Early Byrd (2 page)

Dad still wasn't smiling, so I was sort of
afraid to speak up. But Tim wasn't. "I . . .
Sir, I don
’
t understand."

"It's the Treaty, Tim," Dad answered, though
it sounded as if the words were being ripped from his throat. "We
signed it, and now we
must
obey it. All the more because I'm
a congressman, I fear. There's no getting around it."

"What about the Treaty?" I finally asked.
"What does it have to do with Tim and me?"

Dad closed his eyes
for a moment
, and then squatted down to
address us on our own level. "A lot of things," he finally
explained. "More than most people anywhere understand yet. But in
your cases . . ." He took in a deep, ragged breath then released
it. "For you two, it means that you, along with a few others from
other important nations on Earth, have to go live on Artemis and be
raised as Artemu."

"But why?" Timmy asked. His voice quavered,
and I felt my eyes filling with tears. This wasn't a good thing
to do
in front of an
alien—I made two fists and somehow forced the liquid back through
sheer willpower.

"You're to become hostages," Rapput
explained, still smiling. "Or at least that's the closest word in
your language I'm aware of. It's not an accurate translation of the
concept."

"Hostages?" I asked, ignoring the Artemesian
and looking deep into Dad's eyes. "But . . ."

"He's right when he says the word's not a
perfect match," Dad explained, though he had to turn away. "Because
we put up such a fight they want us to become more like
mercenaries—
or perhaps even
partners
—than a conquered people. Eventually, that is.”

"Absolutely!" Rapput added. "More than
anything! There's no reason why our kinds shouldn't get along
splendidly, once we develop a sense of mutual respect and
understanding. And you two . . ." He reached out and laid his hands
on our heads again; apparently the gesture was meaningful to him in
a way I didn't understand. ". . . have been selected from the most
noble youths of your entire clan to be adopted by my own!"

I blinked again. "Adopted?"

He nodded. "And raised to become Artemu
nobles, equal in almost every way with our biological children.
Thus in time we shall bind our worlds and our peoples and become in
essence one, far stronger and more powerful together than the sum
of our parts. The universe shivers in terror of this day, in fear
of the glory that our kinds working together shall surely win."

He spread his arms wide in what looked like
a benediction on Tim and I. "You two are the luckiest boys on
Earth!"

3

Dad didn't agree about our being so lucky, of
course. And Mom even less so. "Do
not
tell me
I have to feed that . . . that
fiend
at our family table!” she hissed. “Not when he's going
to . . . to . . ."

"Easy, babe," Dad said, reassuring her with
a hug. "We have no choice in the matter. You understand that." He
kissed her gently, even though we could all see he was hurting as
badly as she was. "We're a strong family. We'll see this through,
somehow. Now . . . Yes, I fear we do indeed have to serve the
bastard a good meal. The best we can offer, in fact, with a smile.
In honor not of him but our own children. It may be their last
home-cooking for a long time to come."

Mom pulled away from the embrace at that,
then softened and nodded. "For them," she agreed. "Not him." Then
she hugged each of us again for maybe the third time in an hour and
marched off to the kitchen, head high.

"Dad," I finally had time to ask. "What . .
. I mean . . ."

He looked at the floor, then
went
to his favorite chair, the one
under the stuffed head of a Boone and Crockett mountain goat he'd
bagged before Tim and I were born. "I never wanted for us to sign
that damned treaty," he muttered as if we weren't there. Then he
closed his eyes and leaned way back. "But we had no choice. Only
total fools would've fought on any further. They controlled space,
you see. We could fight off their landing parties—
did
fight
them off every single time, in fact, though the cost was horrible.
But once they threatened to start dropping rocks on us, well . .
."

"Rocks?" Timothy asked. Clearly he was as
bewildered as I was. "Rocks can't hurt tanks. Or fighter
planes."

Dad smiled and gestured for us to climb on
his lap. It'd been a long time since we'd done that; by now we were
far too big. But it seemed
right
then and there,
somehow.

