia? Doesn't sound like 197

Gustavo Bondoni Revenue to me. And also, I'd appreciate it if you'd give me a heads up before your next experiment. I nearly had a coronary."

"You were watching?"

"It's my job." Ripper shrugged.

"Okay. And it would definitely be a good idea to ask our more honored guests to remain in their quarters for a couple of days. It wouldn't look good if our inspectors found them wandering around."

Ripper favored him with a sour look.

"Already taken care of, even before our spies arrived."

"Good," said Trellez, briefly debating whether to return to bed or just pull through with four hours sleep, finally deciding that he wouldn't be able to face having to get out of bed yet again. He walked off to shower, stopping only to get a refill of his Doublecaff. He would need it if he was to have any hope of staying awake during an audit meeting.

"Good morning inspector Howmet, Analyst Etruska. I hope you slept well," said Trellez, who was already seated at the table when the tax inspectors were escorted into the room. It was immediately obvious that the functionaries hadn't slept well at all; their haggard countenances bearing witness to the difficulties that even the slightest differences in gravitational force (not to mention, thought Trellez, the fear of rampant bacteriological activity) brought to the sleeping process. Trellez waited until they were seated to continue. He indicated a small, dark-haired woman to his left. "This is Cece Rimay, our financial officer.

She'll be showing you through our records and answering any questions you might have regarding our accounts and taxes."

The inspectors nodded, and they were off. Comparing spreadsheets with tax declarations on their padscreens. Arguing about brackets. Reclassifying profits.

Trellez, ignored, let his mind wander, paying only enough attention to the meeting to be certain that the proceedings were, indeed, routine, as he suspected they would be. He was adamant 198

Evasion that the company always stay within the letter of the law. Of course, they took that letter to the most favorable interpretation possible, and took advantage of any and every loophole they could find, but, at the end of the day, it was all legal. The worst the tax officers could do was object to some interpretation and insist that the difference be covered, but that was all.

This meeting was obviously just window-dressing, as he had known since first laying eyes on Etruska. But windowdressing for what? Trellez had no clue as to what they thought they would find, and that made him very nervous.

His reverie ended when Howmet spoke to him a few hours later.

"Well, Mr. Trellez, from a tax point of view, your operation seems to be in relative order, save for some small procedural differences which you will need to address in your next tax statement." This seemed to cause the taxman bitter disappointment, but he went on. "There are, however, a few questions that you might be able to answer more completely than Miss Rimay." “Shoot,� said Trellez, but in his mind he said, OK, here it comes.

"We've found some enormous deviations in the uranium stores on your balance sheet versus what we would consider consistent with your revenue. While we understand your need for freely negotiable currency on hand in large quantities, we have been having difficulty explaining why your deposits, which, logically should be a function of your profits, greatly exceed your sales numbers for the whole lifetime of the station," said Howmet, peering up at him from a spreadsheet.

"Well, space salvage laws allow us to keep any currency we find aboard ships we recover, which we then convert to uranium, which, as you said, is more convenient because everyone in the solar system will accept it."

"But the quantity we are talking about here is massive.

Somehow, I don't think you got this from the pocket change left behind by mechanics in old mining drones."

"Of course not. The real source of most of it was the 199

Gustavo Bondoni system liner Seychelles, that hit an uncharted rock outside Mars orbit. It was a bit of a stretch to get there, but we risked it for a salvage job that large. And, lucky for us. It was our biggest in the last seven years. And, though you might find it a bit ghoulish, body recovery is always profitable. The rich people on a liner have rich relatives willing to pay a lot of money to get their loved ones back to civilization and give them a decent funeral.

Since we're not allowed to report that as sales, it goes directly into profit.

"Yes," said Howmet, reviewing the numbers, "that's duly recorded, you still have a huge unexplained gap. The uranium just pours in at yearly intervals."

"Another loophole. There was also a large amount of cash on that ship. Unreported cash. We're allowed by law to prorate the accounting of it over ten years. It's an old loophole, granted, and meant for other types of businesses, but it's on the books, and we use it." Trellez was really sweating now. He'd never been grilled by a taxman for overstating his profits. More profits meant more taxes, something taxmen were always in favor of.

This was not true to form, and therefore made him nervous.

"That would explain it, but it's still an enormous amount of cash for the passengers of a single liner, no matter how rich, to be carrying with them on vacation. I’m sorry,� said Howmet, looking more relieved than sorry. "We are going to have to move to the second phase of our investigation. Major Etruska?"

Trellez looked at her. Major Etruska didn't sound like an accountant at all. She pulled a sheet from a folder.

"I have a permit from the Jovian Federation Government to search the station for evidence and arrest you if we find any.

Do you recognize the authority of the Federation?" she asked him, handing over the sheet.

"What? On what Charges?"

"Treason."

Trellez said nothing, scanning the sheet, which simply confirmed what Etruska had already told him. He wasn't aware of having committed treason, at least not of the usual type. But maybe they knew more than they let on and were being flexible 200

Evasion in their definition of treason. In that case, he was in big trouble.

"Could you be more specific?" he asked her.

"This station is suspected of outfitting vessels for sale to the Earth-Mars Axis."

"But that's impossible, We register every ship that we find, and have no access to heavy weaponry!" Trellez knew he could beat this charge. It was ridiculous. He hadn't gotten involved in the war for precisely this reason. He had come out here to avoid the war in the first place. He was certain that the current flareup in which Earth and Mars had allied to become independent from the Jovian Federation once more wouldn't be the last, and, with shifts in alliances, the war would last well after he had died.

"We don't think that, if you're already committing a crime punishable by death, that the smaller crimes of failing to fill out the proper papers or buying a black market plasma cannon or two is going to stop you. Do you accede to a search of the station and outlying asteroids?" demanded Etruska.

"Do I have a choice?"

"Yes. We can do it by force." She looked as if this second choice was her preference.

So they searched. They went over the ship with a finetooth comb, while a previously undetected troop carrier emerged from the sensor shadow of a nearby asteroid and proceeded to go over every rock and installation in the vicinity.

They found, as Trellez had been trying to tell the tax inspectors, nothing indicative of the capacity to create warships and not one salvaged ship that hadn't been duly reported to the authorities.

Inside the station, the situation was similar. Etruska had been expecting to find at least one person, whether locked in a storeroom or hidden among the crew, whose papers couldn't be verified by the naval intelligence network, or didn't match the corresponding retinal scan, indicating a TerraMars liaison. It had been a painstaking process, but the only anomaly detected was the discovery of a small-time thief who had gotten employment at the station in order to lie low.

201

Gustavo Bondoni Finally, nearly two days later, they stood in a small group in the common. A very frustrated Etruska was contemplating her holographic map of the station. Every sector, every compartment was marked in red, indicating that it had been searched without results, except for one large chamber just off the common: the bisophere.

Trellez, who had been following the search with understandable concern, nodded towards the holo. "Well, that's the last area. Would you like to search it now?"

Etruska looked uncomfortable. She consulted the reports from the troop transport.

“There seems to be no need,” she said. “It doesn’t look as if you could build that stuff even if you wanted to, so if you've got a TerraMars spy hiding in that jungle, he's just wasting his time. And he'll probably be dead of something contagious pretty soon anyway which will probably spread. In that case you might actually be doing us a favor." Etruska shuddered at the thought and disconnected her holo, which disappeared. "It seems we need to apologize for the inconvenience."

"No problem," said Trellez. "Always happy to help the government."

It was only after he'd escorted them back to their shuttle, cycled the airlock and watched them depart that Trellez allowed himself to sag against the viewport as relief flooded through him, defeating the nervous tension and Doublecaff that had been keeping him upright for the past two days.

The slight smell of sulphur was always an annoyance, as was the enormously humid atmosphere that his guests preferred, but it was something Trellez was willing to put up with. They were, after all, his most valued customers, and the worst of the problems, that of communication, had, at last, been fully solved.

"So," he said, addressing the senior member of the party," are you satisfied with our engineering?" His words were then translated into a sibilant hiss, rising and falling in tone – a mechanical approximation of the visitor's language.

A chitinous appendage was raised in agreement, followed 202

Evasion by the translation of the answering hiss. "Quite delectable. We thank you."

Trellez remembered the first time he had seen the Clients, so called because there was no adequate translation of their name into the Jupitearth language.

Their ship had simply docked onto the station one day, cycled through the airlock despite electronic safeguards designed to insure that this could only be opened from inside the station, disgorged a cloud of sulphur and flooded the docking bay with four inches of water. The ship had then proceeded to disgorge an exoskeletoned black monstrosity with four arms which skittered towards the greeting party, slipping around on the wet metal floor. Being unarmed, as was the practice on most space stations (holes in the walls tended to be a big problem), the party had run backwards to what they deemed to be a safe distance and watched the creature.

The visitor, meanwhile had simply dropped a flat piece of material onto the first dry patch of floor it encountered, and retreated back to the airlock.

The stalemate lasted until Trellez decided that something had to be done, and since it was his station, he was going to have to be the one to do it. So he gritted his teeth and advanced very, very slowly, to where the white piece of material lay. It seemed to be a flat piece of plastic, about ten inches square. Cautiously picking it up, he saw geometric figures printed on it in black.

Below these symbols was writing, human writing, which Trellez was able to identify as English, since that old language was similar enough to Jupitearth to be understood. The writing said, simply, "we come in peace".

And now, eight years later, having solved most of the technical, linguistic and biological problems involved, he was having a conversation with one of them. Much more importantly, he had just finished selling them another asteroid.

"Is the payment adequate?" hissed the leader. “Absolutely,� said Trellez. He omitted to add that with the quantity of Uranium that had been paid, he could probably purchase Uranus, or possibly even Saturn. How was he going 203

Gustavo Bondoni to justify this on the next tax form? "I trust your quarters were satisfactory?"

