A Planet for Rent (22 page)

Three of them.

An ideal number.

Two men and one woman.

Or, even more precisely, two male humans and one female human.

The female is Friga.

Friga doesn’t much resemble the usual idea of “what a woman should be.”

Isn’t slender with swaying hips, long legs, and smoothly curved breasts.

Doesn’t have a heart-shaped mouth, doll-like eyes, and huge ovaries.

Friga has skin as dark as ebony and pearly white teeth. She’s six foot two and two hundred pounds of muscles bulked up by the same illegal steroids that atrophied her ovaries to the size of beans after she gave birth.

A jaw like a concrete block, and a legendarily bad temper.

What you call a real butch or virago.

But those who know how she reacts to those words would never risk the consequences.

The last guy who did will never risk anything again. Ever.

Friga isn’t a whole-hearted lesbian. It’s just that she finds it harder and harder to find a man who would risk carrying on even an occasional relationship with her.

And since some women find her desirable, and she’s never been too choosy...

Friga has no visible means of support, aside from crime.

Never has.

She’s done robbery, trafficking—any job that turns up and pays well enough.

Her physique is too distinctive for her to work as a scammer or a con artist.

She’s killed a couple of times.

Out of anger, not for work or for pleasure.

She isn’t a professional killer or a psychopath.

She’s spent eight hellish long years of her life in Body Spares, sentenced for various offenses.

She doesn’t remember much about those years... She only knows that she doesn’t want to get sentenced again.

That’s her motivation for setting out on the Voyage.

People say she has a daughter, a little girl, by the name of Leilah, but that she doesn’t much care about her.

She may be coarse and uneducated and have a limited vocabulary, but she’s a perfect survivor, and a natural leader.

She always knows what to do in every situation.

And she does it without a word of complaint.

They are Adam and Jowe.

Adam is tall, young, gangly, and clumsy.

He uses artificial lenses because he wore out his own eyes long ago staring at holoscreens and browsing through technical reference manuals that are so old, they’re actually printed on paper.

Adam can build anything, using nothing but bits of trash, patience, and inventiveness.

From a hyperengine to a high-powered ruby laser.

Some say he could manage even if there weren’t any trash available...

He’s a super-handyman.

A genius of technobricolage, convinced that his talent is pitifully wasted on building illegal arms and other brilliant doohickeys.

His usual clients are people like Friga.

He’s just gotten out of eight months in Body Spares on account of some masers he made, which later on were supplied to some Yakuzas.

And Body Spares wasn’t what you might call his cup of tea.

He was conscious almost the whole time he served as a “horse.”

He was mounted by a guzoid from Regulus who was very interested in extreme experiences.

Purely sexual and other sorts.

He survived.

But he still has scars...

He dreads having to go through something like that again, which he knows will be very hard for him to avoid given the only kind of life he’s ever been able to live.

Though his sentence also had its upside.

That was how he met Jowe.

Jowe is still young, but his face already looks like a weathered chunk of rock.

Jowe would be handsome, with his golden bangs and his big blue eyes, if they weren’t as icy as the blue of chrome-vanadium steel.

Jowe has dead eyes.

The eyes of a person whose soul must have frozen.

His eyes look like the sort that have seen everything there is to see about pain, betrayal, disappointment... and more.

Jowe is intelligent, seems well educated, has delicate, sensitive, skillful hands, like an artist’s.

He never talks about his past.

In general, Jowe rarely talks...

Jowe just gazes straight ahead, at the stars.

And his gaze is terrifyingly empty, doesn’t hold much hope.

Barely even a motivation to keep on living.

Even Friga, who isn’t afraid of anyone or anything, sometimes gets a chill around Jowe.

The idea of the Voyage was Jowe’s, and when he speaks of it, the words that emerge from his lips sound like beauty itself.

The Voyage is the Exodus.

Like in the Bible.

Escaping from the kingdom of Pharaoh in search of the Promised Land.

In the Promised Land there are clusters of grapes so large it takes two men to lift them, and there’s work and opportunity for all.

The rivers flow with milk and honey, and every enterprising man can achieve his dreams of wealth.

The Promised Land is any land but Earth.

Humans aren’t exactly the Chosen People, but...

The Promised Land belongs to the Philistines, and nobody promised it to the people of Earth.

The Philistines are the power behind Pharaoh’s throne.

Xenoids who manipulate the Planetary Tourism Agency puppet and who despise the Earthlings.

Philistines who don’t want humans to enjoy the same quality of life that they do, because they fear their worlds might be polluted by the inferior race.

The xenoids are mighty in arms and money, so sword and purse are unlikely methods to win victories against them and their Planetary Security puppets.

What’s left is shrewdness and cunning.

That is, entering the Promised Land by stealth.

Taking advantage of the fact that not all Philistines think alike, that there are some who patrol the borders of their kingdoms looking for hands to work in their fields.

The fact that there are always a few “compassionate” sorts who take in runaway humans and, in exchange for the runaways’ virtual slave labor in their factories, keep them hidden for three years and three days.

After that period, if the human can show that he has remained among the Philistines the whole time, he gets a chance to become a citizen of the Promised Land.

A second-class citizen, of course.

But at least that’s something, and it’s better to suffer directly under the yoke of the Philistines than to do it under their puppet Pharaoh.

Better the Promised Land than its virtual colony, Earth.

Shrewdness and cunning, then, mean escaping.

The Voyage means Escaping.

Escaping is no easy matter.

There are two huge obstacles: Distance and Surveillance.