"Big enough rocks can," he explained.
"Especially when they fall all the way from the Moon or so. In
fact, they can wreck entire planets. But by then the Artemu wanted
to take us intact, you see. And they wanted it bad."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because of the way we kept fighting them
off," Dad explained. "Again and again and again. They tried landing
in Kansas City first, but they'd never seen anything like an Abrams
tank before, or a stealth aircraft." He smiled. "They didn’t invent
Chobham armor or work out the equations that can make an airplane
invisible to radar. We Americans tossed their asses right back off
the planet."

Tim and I both nodded. Dad had won an
important decoration called the Medal of Courage or something like
that at Kansas City. Supposedly he was the main reason we won the
battle without taking even worse losses than we did, and that was
also part of why he was a congressman now. Americans appreciated
their heroes more than ever these days.

"Then the Japanese did the same, and next
the Koreans. So the Artemu tried to land on Madagascar to establish
a base we'd have a hard time getting to, and then freaked out when
we all worked together and beat them there as well." His eyes
flashed; he'd been at Madagascar as well, and had gotten caught in
a fallout pattern. We'd grown up knowing he still might die any
time from it. "It was only then that the Artemu even considered
negotiating. They hadn't negotiated a peace in living memory. Their
way is to conquer and dominate, not to co-exist."

"But . . ." Tim asked, shifting position.
The chair was much too crowded to be comfortable. "Why didn't they
just ruin Earth with rocks then, like you said?"

"For anyone else, they would've," Dad
explained. "But we impressed them, you see. In a way that no other
enemy since their own unification wars has. They never once broke a
human high-level code that we know of, while we decrypted their
stuff almost at will toward the end. And when we nuked our own
territory, with our own troops still in the blast zone, they began
to respect us by the only standards they value. The truth is that
given equal technology, especially in terms of space drives, we'd
have stood a good chance of kicking their asses. So, given a choice
between rendering us extinct and trying to make use of us, they've
swallowed their pride in the name of pragmatism and are treating us
the same way they treated the losers in an
intraspecies
clan war back when they still
had such things. That's their historical model and precedent, you
see. The idea is to absorb us and become stronger, not destroy a
potential source of newfound strength. In theory, we're supposed to
be both flattered and deeply honored to be deemed worthy."

"But
we're
not
honored," I observed.

"Hell, no!" Dad pounded the arm of his
chair; he was a powerful man and it was if a thunderbolt had
struck. "The Artemu are a bunch of amoral, socially-stratified
empire-builders whose infantile values we humans—or at least most
of we humans—abandoned long ago. They're forcing us to put our own
economy on a permanent war footing and slicing our standard of
living to the bone." He shook his head. "It's a huge step back for
us all, in every possible way. Yet so long as they can drop rocks
on us, what else can we do?"

I thought about a big rock falling all the
way from the Moon. Why, it might wipe out an entire shopping mall!
"Wow," I finally said.

"So," Dad explained, squeezing us
extra-tight for a moment. "They're going to take you two away from
us—there's nothing anyone, not even a congressman, can do about it.
They consider our family to be the nearest thing American society
has to a warrior-nobility class, and I guess that's my fault. I
swear to you, if I'd known I'd never have run for this seat in the
first place."

"It was Grandpa Davis, too," Timothy
replied. "He was a governor once."

I nodded. "And Great-Uncle Herman that you
named me after. He won the same medal you did in Vietnam."

Dad nodded then turned away. "I guess I
should've seen it coming after all, when you put it like that. By
Artemu standards, our family
is
a sort of warrior/noble
clan. They did their homework better than I realized." He frowned
for a long moment, and then met each of our eyes in turn. "Our
ancestors fought for much better reasons than the Artemu do, and
certainly in defense of better causes. Their ultimate goal is to
raise you, who they consider our best and brightest, as part of the
highest level of their society so that you absorb their values and
culture. Then they plan to someday return you here to positions of
high leadership, so that with a foot in each world you might act as
cultural intermediaries and smooth the transition for the rest of
us."