"Delightful. The vegetation is becoming very lush and the lake is deep enough for comfort. You are a generous host."

"You are gracious guests." Now that the bargaining was concluded, it was time for the ritual words of departure.

"We will await your return. Do you know when it will come about?"

“At our time of need,” said the leader. In Trellez’ experience, their 'time of need' could be anywhere from a single week to two years.

"We will be ready to provide,” he said.

"We will be ready to pay."

The aliens turned, entered their tiny ship which had been ignored by the government inspection as it was too small to be of any consequence and flew to the asteroid they had just bought. For the princely sum they'd paid, all Trellez' crew had done was fit the asteroid with running lights, small propulsion jets and very rudimentary control systems. As the asteroid itself was free to Trellez, the gross profit was near enough to 100% as to make no difference.

Ripper moved into place beside him at the viewscreen and watched the craft dock with the control pod installed on the rock, which immediately blinked out of existence.

"That always freaks me out," said Ripper. Trellez grunted, and he went on. "I mean really, how do they do it? I know we've been over this, but how much more money do you want? Let's report their existence to the navy and run for cover. Let the government deal with them. This is the single most important thing going on anywhere in the solar system, you know. We have to report it!"

"Yeah, I guess. We almost got caught this time," Trellez sighed. "One more sale. What harm can there be in one more sale? Who's going to notice another missing asteroid?"

"A lot of people. But that's not what's worrying me. Why do they want them? I mean, what possible use could some small rocks be to a race that can travel by disappearing into space? I 204

think they can probably go anywhere they want in the whole galaxy, because they're certainly not from around here."

"Yeah, I noticed."

"So what are they really doing here? And how long before they decide not to do it anymore, and start taking the rocks without paying for them? And then, how about the big rocks? The moons. Mars. Earth. I really doubt we can stop that kind of tech. We need to tell the government. Give them info to prepare. Everything we've got on these guys. And we need to do it now."

"Hey, I'm a businessman, not an Admiral. I don't worry about that kind of thing. As long as they assume that I own these rocks, I'll sell them these rocks. Anyway, all we need is one more sale. Then we'll report them. I promise."

"That's what you said last time," said Ripper, dejectedly.

His cut, after all, depended on his loyalty.

"Yeah. I was lying then, too."

205

Interplanetary Bicycles and the One Back Home Robert looked down the long, empty tunnel and imagined it filled with shining tubes. Inside those tubes, his mind’s eye could clearly visualize particles – subatomic and invisible, speeding at incomprehensible velocities towards a target at the far end.

But those days were long past.

A scratching sound filled his head, the precursor to an insystem transmission, a phone call from the outer reaches of the solar system. He stopped and paid attention.

“Hey old man.” The voice on the other end was unmistakably that of Stirling Licht, who wasn’t a youngster by any means. “Just calling to let you know that, by the time this gets to you we’ll be one hour away from initialization. So if the universe suddenly goes bye-bye, you’ll know we were the ones to blame. I guess I’ll be pretty unpopular with everyone if there really is an afterlife, but that’s the way it goes.” The other man paused. “Seriously, I wanted to thank you for … well for everything. We couldn’t have done this without you, and we all wish you were here with us. Thank you.”

Tears welled in Robert’s eyes, and he looked down the tunnel, dark now save for the illumination from his miner’s helmet. What had once been the pinnacle of human engineering was now just another abandoned hole in the ground. By this time the next day, the entrances would be blocked off, the elevator shafts filled in, to avoid accidents.

But for today, he could enjoy the ride around the ring and try to remember how it looked when it was full of piping, wiring and complex detectors as opposed to bare rock and holes in the walls. The sound of his bicycle’s wheels echoed ahead of him.

While his technicians watched the data feeds, Stirling 206

Interplanetary Bicycles Licht looked out the front window at the sensor. The huge structure floated in space, looking just like an electric motor from the toy cars he used to dissect as a child, except this one was the size of a skyscraper. The sensor’s technical name was High Energy Scruon Experiment, which the team had immediately turned into Hissy.

Stirling was well aware that there would be no outward sign that the detector was working – unless the energies released finally did live up to the panicked predictions of the anti-science set and destroyed the universe, in which case he wouldn’t see anything anyway – but he couldn’t tear his eyes off it.

“Hissy is up and running, ready for its first fit,” the head tech announced. He was seated behind Licht facing one of the monitors that filled the center of the shuttle’s living area. Eight other techs sat in expectant silence, concentrating on their own monitors.

Licht nodded. “Initialize,” he replied. No experimental data would be collected on this particular run, just confirmation that the particle beam could be accelerated to the Tera-electronVolt range, making this the most powerful particle accelerator in the history of mankind. Only after that was confirmed would they scale it up for real power.

The technician flipped a switch.

In the dim light, images came back to him. The day, nearly sixty years before, when the Large Hadron Collider had been put on line deep in its underground lair. There had been a real edge to that event – people protesting that the expense had already been too much, that the money would be better spent on social programs, that knowing the reason that particles in the universe had mass was less important than solving hunger in Bolivia.

And then there were the real whack-jobs. The people who insisted that the LHC would create a black hole that would swallow the Earth. That the energies being created were well 207

Gustavo Bondoni beyond humanity’s understanding. This had been the first big physics project in the internet era, and the information had been available to any fool who cared to look. Too many fools had.

Robert sighed. You could say what you wanted about the politics and stress of the time, but it had been an exciting moment to be a physicist.

Everything after that had been a let-down. The passages he was riding down had been used intensively for one month, the time it took to run the preliminary data analysis, and for everyone to understand that they wouldn’t be getting any definitive answers from this machine. After that, the white elephant had been kept semi-operational just because people believed that the detectors themselves could be used in its successor. Not since the atomic bomb had a machine been so successful and yet so vilified.

Most of the cobwebs were also sixty years old. Except for the ones that had been torn away by the men who’d dismantled the whole thing. Only dust remained of the glory now, and that would only be accessible until the workers sealed the shafts.

The only way to be in contact with high-energy particle physics would be in space – no place for an old man whose body would never survive the acceleration of a rocket launch.

“What’s going on?” Stirling asked as he reached the cycle bay.

The ashen-faced assistant merely handed him a printsheet – ionized to show text, a short message: We cannot allow you to put this machine in motion. Science has gambled with our lives too many times. You’ve already lost one gamble – the stakes are even higher this time. It was unsigned, but that didn’t really matter – Licht had long since stopped trying to make sense of the players on the lunatic fringe.

“So what did they do? And who’s the loony?” The extremist anti-science groups always managed to infiltrate people into every project they opposed, despite strict screening done on everyone from the project directors to the cleaning crew.

208

Interplanetary Bicycles The tech just pointed to an empty niche, and Stirling’s heart fell. That niche should have contained a one-person planet bike – a rocket scooter suitable for short hops between the ship and nearby equipment – but it stood empty. “As far as we can tell, the terrorist is Hannah.”

That was an unexpected twist. Hannah Moss was the morale officer. Not a physicist, but a psychologist whose role was to keep the rest of them sane during their six-month stint inside the cramped spacecraft. Then again, it was logical. None of the team’s physicists would try to sabotage this particular mission. Curiosity would overcome whatever brainwashing was attempted.

There was really only one thing to do. Following her in the ship was too risky; she was obviously bound for the Hissy sensor, and trying to maneuver the enormous ship near the experiment was likely to result in bent antennae or worse. Licht walked to another niche and popped the hatch to the second bike.

“Track her and keep me posted on her movements,” he ordered and sealed the opening.

No matter how often he went out, Licht was always fascinated by the sheer peace of space. The single-person craft was small enough that the silence seemed to drift through the bulkhead. He was in a state of near-panic but the emptiness calmed him, if only a little.

His instruments lit up as the main ship transmitted coordinates for the stolen planet bike. Hannah was ten kilometers ahead, nearly half-way to the Hissy sensor, and moving at top speed. There was no way he could reach her before she did whatever it was she was planning to.

He toggled the intercom. “Hannah, can you hear me?

This is Stirling Licht.”

His only reply was static.

“Hannah, come in. Please. What you’re doing doesn’t make any sense. You don’t understand the physics involved.

You’re just a tool for ignorant people who hate science!”

That managed to elicit a response. “That’s an interesting argument, seeing how you represent a group of people who’ve 209

Gustavo Bondoni managed to be wrong almost every time they set their minds to it. Remember the LHC?” “The LHC posed no risk whatsoever to human life.

It achieved its goals perfectly – so well in fact that it became nearly obsolete after the first month’s analysis was complete.

It was built mainly to find the Higgs boson, and it did. Very quickly, too.”

“I’m certain we would all have been much more impressed if the particles it found had done anything like what they were supposed to. Your predictions were wrong then. They can easily be wrong now, except you’re playing with a million times more energy. Do you really think we can just sit on the sidelines and watch you gamble our lives away?”

“The predictions weren’t wrong. The Higgs boson appeared almost immediately!”

“Yeah, and you had to rewrite the entire set of equations to account for the fact that it only did half of what you predicted.

That doesn’t sound like much of a success to me. Even the guy who named the missing particle set agreed with us. Or have you forgotten why they’re called scruons? You people are completely unbelievable.”

Stirling knew that he had no choice now but to try to stop her physically. But there would be three minutes during which she’d have the Hissy to herself. God only knew the kind of mayhem she could wreak in that time. Despite its size and the radiation shielding, the High Energy Scruon Experiment was a delicate piece of equipment – one of the most accurate ever built by man.

He cursed the designers of the bikes for not giving them more top speed – although he knew that that would also help Hannah in her flight – and for not having slave circuits built into them. That would have solved all their problems; they could simply have overridden Hannah’s manual controls and brought her back to the ship. He punched the control stick, but that didn’t cause the scooter to move any faster.