Distance is a serious business all by itself.

To get to the Promised Land you must always cross some desert first.

The stars that the worlds of the xenoids orbit are light-years away.

They are separated from Earth by an endless desert of empty space, which hyperships cross in a matter of seconds.

But only xenoids have the technology to build safe hyperships.

Though hyperengine construction is well within the reach of many human “super-handymen” such as Adam, the steering and power control systems are another kettle of fish.

A homemade hyperengine built on Earth works only once... and the ship that uses it can return to ordinary space almost anywhere.

Maybe near a solar system full of xenoids, maybe a thousand parsecs from any stellar bodies.

Or in the middle of a gas nebula, or inside a globular cluster.

Fortunately, the structure of the hyperengine itself prevents it from working very close to large masses.

There’s no danger of materializing in a space that’s already occupied by a sun or planet.

The flip side is that in order to activate a homemade hyperengine without control systems, you first have to get some distance away from the plane of the ecliptic containing the Sun, Earth, and the other planets.

The only way to get far enough away is by conventional propulsion, relying on the law of action and reaction.

Ballistically, the safest trajectory for getting as far away from the plane of the ecliptic as quickly as possible with minimum fuel consumption is by traveling almost perpendicular to Earth’s orbit.

The safe zone is no more than twenty arcminutes wide.

In the semisecret, semitechnical jargon of those who aim to make the Voyage, this route is called the Escape Tunnel.

Naturally, Planetary Security is also familiar with it and keeps it under constant surveillance.

Planetary Security was created, and exists, to maintain control.

Control means, among other things, stopping Voyages by all possible means.

All possible means add up to a multi-level system.

The first level includes everything from surprise raids in search of the hideouts where homemade ships are built, to generous payments to an extensive network of informants who are retained to locate those hideouts, to ultratight controls on all the raw materials and instruments used to manufacture space engine parts.

The second level is the network of Earth-based radars that rake the atmosphere with their invisible fingers day and night, distinguishing between commercial aerobus flights and any Unidentified Flying Object taking off from the planet.

The third level is the system of orbiting radars that similarly distinguish between shuttles bearing passengers or cargo to hyperships waiting at docking points and any Unidentified Flying Object that attains escape velocity.

The main players at these last two levels are the high-tech patrol ships that the xenoids supply to Planetary Security.

With crews of six, these super-aerodynamic, Mach 3 suborbital patrol ships are loaded with weaponry.

If an Unidentified Flying Object turns out to be a homemade ship headed for the Escape Tunnel, the crews on every patrol ship have instructions to open fire and destroy it.

After, of course, trying to communicate by radio first, and after warning the craft that it absolutely must return to Earth.

Generally speaking, the primitive communications gear on a homemade ship is completely incapable of working while the ship climbs into orbit, when it is subjected to an acceleration of several
g
and enveloped by static.

So the Planetary Security guys often forget the step of trying to communicate, or simply skip it.

And they fire on the homemade ships without further ado.

If the ships manage to slip through the first three levels of the surveillance system, there’s still the fourth and final one.

The hardest one.

After a few modifications, suborbital patrol ships designed for operating in or very near the atmosphere can also be effective in deep space.

Their crews reduced to three men each in order to carry the maximum fuel loads possible, modified patrol ships orbit in the vicinity of the Escape Tunnel on shifts lasting several weeks, scrutinizing the Tunnel with their sensitive instruments all the while.

Surveillance like this is, obviously, very difficult to elude.

But there’s always a possibility.

Friga, Adam, and Jowe are gambling it all on that possibility.

And on their knowledge of earlier attempts, in order to make their own plan better.

Now that several dozen people have attempted it, and even succeeded in one case out of fifty, aficionados have a wealth of technical information on the Voyage.

Information that, of course, is shared only by word of mouth.

It needs not be said that any mention of the Escape Tunnel is superforbidden and ultracensored.

The data come from three main sources.

Positive feedback from the few lucky ones who managed to get to the xenoid worlds and were later able to tell how they had done it.

Also, feedback from the members of their “support staff” who stayed behind on Earth, spreading information in the form of rumors about the most successful techniques and ship models.

And as negative feedback, stories about how the unsuccessful ones managed so badly.

If all the folklore on the Voyage and Voyage Vehicles were compiled in one place, it would take terabytes of memory to store it.

There’s been a bit of everything.

Ships camouflaged as commercial aerobuses to circumvent earth-based surveillance.

Using solar sails, a form of passive propulsion that is almost undetectable by a patrol ship’s instruments, to get inside the Escape Tunnel unnoticed.

Ships with several “disposable, single-use” hyperengines, to increase the chances of getting somewhere by being able to make more than one hyperspace jump.

Vehicles tricked out with handcrafted armor, and loaded with illegal weaponry such as lasers and masers, to resist and respond to any attack by Planetary Security ships.

Modular ships that break into independent small craft in order to confuse the pursuing patrols, or, if that turns out to be impossible, so the pilots might escape with their lives back to Earth, able to try it again in the future.

Vehicles with onboard anabiosis systems so the crew can remain in suspended animation... for all eternity, if their luck runs out and they return to three-dimensional space too far from a xenoid settlement…

Yes, there’s been a bit of everything.

Based on all these brilliant and desperate solutions, Friga, Adam, and Jowe have designed and built, with nearly endless ingenuity and patience, their own passport to happiness.

Their escape vehicle, which they have christened the
Hope
.

The
Hope
is a genuine marvel of improvisation.

It ought to have the old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” written in gold across its bow.