"They want us to become traitors," I said
softly.

"Not from the Artemesian point of view," he
replied. "They'll see you as honorable leaders with an especially
difficult task to perform, individuals of the highest courage and
honor. Or at least their elite will.
I doubt
the ground-floor mutts will be so
open-minded." He licked his lips and considered further. "From
their point of view, you'd be the highest sort of patriots, not
traitors. Doing what's clearly best for Artemu and humanity alike.
As I said, this is precisely how they unified their own clans. Or
so they say. It's not like we can fact-check them on the matter."
He sighed. "It all boils down to where you're sitting and what you
think is right and what's wrong, I suppose."

"Invading peaceful planets is wrong," Tim
declared.

"Not if you believe in the glory of Empire,"
Dad disagreed. Then he laid his head back again. "I can't speak for
the Artemu, but for most people deciding what's right and what's
wrong is life's most difficult yet most important task. Some seek
guidance in holy books, others in the words of men widely
considered to be wise. I'm your father, and one of my most
important obligations is to help you find your own truth." He
sighed again, his breath catching as if he were on the edge of
weeping. "I've done my best so far, but . . ." He hugged us one
last time. "Sons, never forget three things. First is that both
your mom and I love you more than life itself. Second is that what
you're doing really
is
both honorable and important. I can't
know what the future will bring, but whatever it is you're sure to
play a central role in it. It's not your fault that you were placed
in such an impossible situation, and because you'll be trapped in
the middle neither human nor Artemu will ever be in a fair position
to judge you. But third . . ." Finally he broke out sobbing, so
badly that his words were nearly lost in his sorrow. "Never, ever
forget that you're
human
, dammit! Not of a noble bloodline, but a
deeply
American
one! Which is
better.
We don't do
bloodlines here! Nobility lies at the root of many of mankind's
deepest and darkest evils, as I hope and pray you'll never forget
no matter how many peaceful planets you're required to invade and
whatever fancy titles you're forced to accept."

4

As it happened, Tim and I received our first noble
titles just after breakfast the next morning. Rapput, who judging
by outward appearances had just discovered one of the major loves
of his life in bacon and eggs, formally adopted us into the Clan of
Gonther while Mom was still clearing away the crockery. Out of
nowhere, three more Artemu appeared. Two carried a blood-red robe
apiece, while the third recorded the proceedings with what might as
well have been a human-made camera.

Rapput smiled and handed us the robes. "In
donning these most-honorable garments," he explained, "you
officially become my clan-brothers and nephews." He turned to Dad.
"There will of course be a public and more impressive ceremony on
the homeworld. But for convenience's sake it's best to formalize
the adoption immediately. Now that they're legally Artemu, for
example, they can travel freely on our ships and receive full
protection under our laws."

As one, Tim and I looked at Dad. But he
merely nodded, which was no surprise. Slowly and reluctantly, as if
we were swimming in molasses, we slipped the robes on. The garments
were made of something silky—soft and so translucent that obviously
we were expected to wear our normal clothes underneath. Plus,
whoever'd made them got the sleeves wrong; they were much too
short, and there was something off about the way they were attached
at the shoulder. Perhaps they'd been custom sewn by Artemu
tailors?

"Magnificent!" Rapput declared, breaking
first into a Posture I didn’t know—there were so many!—and then
into applause. Oddly, the two species had developed the habit
independently. Perhaps applause too was an inevitable outcome of
carbon-based life, it being so natural and obvious for a being to
slap its appendages together in order to make a happy noise?

The two other Artemu each dropped to one
knee before us for a moment, then stood up and applauded as well.
Even Mom and Dad clapped after being prompted by a dirty look from
Rapput, followed by a glance at the camera. Mom was crying again,
of course, and that was pretty awful. But Dad had made us promise
to try not shed tears in public at moments like this, and somehow
both Tim and I maintained dry cheeks.