Hannah had reached the edifice-like jungle of tubes and metal plates that was Hissy. To Stirling’s surprise, she didn’t 210

Interplanetary Bicycles drive the bike directly into the airlock in order to attack the more sensitive areas. She simply pressed the its nose against the experiment and began to push it out of its orbit, using full thrusters to do so.

Hissy had been designed to be self-adjusting to a certain degree, but its tiny attitude rockets were no match for the scooter’s thruster, and the platform began to drift away very slowly.

By the time Stirling arrived, the whole thing had moved nearly fifty meters out of orbit, which would require months of realignment. And yet, Licht could see Hannah inside her bike, teeth clenched, pressing the control stick forward as far as it would go. She seemed determined to push the experiment out of the solar system altogether.

Despite her canopy giving her a full view of the sky, Hannah had no inkling that Stirling had followed her, and her face registered furious surprise when Licht’s scooter collided with hers, sending them both tumbling away from Hissy. He used her momentary confusion to lock his bike’s grappling claws to one of her exhaust tubes.

“That’s enough,” he hissed. “You’ve already ruined months of work. Aren’t you satisfied?”

“Screw you,” she replied, her voice shrill now. “I just wish I could have found something to crash the whole thing into.”

“Another good reason for us to build it in empty space.”

Licht grinned. The damage hadn’t been terrible, and the extra expense of building the accelerator above the ecliptic seemed to have paid off, even though the main reason they’d put it there was to avoid the dust particles that were more prevalent on the plane.

The would-be saboteur gunned the engine on her bike, but as Stirling’s was already at full power, it was to no avail. The scooters just went around in circles.

“I should have known you’d be the one to come after me. Typical male scientist. Despite the fact that you hold a PhD in particle physics, you just couldn’t come to terms with the 211

Gustavo Bondoni intellectual nature of your profession. You seem to see yourself as some kind of cowboy from a pair of centuries ago. When you found out I was gone, did it even cross your mind that it might be a better idea to try to hail me over the ship’s radio?”

“I didn’t think you’d listen. And if I’d have done so, where would I be now? Much farther back, watching you move the experiment even further out of its orbit.”

Hannah snorted.

“Excuse me, Dr. Licht?” The voice over the radio sounded extremely concerned, but, given the state of affairs, that wasn’t surprising.

“Hello Emily. Don’t worry, I’ve neutralized the saboteur and we’ve drifted far enough away from the experiment that it’s safe for you to come pick us up.”

“That’s not it, sir. The second package just cleared the final accelerator. We tried to abort it, but the system asked us for your abort code.”

“Oh my God,” Stirling said. He could hear Hannah laughing over the intercom. There was madness in that laugh, and it was obvious that not only had she overheard the conversation, but knew what it meant.

“How is our orientation?” he asked.

“As far as I can tell, it’s perfect.”

“Tell the receiving station on Earth that they’re about to get bombarded with something a lot more massive than a neutrino shower.”

“Yes, sir.”

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. After all, one of the most interesting results of any particle collision experiment was the explosion of neutrinos that it originated.

And what better way to insure a maximum neutrino strike on the Earth-based sensors than to put the whole orbiting accelerator into an orbit that meant that the back end of the Hissy was always pointed straight towards the planet? The beam would slam into the target, the neutrinos would fly out the back and head right for the detectors.

212

Interplanetary Bicycles Of course, no one expected Hissy and its safe, distant lead target not to be there when it happened.

Robert’s bike ride was coming to an end. Even a ring twenty-five kilometers long had to end sometime, no matter how much he tried to extend the circuit by slowing and falling into nostalgia-filled reverie. No matter how many times he got off the bike and placed a hand at some spot where, as a young man sixty years before, one experiment or another had resided, ripe with the potential to aid in pushing aside the veil of ignorance just that little bit further.

Science had seemed exciting back then. The world’s mysteries ripe for the unveiling, and there had been no talk of putting the LHC in space. Back then, if you wanted to run an experiment which might seen risky to the unwashed, you just buried it underground and hoped no one would notice. And you walked through the picket lines with a smile on your face when that strategy failed.

Now, there were acres of vacuum between the collision point and the nearest observer. You’d practically have to drop Jupiter into the sun to create a noteworthy emotional reaction under those conditions.

And yet Robert knew that this was exactly what progress meant: in understanding things, one was able to remove the risk. As science advanced, even though the energies involved increased by multiple orders of magnitude, there was less and less danger. It was simply a question of being able to predict what was about to happen. Life changed, and science itself was causing it to change.

A burst of static on his comm brought him out of his reverie. He realized he was nearing the elevator shaft and the time had come to say goodbye to the tunnel that had been such an important part of his life’s work. He turned the volume up. “… I repeat, terrorists have removed target and high-energy particles are headed towards Earth after final acceleration. Impact should occur ten minutes after you receive 213

this transmission.�

The old man smiled. Now this was more like it. No one knew exactly what an unshielded impact at tera-electron-Volt energies would look like.

But science was about learning new things. He wordlessly thanked the LHC’s original designers that the elevator was an express model that would get him to the surface quickly.

There was more to life than stale memories.

214

No Vacancy “Not good,” said Emily, shaking her head and looking at the on-screen status report again. “Not good at all.”

I grunted. I was in no mood for conversation, and, besides, she was right.

My first clue that something had gone seriously wrong came immediately after waking. It was then that I discovered that the life-support system had thawed us out in space, instead of doing so after planetfall. This was most certainly not according to plan.

It indicated that the control and navigation computer had encountered something it wasn’t programmed to deal with. And I knew for a fact that it was programmed to deal with almost anything one might conceivably encounter during the process of transporting a load of Colony Engineers to a virgin planet, landing on it, and beginning the colonization process.

Being thawed out in emergency situations isn’t fun. It compresses the usual reanimation process – normally a four-day affair – into three hours, leaving the subject much the worse for wear. Considering that I had been in suspended animation for almost seventy-five standard years, I naturally awoke aching and disoriented. When one adds the dread of knowing there was a big problem several light years away from the nearest human colony, well, I felt that my less than sunny disposition was more than justified.

On reaching the control chamber, the first sight to greet me was a large blue-green orb floating on a black background which could clearly be seen through the main viewport.

I had let out a small sigh of relief. While there was almost certainly something very wrong somewhere, at least we weren’t stranded out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do about it but freeze to death or die of boredom. We were in orbit around a planet, and a planet, no matter how hostile, was something we were equipped to deal with. I started to relax and thought that everything would be all right after all.

215

Gustavo Bondoni So you can imagine my irritation when Emily calmly informed me that the planet below was inhabited by intelligent beings. Several billion of them. They were definitely not human, and, by our readings of the electromagnetic emissions emanating from their major population centers, they had advanced to the tanks, planes and television stage of technological evolution.

All of which explains why we were looking glumly at our readouts and thinking that things were far from ideal.

“So now what?” said Emily.

I scowled at her, but too late. The other members of the emergency team that the central computer, in its infinite wisdom, had seen fit to wake looked at me expectantly. I hated being in command sometimes.

“How should I know?” I replied. I’ve never heard of anything like this happening at any other planet. Just my luck, I guess.”

This was followed by silence. It was evidently the wrong thing to say. I tried again.

“Have you tried talking to them? Maybe we can establish communication of some kind. What frequency are their electromagnetic emissions on? TV? Radio?”

“We could probably do that, sir,” our systems specialist, Jones, piped up, “but are you sure it’s a good idea to let them know we’re here? I mean maybe we should study them for a while before committing ourselves.”

“I think they already know we’re here,” said Emily. We all looked at her, but nobody said a word. Emily was a physicist in theory, but, in practice, she was our general purpose science and problem-solving officer. And she was almost never wrong.

“Look.” She said, pointing at the monitor. “I’m getting readings for no less than eleven artificial satellites. It may not be Earth’s ring system, but at least it proves that they’re spaceaware, if not necessarily space-faring.”

She paused as we digested this bit of information.

“Also,” she continued, pointing at another reading which oscillated at regular intervals, “this electromagnetic reading here indicates that we’re being hit with some kind of radiation. It 216

No Vacancy started sixteen minutes ago, it’s a regular pattern which repeats every seven seconds or so, and it emanates from the planet. Or, at least it’s only hitting the side of the ship that faces the planet.

My guess is that it’s probably a communication or some kind of scanning device similar in principle to radar technology.”

“Either way,” said Jones, “they know we’re here.”

“Yup,” said Emily.

They looked at me again. I sighed.

“OK.” I said. “Let’s talk to them.”

What followed were a very frustrating three hours as the crew tried to find some way to communicate with the planet below. Being in command, I did what was expected of me. I sat. I fidgeted. I occasionally fielded a question on some arcane technological subject regarding which I understood nothing, but about which I was forced, on the basis of the hurried and incomplete information which the crew was able to give me, to make a decision.

Mainly, though, I tried to disguise the fact that I was actually looking out the viewscreen at the beautiful planet below, and trying to organize my thoughts. I specifically felt that it was important to decide whether I loved the place or hated it.

Gliese 67 had been chosen for colonization because it was a yellow star less than fifty light-years from Sol. Mediumsized rocky planets had been discovered, putting the system on the shortlist. Computer simulation had shown that the fourth planet in the system was likely to be the most habitable of any nearby planet known to scientists on Tau Ceti II, from which we had departed. On this evidence, the human race had chosen to gamble the lives of ten thousand colony engineers and five million colonists, as well as one state-of-the-art terraforming ship – probably the only one that would be built for the next fifty years.

I chuckled.

The scientists had been right. More so, probably, than 217

Gustavo Bondoni even they would have been willing to accept. The planet was definitely habitable: a beautiful oxygen- and water-covered ball, with the added side benefit of humanity’s first contact with an alien intelligence.

What fun.

I decided to growl at my crew a bit to relieve the tension.

They were dealing with a situation unlike any in the history of mankind and were trying to find a technical solution to a problem which might not even have one, so this may have seemed slightly unfair to them. Nevertheless, I felt justified because I had to shoulder the burden of command, and they didn’t. Plus, I found that it often helped to spread the stress out a little.

“Have we made contact yet? It’s been three hours.” I asked Emily, who had the misfortune of being closest at that moment.

It was Jones, however, who responded.

“No. And I don’t think we’re making any sort of progress either.”

This was not what I wanted to hear.

“Why not?”

“Well…” He paused. “There seem to be two main problems. The first is that although we can easily receive what they’re transmitting, I can’t seem to get onto their airwaves with enough power to override the signal to any part of the planet on the frequencies they’re using. They’re using quite a bit of juice and our comm system isn’t designed for high-power transmissions.

At this point, they probably think we’re just interference on the TV. I don’t know what kind of transmitters they’re using, but I can tell you that only about four distinct frequencies are active.”

“What are they sending? Sound? Images? Data?” I asked.

“That’s the second problem. I think they’re sending images, without sound. The wave analysis looks similar to satellite TV, although our systems can’t quite unscramble the signal – probably just a case of different technology. I can’t find anything that even remotely resembles radio or cellular phones or any other sort of sound-only stream. This means that we can’t just call them up and say hi.”

218

No Vacancy “So, what can we do?” I asked.

“Basically, we can wait here, transmitting on different frequencies until we receive some sort of acknowledgement, which, considering the way communications on the planet are structured, seems pretty unlikely. Or we can go down to the planet and say talk to them in person. That would be cool. We’d become world-famous instantly. I wonder if I’ll get onto their talk-show circuit. After all, I’m far and away the best looking human on this crew.”

The main problem with being the captain is that you can’t just order the crew to shove someone out of an airlock.

Although I haven’t had the occasion to experience this myself, I imagine that the paperwork would be horrendous. I had to be content with rolling my eyes and silently vowing to give Jones the first completely awful assignment that came along.

“How about this: we’ll send you down, and if they shoot you, we’ll stay up here and think of something else,” I told him.

He shut up.

“Do you think they might be hostile?” Emily asked me.

“We know absolutely nothing about them. How are they organized politically? Are they a single entity? Nation states? How many intelligent species are there on the planet?

One? More? The only example we have of the development of intelligence is on Earth, and I would bet against this planet having the same evolutionary history. For all I know, they might be enormous telepathic rocks,” I said.

At this point, Kalla spoke up. A brilliant engineer, she was nevertheless extremely shy and reserved. Her psychological profile was marginal enough that I had had to personally sign off in order to allow her to be posted on such a potentially stressful mission. During our conversation, she had been looking at various readouts.

“Excuse me. I think I can answer a few of your questions,” she said, and then shrank into herself when we all turned to look at her.

“Please, go ahead,” I prompted.

She took a deep breath. “While Jones was trying to 219

Gustavo Bondoni communicate, I was using our terrain scanners to look at the surface at maximum resolution.” As she spoke, she keyed in a sequence of commands, and a large map of the planet’s landmasses came onto the main screen.

“Here, you see,” she said.

We all looked at the map. It was, as far as I could tell, just a map. I gave her what I hoped was an encouraging look.

“While we’ve been here, I picked up large energy emissions concentrated in this area here and this one here,” she said. Two red dots appeared on the map, separated by a few thousand miles of real terrain. “At first, I thought it was due to large-scale mining activity, but then I superimposed the energy map with the topographical scan, and found this.” She keyed in a new command sequence.

We stared. She had zoomed in towards one of the energy sources, making individual emissions visible in the image.

Underneath the translucent dots that showed the energy, we could make out the terrain underneath. Surrounding the energy emissions were the geometric outline of what looked like several large buildings. Directly under the emissions, the topography was more akin to amorphous piles of rubble.

The energy emissions were the result of a bombing raid less than two hours old.

“So,” said Jones, “at least now we know something about their politics.” He chuckled.

“And, by the analysis of individuals, they seem to be quadrupeds of about two hundred kilos. I’m sorry that the resolution isn’t better, but we normally don’t need to scan for less than five meters of length from space,” said Kalla. As she spoke, a blurred block appeared on the screen. It seemed to depict a quadruped of some sort exiting a building, but it was very hard to tell.

“So where does this leave us?” asked Emily. This was directed at me, again. I would have to do something about the job description.

“Exactly where we were before, except that we now know that if I do decide to send Jones down to talk to them, they 220

No Vacancy definitely have the capacity shoot him. Which might not be a bad thing. Keep trying to talk to them and keep me posted.” I walked off. I needed to think.

I walked around the ship. There weren’t many places to go, since it had been designed for a hibernating crew, so no sleeping or entertainment facilities had been built in. Basically, only the command area, and a cavernous empty box of a room were kept pressurized. The box-room was there in case we had to wake all the engineering team at the same time and we needed a place to put ten thousand people.

There being nowhere else to go, I walked across the hundred and fifty meter-long room. From the large viewport at the rear of the room, I could see the outside of the ship. The engines had long since been switched off and had cooled to a dull metallic grey. Looking at behind us, I felt a twinge of guilt.

Somewhere back there five million people were frozen inside the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid, hurtling through space at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Six months from now, they would be landing, in a controlled crash, on the fourth planet of the Gliese 67 system, and would wake up expecting to have a safe surface on which to walk, safe water to drink and safe air to breathe. And I was the one who had been charged with giving it to them.

Five million lives.

They didn’t have the option of stopping and orbiting the planet to decide what to do next. The mission planners had assumed that the planet would be ready to receive them when they arrived, so the asteroid would just dive into the atmosphere to whatever landing site my people indicated for it.

This was a problem. My main responsibility was to the colonists in the asteroid. My Colony Engineering unit was made up of volunteers, often military personnel, who were aware of the risks and prepared to face the challenge of a virgin planet.

The ones inside that rock, on the other hand, were civilians – mainly farmers – and their families. Once you add to this that they were part of the future of humanity, our own lives were of little consequence. We had to have the planet ready for them.

221

Gustavo Bondoni But how?

I could think of only two alternatives, both unpleasant.

The first was to send down a crew to try to make the locals understand that we were here in peace, and that all we wanted was a small chunk of their planet, say a hundred thousand square miles of prime farmland, for example. Also, they were to understand that a very large space rock would be hitting the area and that this was nothing to worry about. I felt that this had little chance of success, since, not only would the crew have to avoid being killed as soon as they landed, but I felt that the message was somewhat lacking in empathy and wouldn’t go down well at all.

The second was to land my engineering ship in the place that I wanted to keep for our colony and lay claim to the area. We could defend it by force, if need be. This plan had the definite disadvantage that, although our terraforming equipment had plenty of weapons-grade destructive power and was armored against basically anything short of a direct nuclear strike, it didn’t change the fact that there were ten thousand of us and about four billion of them.

I was looking out the viewport, pondering this, when the decision was taken out of my hands.

“Captain, we need you in the command center. Now.” Emily’s voice over the PA system. She sounded about as happy as I felt.

As I ran towards the command center, I felt the ship move slightly. Attitude correction rocket, I assumed. Our fuel supply had been calculated to allow us to land, some very limited emergency maneuvering, and not much more. There had to be something going on. Something I suspected I wouldn’t enjoy much.

Just as I arrived, the ship rocked. It was a jerkier motion than the rocket, and I held on to the console to keep my footing.

“What was that?” I asked the crew.

“Explosion,” replied Emily. “I guess they got tired of seeing us up here and decided to take a couple of potshots. They showed me the replay from the external cameras. Two bright 222

No Vacancy points originated on a northern continent of the planet, resolving themselves, with decreasing distance and increased zoom, into two distinct cylindrical objects.

“We spotted them with plenty of time to spare and maneuvered slightly. They missed, but they might try again. And we don’t have enough fuel to keep avoiding them and to land as well,” said Kalla. She didn’t seem quite so shy now that there was a technical crisis to resolve.

Which left everyone looking at me.

“Wake up the engineers. We’re going sightseeing on the planet, and I don’t want them asleep for the trip,” I said.

“Are you sure?” asked Emily.

I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t been sure of anything since I had woken up. But I sure wasn’t going to sit here, run out of fuel, burn up on reentry and leave five million colonists to crash-land on a planet full of armed aliens who shot at things they didn’t understand.

“I know what I’m doing. Wake them up.”

These three hours I did not spend idly looking through a viewport. I spent the first fifteen minutes explaining the sketch of my plan to my crew, and then spent the following two hours and forty-five minutes looking out of the viewport very nervously. I knew that the systems people would spot any missile launches well before I did, but this didn’t stop me.

Before I could do any detailed planning, I needed to have some military minds thawed out. The records showed that I had a pair of retired infantry Colonels, one army and one marine, on board, and I planned to milk them for all the knowledge they had. Humanity had never battled an alien race on their home planet, but they were certainly more prepared to deal with it than I was.

So I paced. I looked out the viewport. I paced some more. I gave orders that the Colonels be separated and brought to the command chamber as opposed to the assembly room. I 223

Gustavo Bondoni was informed that there was still an hour of reanimation to be done before either was ambulatory. So I continued to fret.

Finally, when the tension of waiting for the next missile strike was almost at the point where I wanted to climb into the nearest airlock and cycle myself out, a man and a woman were escorted to the bridge. Despite the disparity in ages and physical size, I would have picked them out as infantry officers anywhere.

They both stood tall and proud, like my old drill sergeant, the one who had made me decide that military life wasn’t for me and that the civilian space navy was a much better bet. I had to suppress an urge, as surprising as it was sudden, to hit the ground and give them twenty.

Instead, I said, “Good morning. I’m captain Stewart. I assume you are Colonels Wang and Pendalai?”

“Yes, sir!” they answered, with military precision. It sounded almost choreographed, making me wonder if there was a standard response time and cadence that the military hammered into you until you could get it right no matter where you were or who was next to you. I guess it must be advanced training, as I had never gotten anywhere near that far along.

Wang was young for a colonel. Thin and birdlike, only her bearing and her eyes gave away the fact that she possessed the iron will and political intelligence to climb the military ladder quickly and efficiently. Her record showed that she had retired from active duty in the Tau military to volunteer for this mission.

Pendalai, on the other hand, was exactly what I would have expected of a retired Marine colonel: tall, big, and graying.

Decorated several times for bravery in the field, he had retired with honors after taking a shrapnel wound to the leg. Two years of retirement had convinced him that civilian life was not his cup of tea, so here he was.

The main thing they had in common, from my point of view, was that I resented them enormously for having the ability to stand alert and at attention despite having been recently thawed.

“We have a problem,” I said. They remained silent as I brought the maps up on the screen and motioned Emily to join 224

No Vacancy our conversation.

“The planet we have been tasked to colonize is inhabited by sentient, intelligent beings. They are technologically advanced enough to send satellites and missiles into space, but insufficiently advanced to be able to hit us with them,” I grinned at them. “All our evidence, including the fact that they’ve shot at us already, indicates that they will react with violence when we land.” I must admit to have felt satisfaction at seeing the shock, however fleeting, that passed over each of their previously impassive faces.

“Is there any weaponry on board?” asked Wang. I motioned for Emily to respond.

“Yes and no.” she said. “We have no military hardware, except for small- and medium-caliber guns meant for wildlife control. Nevertheless, we do have three heavy terraforming machines, each complete with a plasma globule launcher capable of leveling a decent-sized mountain. Due to the extreme nature of the work they’re designed for, they’ve been seriously overdimensioned. They can take a direct hit from anything short of a medium-yield nuclear device without a whole lot of damage.

Each can carry up to two thousand people in the payload bay.”

The Colonels nodded.

“The main problem,” I said, “is that the ship has to land before they shoot at us again too many times – it’s a question of fuel. And we have to land on a large, flat piece of terrain where we’ll very likely be sitting ducks, and this ship isn’t designed to withstand intentional military action against it. On the schematic, we’ve identified the two best areas that aren’t too close to one of their cities.” I indicated a pair of numbered blue dots on the topographical map display. “What do you think?”

“That one,” said Pendalai, pointing at the more inland location. Colonel Wang nodded.

“Why?” I asked. I had favored the other spot, as it was near the sea, and readily available water would come in handy.

“Protection. This one is near a mountain range that we can use to cover our flanks and rear. Also, from what you told me, we shouldn’t have much trouble digging in with the equipment 225

Gustavo Bondoni we have available. How close to the mountains can you land?”

We called Kalla over from where she was overseeing the orbital telemetry. Pendalai repeated his question.

“I need twenty miles between the landing zone and the foothills, minimum,” she said.

“How fast are your digging machines?” asked Wang.

“Not fast at all. Maybe ten miles per hour,” said Emily.

“So, we’ll be in the open for at least two hours. Probably three before we can find a suitable place to dig in.”

“But we’ll be safe inside the diggers,” I said, “They don’t seem to have nuclear weapons. We’ve been watching their wars.”

“In the first place, the fact that they don’t use them doesn’t mean that they don’t have them. Look at old Earth before the emigration. Only two atomic devices were used in warfare in over two hundred years,” said Wang “But there’s a more pressing issue: you can only fit six thousand people into the machines. How are we going to move the rest? And the equipment?”

She was right. Four thousand engineers would have to make the trip on personnel transports, and the equipment would have to be hover-trucked. Neither trucks nor transports were well armoured.

We told her this. The colonels exchanged a look.

“A classic logistics problem,” shrugged Pendalai, “We’ll just have to bait them, and mislead them. And when that fails, we need to be ready to cover them as well as possible. You will have losses.”

And with that happy thought, I gave the order to land.

I had never been through a reentry process with a large ship. The normal procedure is for anything lager than a frigate to remain in orbit. Shuttles offload personnel and cargo.

I guess that’s why I was scared out of my mind.

It wasn’t so much the glow of superheated ceramic 226

No Vacancy covering that frightened me. That was normal. Even the news that our friends on the planet had decided to shoot at us while we were coming in didn’t bother me, since, at this speed, it would be impossible for them to hit us.

But the noise was terrifying. A howling, rushing sound that began as a slight, ghostly whisper but gradually became a deafening roar. It sounded as if the ship was tearing itself apart.

And each shudder was accompanied by its own personal noise, making you resign yourself to the inevitable: that with the next bounce, the ship would break up completely. But, all the while, hoping to survive. Praying to a god you had forgotten.

And then, a lull. Not a cessation, by any means, but simply a lowering of the pitch of the sound as we scrubbed off speed in the atmosphere.

A lurch as the jets came on, and then the approach to our chosen landing site. I thought we were going too fast.

That we would all die in the impact, despite the ship’s inertial compensators.

The landing was not gentle, but it wasn’t fatal either. As a matter of fact, no injuries were reported afterwards.

Feeling that I had survived the worst experience of my life, I was not at all cheered by knowing full well that the worst was still to come.

From this moment, and until we were secure from attack, I was happy to relinquish command of the mission to the two colonels. They quickly put together a team of ex-military personnel to lead the deployment in the field, and asked me to help coordinate the unloading in the order that they had specified.

Before doing so, however, I stopped to admire our surroundings. I had been on the surface of many planets, of course, but this was only the second planet after Tau Ceti II on whose surface I could stand unprotected. I took a deep breath and was reminded of the Ceti II farm zone.

Looking around, I was struck mainly by how common everything looked. An endless plain covered in grass-like vegetation, golden as opposed to green. I could have been on Ceti II or even, from the photos I had seen, Earth. The main 227

Gustavo Bondoni difference was the color of the sunlight, somehow brighter and less red-hued than what I was used to.

The first items to leave the ship were the medium-caliber projectile weapons, pressed into service as an impromptu antiaircraft perimeter. We had no way of knowing if or when we would be attacked or if our guns would have any effect if we were, but it was better than nothing.

The diggers came next. Far too heavy for wheels or hovering, they had been fitted with expensive antigrav units. The colonels took advantage of this, ordering the heavily armored vehicles into the air above the cargo bays to protect us from aerial attack. The plasma launchers pointed in three different directions, covering us from ground strikes.

Being out of the command loop at this stage, and nowhere near the radar technicians, the first inkling I had that the locals were coming to say hello was a strange thumping sound that came from the east, right after we had powered up, loaded and positioned two of the diggers. As the noise grew louder, the crew powering up the third digger stopped working and looked to the east, until a shout from Pendalai got them moving again.

But there was no way I was going to miss out on information that could affect the lives of my crew. I ran to where Wang was organizing the defense.

About halfway there, the alien flyer came into view.

Unsurprisingly, it looked completely different from any human design that I had ever seen. A long black fuselage was held in the air by four flitting wings that moved faster than the eye could see. It reminded me of an enormous dragonfly.

Lights shone in a repeated pattern from the nose of the fuselage as it approached. The thumping grew louder.

“What are you going to do?” I asked Wang.

“Nothing,” she said calmly.

“Nothing? But we’re sitting ducks. We’ll all be killed!”

“From the size of that flyer, I’d say it’s a scout. Probably lightly-armed at best. But that’s not the main reason. The main reason is that there’s a lot more of them than there are of us, and I’d rather not provoke them.”

228

No Vacancy “But..”

“Shhh…,” she said. “Let’s see what it does.”

We stood and watched. The flyer flitted this way and that, zooming over our formation. I noted with interest that it had the capability of flying forward, backward and also hovering in place. Wang, standing next to me, nodded. She looked as though she were x-raying the craft, weighing what she thought it was capable of.

After a few moments, the craft moved off a ways, and it soon became apparent to us that one of its capabilities was that of firing missiles. We dove to the ground as the missile hit the left engine pod a hundred yards away. It exploded with a deafening sound and small shockwave reached us.

After this had passed, I looked around and noticed several things at once. The first was that the missile had damaged the engine pod, but not all that much, and nothing else. Evidently a small charge. The crew in the loading bay was already hard at work under Pendalai’s shouting. Another was that our perimeter guard was returning fire on the flyer, and, as I watched, at least one round managed to hit it, causing enough damage for a plume of smoke to emanate from the vehicle, which then retreated at enormous speed.

“Interesting,” said Wang impassively, making me want to hit her, which I thought would probably be a very bad idea.

Seeming to understand, she continued. “Mechanical as opposed to organic. I wasn’t sure of that. It might have been a large insect. And not much in the way of armor, although you could probably have expected that from a scout. I wonder what those lights were.”

She walked off to organize her troops, so I rejoined Pendalai at the ship. The third digger was in position, and I was ordered into one of the hover trucks, which the crew had just finished loading. I was acutely aware that the missile that had just been fired at us would have completely destroyed this lightly armored truck. To make things worse, Emily had volunteered to drive this particular truck as it was carrying the molecule synthesis lab. I would have to watch her drive calmly while I 229

Gustavo Bondoni worried about our certain death. Was I the only person with even the common sense necessary to worry? Two hours out in the open did not seem like a very enjoyable proposition to me at that moment.

After an interminable thirty minutes, we moved out, abandoning the ship. She had been a good, faithful companion, but there was no way that we could hope to salvage or defend her now. What we did do, however, was rig charges to melt down as many of the ship’s systems as possible, in order to avoid their capture by our new friends.

The plan was for the personnel transports and trucks to range ahead of the slow-moving diggers. Hopefully, the aliens would attack these seemingly easier targets and ignore the more maneuverable hover trucks. If this didn’t work out, we would fall back and try to remain under the diggers, using the heavy plasma cannons as covering fire.

Personally, I was hoping that the aliens wouldn’t attack at all. But from what I had seen of them so far, my bet was that they would hit us sooner rather than later.

I hate being right all the time. Fifteen minutes later, the aliens attacked.

Fortunately, alien psychology was similar to ours, and, they duly attacked the diggers. The strike force consisted of more than a dozen flyers similar to the first, whose missiles could have no effect on the diggers’ armor. Nevertheless, they kept it up for nearly forty-five minutes. This situation would probably have continued long enough for us to reach safety if it hadn’t been for the fact that someone inside one of the terraforming machines fired the plasma launcher at something I couldn’t see, atomizing a pair of the flyers in the process.

I later learned that a column of ground troops had been approaching from the east, but at that time I was furious, thinking that someone had been showing off, with the effect that the flyers evidently decided that they couldn’t deal with that kind of firepower.

So they attacked us instead.

I watched helplessly as two personnel transports to my 230

No Vacancy left were destroyed by missiles. Eighty people dead, just like that. A near miss knocked a hover truck onto its roof, although I was relieved to see the bleeding driver jump out and limp to another truck. Our return fire with medium caliber rifles was unable to do any noticeable damage, it being very hard to hit a moving target from a speeding truck.

The order to retreat to the relative safety of the area beneath the diggers was given, and we throttled our truck as fast as possible. We had gotten far enough ahead that it was a tense few minutes before we made it to where the diggers hovered slowly towards the mountains. All the while, I had to watch in despair as the stragglers were picked off one by one. Here a truck, there a transport, all carrying people or equipment. And, sad as it was, I mourned the equipment as much as the people.

Each mobile lab or food synthesizer that we lost limited our capability of supporting the colonists who were coming behind.

Each one represented hundreds of lives.

Assuming, of course, that any of us were even left alive when the colonists landed.

By now, the diggers were approaching the foothills.

The enemy flyers may not have had the armor to withstand the plasma attacks, but quickly adapted their tactics to the situation.

They spread out and came in low, making it impossible for us to target more than one at a time, and picked us off mercilessly.

They suffered losses, but we suffered more.

By the time we reached the first of the foothills, about half of the trucks and transports had been destroyed. I was heartsick, thinking of the needless loss of life that had occurred.

I opened a radio channel to Wang.

“I see a large rock face on a small mountain that we can probably use for shelter,” I said.

“At one o’clock?” she asked.

“That’s the one.”

“OK. I see it. We’re moving in that direction.”

The foremost of the terraforming machines concentrated its plasma fire on the rock face in such a way as to drill into the cliff, forming a tunnel which was shallow at first, but became 231

Gustavo Bondoni progressively deeper as we approached. The mouth of the tunnel was just large enough to admit one digger.

The lead digger went in first, followed by the remaining hover trucks and personnel transports. I heaved a large sigh of relief as the rock walls closed in around me. And another as the mass of the second digger blocked the sunlight. For all intents and purposes, we were locked in an impenetrable cocoon that would keep us safe – at least until the locals brought some heavier artillery to knock down the mountain around us.

Emily stopped the truck and I got off. In the darkness of our artificial cave, I could allow myself the luxury of shaking uncontrollably while nobody was there to watch. In ten minutes I would have to resume command of my expedition, and would have no further space for weakness.

Two weeks passed and we were still alive. The locals (having gotten a closer look at them, we had come to give them the nickname Collies because of their long straight fur and elongated noses) had moved artillery in front of our mountain with the obvious intent of bombing us out.

We hadn’t let them, simply erasing their front lines with our launchers. After that, we launched a volley over the heads of the surviving artillery. This was meant to be a message: “We have the firepower and the range to wipe you out. We will tolerate your presence as long as you don’t do anything stupid, such as bombing our mountain, or coming too close. If you do, we will deal with you.”

They seemed to understand the message, as they didn’t approach any closer, so we used the opportunity to excavate an escape tunnel deep under the mountain with one of our diggers and create an impromptu living area inside it. About half our equipment had been lost, as well as over two thousand of my crew. Life was uncomfortable, and we had not yet completed the genetic analysis of local microorganisms for the purpose of synthesizing vaccines, but we were alive.

That night, as I stood at the mouth of our cave, looking over the local’s vast artillery array under the starlight, my 232

No Vacancy thoughts were a quarter of a light-year away. I was thinking about the asteroid with five million people aboard that I was responsible for.

“I wonder what they’re thinking,” said Emily. Lost in thought, I hadn’t heard her approach, but was unsurprised. It was a warm night, and several of the crew had already come out of the cave to enjoy the evening. Already, we were slipping into complacency. Barely ten days after the cessation of hostilities, our life here seemed nearly routine. That was a dangerous thing, I knew. But, right at that moment, I didn’t have the energy to do anything about it.

“Probably trying to figure out a way to kill us without getting into a straight fight,”I replied. She laughed.

“We’ve been scanning every segment of the electromagnetic spectrum to see if we can’t pick up some kind of language we can translate. No luck.”

“I don’t think you’ll have any luck, either. I think they communicate through light signals,” I told her. I had been considering this for a couple of days, and thought it was logical.

That would explain the constant blinking lights on every one of their machines, as well as the lack of audio on the TV and lack of radio transmissions or, at least, some equivalent.

She seemed to consider this.

“That’s going to make it a lot harder to communicate with them,” she said.

“Then you’d better hurry. In just under six standard months, I need to set the coordinates for the landing zone for the asteroid.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“I need you to be able to tell them that if they don’t remove their artillery by that time, I’m going to land a few hundred million tons of rock on their heads. I’m guessing they won’t enjoy the process.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Please Emily,” I said softly, “get me communicated so we can lay down a working truce by then. I don’t want to have to figure out how to get five million confused farmers out of 233

the asteroid while being attacked by the combined armies of the planet. Please.�

And I walked away, worrying about how I was going to get five million confused farmers out of a large rock while being shelled from every direction.

One thing was for sure: I would have to think of something.

234

Time Share That’ll show ‘em. I took a step back to make certain that the modifications were invisible to the naked eye. They were.

The titanium plate looked as if it was securely bolted to the rest of the armor. It would be impossible to tell the difference unless someone came in for a visual inspection, and I knew from the security reports that no one had been this deep for at least a couple of weeks.

But that wouldn’t keep the blinkers from investigating.

They might not be as advanced as we were, but they certainly were methodical. They would find the loose plate in no time, and work their way in. I knew it was a risk, but I could monitor the whole thing from the command center, and if it looked like they were going to come at us in force, I could organize a welcome. I wanted to teach the captain a lesson, not get us all killed.

But I suspected they would send a small number of troops in ahead of any major incursion – that kind of action would be much more consistent with the way they’d been operating so far.

I was feeling great, whistling a little tune as I walked back towards the security center.

I had finished throwing up, but my stomach was still unsettled. Who could have known that the blinkers would attack in such force and with such brutality? They’d torn through the whole squad that I’d sent over to check on the anomalous readings from the plate I’d loosened. If I closed my eyes, I could see the wall on which they’d splattered the poor souls; the wall had been shiny metal when I left, and looked like some sort of wet organic papier-mâché when I returned.

The image would live on in my nightmares for the rest of my life, along with their last transmission: a calm call for backup followed by an efficient voice saying that they were checking a loose plate and then the screams: terrified, high-pitched and cut 235

Gustavo Bondoni off as suddenly as they’d begun.

I’d gone down with the second unit in full battle armor and had managed to push back the blinkers’ strike force, twenty strong. But even we’d suffered some casualties. All told, my little trick with the plate had cost us six dead and another three badly injured. After the adrenaline had worn off, I’d been lucky to keep the contents of my stomach under control long enough to get back inside my quarters before letting it all go.

I knew just how hard I’d have to work to be able to look myself in the mirror in the future, but at least the captain couldn’t ignore the threat any longer.

A knock on the door brought me back up.

“Just a minute,” I called and frantically wiped my mouth, rearranged my hair and tried to get my face into some semblance of cold efficiency. Everyone knew I’d been in battle before, and looking so rattled after a skirmish might raise questions. As soon as something that looked like normality had been restored, I ran to the door and pressed the activator. Colonel Wang stood on the other side, her short black hair stuck to her scalp by helmet pressure and perspiration. I saluted.

“Jana, are you all right?” she asked. Wang was the kind of soldier who wouldn’t stand on formality in front of a junior officer, as long as the respect was clear.

“Yeah, I’m fine. It was quite a fight, though.”

The colonel’s eyes took on a sharp glint. “Yes, I heard.

And I saw the aftermath of the fight. Not pretty.”

My stomach heaved again. Thankfully, I’d already emptied it completely. “No.” “Any idea what might have happened?”

Was there suspicion behind the question? I had no way of telling, but I knew my course had been charted already. “Yes. A single plate of door armor covering one of the out-of-the way escape tunnels had been removed. My techs assure me that the studs had failed.”

“On a titanium-alloy plate?”

I shrugged. “We have millions of those studs used in various places. Having one crack under stress is possible, if 236

Time Share unlikely. Two on the same plate is very unlucky, but not unheard of.”

“Two?” “If only one let go, the other three would be strong enough to bear the load against anything the blinkers have shown us so far. But with two gone, they should have been able to get through easily enough.”

Wang thought about it for a moment. “Are we sure that was all that happened?”

I actually felt my gut freeze. “What do you mean?”

She gave me a steady look. “I have to look at this from every angle, and deal with the possible ramifications of each.

What if the blinkers are a little more advanced than they’ve shown so far? What if they’ve developed something that allows them to cut through our titanium alloys? They say war speeds technical development up to forty times its normal rate – and though we might not be shooting, this is definitely a war.”

Waves of relief replaced the ice. “We’re already looking into it. Is there anything else I can help you with, Colonel?” I asked, solicitous eagerness oozing from every pore – insincere, but convincing, I hoped.

“Are you up for a meeting with the council? I know you’ve been through a lot today, but it would be useful to have you there.”

I nodded. I’d been trying to find a way to get the council to listen to me for weeks and I’d spent the lives of six of my fellows to do it. I sure wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by. “Of course. Let me change into a more suitable uniform.”

Three minutes later we were walking down the main hall, a huge tunnel through the stone of the mountain, excavated by the plasma diggers two months before. No one had bothered to smooth out the ripples that plasma digging invariably entailed.

The council was waiting for us. Captain Stewart, Colonel Pendalai and a few other officers I knew by sight. And Emily.

Her presence was the one that hurt the most – of all the people who should have known better than to go along with the current policy, she was first on the list. I’d explained the danger to her a 237

Gustavo Bondoni thousand times, but she just didn’t want to hear it.

Well, they could take responsibility for the five million people, frozen in an asteroid above us, who would die because of their policies. I certainly wouldn’t. But then again, In all likelihood, I’d be just as dead.

“Lieutenant Carmel, thanks for coming,” the captain said, smiling warmly.

I wanted to spit in his face, but it wouldn’t have been any use. I saluted.

His smile widened. “No need for that formality here. I hear you had quite a fight this afternoon.”

“Yes, sir. We lost six soldiers.”

The smile vanished.

“How did it happen?”

“As far as we were able to ascertain, it was a material failure on a couple of the bolts in the armor. A freak accident.”

His piercing look made me I wonder whether he suspected something. Our beloved captain wasn’t an astrophysicist or even particularly smart, but that wasn’t why he’d been chosen. He was a natural leader, and he could easily motivate large groups of people to rush over cliffs, on just his word. On this particular expedition, he’d had to put that ability into practice more than once, first in the headlong rush towards shelter while the blinkers bombed us, and then in the fact that we weathered the siege without taking devastating action against the army blocking us in.

His job was to know how people think, and what buttons to push. And he knew that I was completely against waiting, that I wanted to take the war to the blinkers right now. To establish our territory by conquest, as opposed to negotiation. I believed that not only was the time we were losing precious to the colonists, but also that we couldn’t trust the natives to honor any agreements we did make. It would be much harder to mount a counter-attack with five million civilians in the way.

He knew that, too. “Is it likely to happen again?”

My only real option was to forge ahead and be as professional as possible. “No. We rechecked all the vulnerable 238

Time Share areas in the armor, and there’s nothing anywhere that they should be able to get through with the technology we’ve seen so far.”

“The technology we’ve seen so far?”

“I’m assuming that their wish to get rid of us is strong enough that they’re working on new tech as we speak. Who knows what they might bring against us next week.”

“Well, it is their planet after all.”

“And that gives them the right to wipe us out?”

“I don’t know. Since we haven’t been able to talk to them yet, there’s little I can contribute on the topic of their moral code.”

“Well, my moral code is against getting killed.”

The captain chuckled. “I’m well aware of that. What do you suggest, then?”

“We need to take the fight to the blinkers.” I held up a hand. I knew he was going to say that that was impossible.

“At the very least, we need to establish a perimeter they aren’t allowed to enter, and enforce it strongly.”

“How far out would you recommend it extend?” Emily interjected. I silently thanked her – she’d just moved the discussion from the advisability of my idea to the details.

“About half a click from each of the entrances to the tunnels, including the ones with armored ends.” We’d dug a pair of escape tunnels just in case, and armored them over – it had been one of these through which the attack had come.

“And what are we supposed to do with the blinkers already inside the perimeter?” the captain inquired.

I hesitated. If it were up to me, I’d sanitize the whole area with one of the plasma cannons we use on the diggers, but I knew that would never fly. “We’ve found some non-lethal alternatives we can use. We know enough about their body chemistry to be able to knock them out temporarily and move them beyond the perimeter. Of course it’s going to be rough going, especially in the tunnels, but if we do it sector by sector, we should be able to get it done in a few days.” And, I didn’t say, once we have the perimeter established we can use the open ground to stage an “accidental” attack – and hopefully provoke them into doing 239

Gustavo Bondoni something foolish – those plasma cannons of ours had extremely long range.

The captain thought about it for a few moments, and I could see the weight of command settling on his shoulders, all jocularity disappearing from his face. “All right. Do it. But I want the fewest number of native dead possible. Zero would be the number I’d aim for.”

“Yes sir.”

Up close, the blinkers looked like shaggy gray dogs the size of Earth cows, with dog-like muzzles and ears, but walking upright and possessing six-fingered hands with two sets of three opposing digits. The biggest difference with any mammal I’d ever heard of, though, were the organs that gave them their name: two bumps on their shoulders which emitted bright flashes of white light which our scientists believes was their main mode of communication.

They also smelled… strange, like a mixture of wet fur and the sharp tang of citrus.

The one at my feet would be unconscious for another hour, so I gritted my teeth as I watched the front-loader crew pick it carefully off the floor. All I wanted was to put a couple of chain-gun slugs into its head, but I held back. The two good men I’d lost clearing the tunnel would be avenged later. Right now, I was trying to follow the captain’s orders to the letter: no dead blinkers.

It would buy me some credibility when our little accidental war broke out.

I climbed aboard the loader, and signaled the driver.

“Let’s take out the trash,” I told him – he wasn’t one of my regular troops, but I thought his name was Marq.

He returned my smile and pushed the control stick forward. “Yes, ma’am. You’re the boss. You want me to pile it up with the rest?”

“Yeah, no point in putting it too far away. We want to use 240

Time Share them to send a message, to reinforce the limits of the perimeter we are going to enforce.”

“And to show them how benevolent we are, in the face of extreme provocation?”

I could get to like this guy. “Exactly. They can’t overlook the fact that we had them in our custody and didn’t kill a single individual. But they’ll probably overlook a few bruises, so you don’t need to drive like my grandmother.”

“Understood.”

The terrain rolled by. The mountain meadows, at least in motion and from a certain distance, looked so much like the terraformed places on Tau Ceti that I could almost feel the pang of homesickness in my stomach. It was only when you got down on hands and knees and looked closely at the vegetation that the alien nature of the landscape became evident. Each blade of grass was actually five individual strands, looped over each other and linked to a stalk on the bottom. Only the green color and general layout made it look Earth-like.

Soon enough, we reached the pile of unconscious natives.

“Wasn’t there supposed to be a guard here?” I asked.

He looked puzzled. “He was here when I left. Maybe he’s out on patrol or something.”

I saw no sign of violence. If the blinkers had been there, it was unlikely they’d have left their unconscious fellows lying on the plain in an unruly heap.

“Put him down beside the others,” I told him. I walked over to the pile of aliens. When you saw a large group of them together, individual differences could be seen. One might have a longer snout, another might have bushier fur. There were thinner and fatter ones.

The smell of blinker was nearly overpowering here, worse even than it had been inside the tunnel. But something was wrong. I looked around, but could see nothing amiss for miles on the plain.

Then it hit me. I was standing upwind of the pile of bodies. The smell couldn’t be so strong. I was reaching for my plasgun when the vegetation underneath me suddenly pushed 241

Gustavo Bondoni up as if on springs. I shot at least ten feet into the air, and, as I rotated slowly, before heading towards the ground, I thought I saw the hand of a blinker reach out from under the displaced sod.

Then the hillside came up to meet me, and the world went dark.

Darkness still reigned when I came to once again. I lay on a hard floor in some lightless place trying to get some sense of what was happening.

The first input was pain. My wrist must have been broken – or at least badly sprained – in the impact with the ground, because I could feel it throbbing. I Tried to move it into a more comfortable position, but first succeeded in giving it a sharp knock against a wall of some sort. Rough, damp and cool, it didn’t seem high-tech, but it also wasn’t natural – not stone, but certainly not titanium armor.

“Hello?” I said. My voice sounded insignificant in the darkness, but its echo came back to me quickly, perhaps too quickly. Wherever I was was a tiny enclosure. But where was it?

The next thing I noticed seemed to answer the question.

A sharp, citrus aroma suddenly wafted in, and my stomach sank.

I’d never smelled the blinker’s scent so strongly. Even piles of ten captured individuals had less odor – although the fact that they were unconscious might mean that the smell was less powerful.

There were only two possible explanations: either there were a large number of the creatures nearby, or there were few but they were active. Neither alternative was particularly attractive.

I needed to figure out my status. Was I a prisoner or had I fallen through a crack of some kind and gone unnoticed? The fact that I was unbound seemed to indicate the latter, but my plasgun was nowhere to be found, so it might be the former.

There was only one way to be completely certain. I got 242

Time Share gingerly to my knees – the oppressive darkness had convinced me that the space I was in had to have an extremely low ceiling – and began to feel the wall with my uninjured hand, from the floor upward, first.

A good thing, too. I would have added another blow to the head to my recent collection as the roof, of the same rough, hard material, was about a meter and a half above the floor.

Now that I knew where my upper limit was, I quickly traced the contour of my surroundings once, and then again and again.

It didn’t take very long to do this. I was very effectively enclosed in a room that seemed to be about two meters long by one wide. There were no openings whatsoever in the walls: no door, no joints between stones and no vents of any type.

It was this last discovery that kept me searching, since I could distinctly feel a current of air passing through the niche.

But there were no gaps. None. The only explanation I could think of was simply a porous wall.

I was essentially entombed inside a coffin-like structure.

Maybe this is what the blinkers did to their prisoners of war. Or maybe they particularly didn’t like me. At least I didn’t have time to dwell on my situation very long. The room began to vibrate, softly at first and then in a more pronounced manner.

It felt like a road vehicle going over a rutted surface; perhaps they were moving me.

Or maybe it was part of their torture. I would have to wait and see.

Air. Despite the draft flowing through my prison, there was simply nothing like finally getting a rush of fresh air and, even better, daylight. I would have liked to push against the opening and spring out at whoever – or, more likely, whatever – was on the other side, but my body felt sluggish, unresponsive.

I must have been inside the coffin for two days, at least, without food or the desire to move. Water had dripped in through the permeable walls, and I’d lapped it up like a dog.

I moved slowly to the crack and let my eyes get accustomed to the glare as my muscles unkinked. I stretched, 243

Gustavo Bondoni hoping the blinkers had made a mistake and would give me a target and an opportunity.

The lid must have been a serious piece of precision engineering, because I certainly hadn’t felt a seam despite searching for hours, and as I knelt there, it opened all the way, leaving me face to face with a pair of white-furred blinkers.

No mammal should have faceted eyes, and yet these two did, the eyes reflected nearly everything, and still managed to give the impression of blackness.

I had no illusions about my chances. Despite their rather bovine appearance, these aliens were not a gentle race. They’d been bombing each other before we arrived, and had only stopped to concentrate their efforts on us. They would not be gentle with a captured invader.

Anger welled up inside me. If these things were going to torture me and then kill me, I certainly wasn’t going to make it easy for them. I jumped as quickly as I could out of the box and went after this one’s most sensitive organs – those obscene faceted eyes, which they used not only to see where they were going, but also to interpret the flashes that its race used as language.

I would leave it blind and incommunicado in one stroke.

One final defiant gesture before they tore me to shreds.

I managed to land a fist on one of the eyes, and it surprised me. It was much stronger than a human eye, as if it were covered with hard acryliplast. I don’t think I even managed to dent it at all before the creature reacted and jumped back. Its companion stepped into the breach and soon had me under control – it must have weighed two hundred kilos at least; nearly four times my weight. There was nothing whatsoever I could do about it.

Oh well, at least I could say that I died while trying to do something to hurt the bastards. I relaxed and waited for the inevitable. Would they shoot me? Tear out my throat? Or simply sit on me until I suffocated?

The answer surprised me. Working together, the two blinkers gently but firmly placed me back in the box and closed the lid, suppressing my most frantic efforts to get back out.

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Time Share

It didn’t make sense. This was a race that had shot at every single attempt we’d made to speak to them. They’d even shot at us when we were in orbit about their planet.

And yet, unless I was sorely mistaken, they were now trying to speak to me. Over the next couple of days after I attempted to attack the blinker, they pulled me out of my box every few hours, never mistreating me, always waiting to see what I would do. I attacked the nearest one each time, hoping that this time they would either make a mistake and let me escape or end it all.

No such luck. Each time, they used their superior mass and numbers to put me away as if they were manipulating a valuable piece of glassware, the lights on their skin blinking urgently all the time, as if speaking at an enormous rate. I didn’t even have any bruises to show for my attempts at xenocide.

After a few rounds of this, I decided to come quietly and see what would happen, and that’s when they started trying to talk.

Well, not right away. First they just stood there and winked little lights on and off at me. I suppose they were either talking among themselves or trying to see if I had any understanding whatsoever of the basics of their language. I must have been a disappointment to them, because all their winking was nothing more than pretty lights to me.

It should have come as no surprise. Our best people had been studying their blinking and attempting to decipher it for nearly two months. As far as they’d been able to tell, there was no pattern to the blinking – the distribution of light intensity and blink length was close to random.

In fact, the only thing I could see now that they were facing me was that the color in the center of their blinkers – the two large glassy, irising bumps on their shoulders that emitted the light, were changing colors as they winked. Yellow, red, blue.

And although the white light flashed randomly in all directions, 245

Gustavo Bondoni it was clear that the shift in the color patterns was deliberate and slow. And suddenly I understood.

The flashing lights we’d been seeing from our vantage point – very bright and very obvious – wasn’t the language that the blinkers used to communicate. I didn’t know what it was; perhaps a waste product created by the communication organs as they changed colors. But it certainly wasn’t their language.

They spoke by changing the colors of the blinkers, and they needed those huge, faceted eyes to be able to make sure they could ‘hear’ one another.

I assumed that this is what they were trying to tell me, and I signaled that I understood, but I don’t think it came across too well. In the end, their flashing became very agitated once again, and they put me back in my box.

This time I had a lot to think about.

This exercise was repeated every few hours until they finally let me go. Either they’d decided that I understood them or they’d decided I was too dense and that they would have to capture a smarter human. Either way, it was quite evident that they were in a big hurry. They simply dropped me down in front of their forces surrounding the mountain we called home and pointed their weapons at me until I began walking up the slope.

At that point, they seemed to lose interest in me and faced each other. No. They hadn’t lost interest. They were discussing me amongst themselves – they could only talk while facing each other.

I staggered towards the nearest unsealed tunnel. After nearly four days without food or any meaningful exercise, the gentle rise covered with the local pseudo-grass seemed like climbing a sheer cliff.

I wondered what my security people would make of me.

They’d wonder how I managed to escape. I wasn’t too clean, but fortunately, the walls of my prison had been advanced enough to not only let in air and water, but also to remove excess waste.

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Time Share They’d definitely want an explanation.

And I wasn’t exactly certain what I would tell them. It was quite clear that the blinkers were trying to find a way to sue for peace. Their instruments had probably detected the incoming asteroid, and they’d decided that they needed our help in dealing with it. They probably didn’t know that it was ours, or that it was filled with colonists. All they could see was a world-killer coming towards them. And here we were, an advanced race that might be able to tell them what to do about it.

Oh, yes, they were suing for peace. The question was, did I want to let my superiors know it? Did I want humanity to establish communication with a race that had killed a good number of my people, or should I keep my information to myself? When the colonists landed, we’d have no choice but to take more aggressive measures against the blinkers, beating them into some sort of submission. It would be extremely satisfying.

“Stop right there. Show me your hands.”

The guard had his plasgun pointed right between my eyes.

“Hi there Joaquín,” I said.

“Jana?” Shock flashed across his features. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m all right, I guess. A bit tired, though. Can you help me up the hill?”

He fell all over himself holstering his weapon and giving me an arm to hold on to. Now that I was back, I was his superior officer again. He radioed in his report and we trudged upward once more, with Joaquín bearing most of the weight.

We soon reached the tunnel mouth. A cart was ready to whisk me to my quarters, where I found the captain and Emily waiting by the door. They smiled at me. “Welcome back,” the captain said.

I wasn’t in the mood for his politicking. “What about the rest of them?” I blurted. I knew that at least two members of my team had been involved in the attack in one way or another.

It was Emily who replied. “Marq didn’t make it. He reacted in time and resisted the assault, and was taken down.

247

Gustavo Bondoni Not much left of the load-truck either.”

I nodded. Another reason to wipe the bastards off the face of the planet. “And the guard? Sergi?”

“We don’t know. When both of you went missing after the shootout, we thought they’d killed you too.” She gave me a searching look. “How did you manage to escape, anyway?”

“They got careless. Turned away for a second and I ran.

When I got to the perimeter, it seemed like they refused to go any further, and they just stopped and let me go.”

They’d never buy it. I would be arrested and interrogated by my own people. But the captain surprised me. “That sounds about right. There’s an imaginary line now, which they haven’t come across for any reason for a couple of days now. Something is going on, but I don’t know what and it’s driving me nuts. Do you have any idea what it might be?”

I gave him a steady look. “I’m sorry sir. I was locked in a box.”

I woke in a cold sweat. I had no idea how long I’d been under, but the dream had left me completely unable to get back to sleep. It had been one of those dreams with obvious meaning. We’d conquered the planet and established a human hegemony, using the blinkers as menials when suddenly huge grey spacecraft disgorged advanced machines which attempted to conquer us. We fought them to a standstill but suddenly the blinkers changed sides and we were overrun. All of that passed in a flash, and the dream-image I would always remember was that of the lid closing as the blinkers put me back in my box. I knew that this time, they wouldn’t be opening it ever again.

It was one of those nightmares that any child could interpret. My conscience was obviously worried about the fact that I had the power to bring peace to this planet, and was choosing to wipe out a sentient race. But then again, it was obvious that, had they been able to, they would have done the same to us.

248

All I had to do was to tell the tech division that the blinkers’ flashing lights meant nothing, and that their true communication was done by simple color change patterns. That was it, they would do the rest. Their pattern-recognition software along with a couple of long-range observation devices would allow them to crack the language in no time flat.

Screw it. I would let them decide their own fate. They still had one of our guards. If they thought I had the information they needed to deliver, they didn’t need him, so they would probably dispose of the poor guy.

But if they let him go, I would give the captain their message.

Decision made, I tried to get back into a comfortable position.

Two days later, I watched in silence from the mouth of a tunnel as one of the perimeter patrols helped an emaciated man in a soiled guard uniform climb the hill. His eyes were sunken, and I could tell that he was very weak, probably from hunger. Two patrolmen dragged him up the hill as his legs only sometimes managed to support his weight.

But he was alive.

I felt a weight lift off my shoulders as I turned back towards the interior of our mountain to go search for the captain.

I had some news he’d want to hear.

249

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine writer with over eighty stories published in eight countries, both online and in print. He is a winner in the National Space Society’s “Return to Luna” Contest and won the Marooned Award for Flash Fiction in 2008. His fiction has appeared in three Hadley Rille Books Anthologies, The Rose & Thorn, Albedo One, The Best of Every Day Fiction and others, and has also been published in Spanish and Greek translation.

He can be found online at www.gustavobondoni.com.ar and at http://bondo_ba.livejournal.com