Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (56 page)

*

The hotel was two levels down, a terrace landscaped as rolling parkland, with lawns and colorful flowerbeds, and clumps of trees grown into puffy clouds of leaves the way they did in microgravity. Little carts ambled here and there between the cabins. Baker had been to Phoebe more than fifty or sixty times, but he had never before been here. This was where vips from Earth stayed, along with
novo abastado
industrialists and miners who rendezvoused here to make deals because the Redeemers were scrupulous about commercial confidentiality.
Jackson had to sign Baker in. Blinking on the flash of the retinal print camera, he sat next to her on a cart that took them deep into the level. A sky projection hid the rocky ceiling high above; in the middle air, a couple of people were trolling about on gossamer wings. The guests could hunt here, too, Jackson said, although the meat remained the property of the Redeemers.
"You buy a license to go out and shoot one of the little cows or mammoths they have here, and then you pay all over again if you want a steak."
Baker said, "You ever done it?"
"I've other fish to fry," she said.
He was very aware of her warmth next to him on the bench seat of the cart, her hips and shoulders touching his. He was also aware of his sidekick's unhappiness; it hadn't stopped complaining since he'd accepted Jackson's invitation. She's an old friend, Baker told it, and it said, Yes, but everyone is your friend and that's why I give you advice you'd do best to listen to.
But Jackson
was
an old friend, a very special friend. A war comrade, maybe even a lover. Although Baker didn't remember anything specific, he definitely felt that they had once had something special, and she seemed to think so too. For all the edge she tried to put into her voice and body language, her trust was quite wonderfully naïve.
The cart rolled over neatly trimmed green grass at a leisurely walking pace
and circled around a big stand of bamboos and yellow-flowered mimosa, and there was one of the cabins, a dome turfed over with grass, little round windows like rabbit holes glinting here and there. A door dilated as the cart approached, and then they were inside a big room with carpet all over the walls and pits for places to sit or sleep. When Baker remarked on the size of the place, Jackson said that it didn't matter how big a cell it was, it was still a cell.
"I thought this was cool at first," she said, "but I'd just upgraded is all. I'm still stuck here, but I think now I know a way out."
The sidekick started to complain again. Baker winced and, something he hardly ever did, switched it to stand-by mode. The silence was a relief; he gave Jackson a goofy smile that obviously puzzled her.
She said, "You'll see who I work for, then you'll get an idea of what I mean."
They put on sticky shoes and shuffled down a long, curved ramp into a lower level, coming out in a room that was all white tiles and bright light, with a circular pool of polystyrene balls rippling back and forth, something big and pink half-buried in them. Some kind of animal, Baker thought, and then it spoke and he realized that it was a man, the fattest man he'd ever seen, masked with artificial-reality goggles and twiddling his hands this way and that.
"Time to wake up," Jackson said loudly. "I'm back, Berry, and I've brought a friend."
The fat man cut the air with a hand; his goggles unfilmed. "Where have you been?" he asked, his voice childish and petulant.
"I was out on an errand," Jackson said, her voice echoing off the tiles, "but I'm back now. Do you need anything?"
"Didn't know where you were," the man said.
"Well, here I am now. You been lying there all this time? You'll lose the use of your legs."
"Help me to the surface if you want," the man said, "but not right now. I'm deep in the Ten Thousand Flower Rift. I think I might get through to the Beast's chateau this time."
He rose and fell with the big, slow waves that rolled from one side of the pool of polystyrene balls to the other side and back again. There was a little machine floating in the air close by his head, holding a bulb of thick white liquid, and he lifted his face now and sucked at a straw noisily.
Jackson said quietly to Baker, "So now you see who I work for."
"He's got to be the fattest man I've ever seen. Massing, golly, it must be two hundred kilos at least."
"One hundred sixty. He tends to spread out a bit lying down."
"What does he do?"
"Mostly he just lies right there and runs these antique two-hundred-year-old sagas and drinks, or lies around on grass and runs his sagas and drinks. That's margarita mix he's working on there; he gets through a couple of liters of that a day. And he uses other stuff, too. He does like his drugs, lying buck-naked there or out on the grass under the sunlamps. They have some uv in
their spectrum, so I have to rub cream on him to stop him burning. He can get about if he has to, but it hurts him even in microgravity, so he mostly stays on his back. There're air jets under the balls, help him stay afloat."
"I mean, who is he? How can he afford all this?"
"Berry Malachite Hong-Owen, his mother is Sri Hong-Owen. That doesn't mean anything to you? She invented one of the two important vacuum organism photosynthetic systems, made her rich as all hell. Berry is her son by her first and only marriage, a reject with a trust fund, doesn't have to do anything but let the money roll in." Jackson raised her voice and said, "You all right there, Berry? I got a bit of business with my friend here. You shout if you want anything."
Back up in the dome, Baker and Jackson sipped bulbs of a smoky brandy. Jackson lit a marijuana cigarette, too— Berry could afford the tax, she said.
Baker said, "How did you get the job? It looks like fun."
Jackson didn't answer for a moment, holding a volume of smoke before blowing it out and saying in a small, tight voice, "Fun? The one other thing Berry likes to do is fuck. He can manage it in microgravity, just about, although it takes some care." She fixed Baker with her bright blue eyes, daring him to say something. When he didn't, she took another drag and said through the smoke, "That's part of what I was doing before I met him— the fucking Redeemers sell you a prostitute's license and you pay tax on every bit of business. I may be old, but some of the tweaks do like the exotic. The rest of the time I was part of the gardening crew, moving bushes and trees here and there, replanting flowerbeds. I didn't have much choice— I lost my ticket through a piece of foolishness. I got to hear of Berry and did some research, and made myself indispensable to him. He likes older women— I think he misses his mother. But the fucker's crafty. His trust fund pays for room and service, but he doesn't have anything much in the way of transferable credit. Doesn't need it, he says, because he never leaves the hotel."
"Doesn't he pay you?"
"He did at first, but then I was living here and I told him to save his credit. It wasn't that much anyway, not enough to parlay up for any kind of good ticket and I don't fancy leaving here as a corpsicle in steerage."
Baker began to see where this was going, and felt a twinge of pleasurable excitement. He had been right to think that there might be something in this, and it could well fall within the very wide parameters that allowed him to operate without consulting the collective. He said cautiously, "The thing is, the ship isn't exactly mine."
"I'm not looking for a lift," Jackson said, leaning forward through her cloud of smoke. "I'm looking for a partner in a deal so sweet it could rot your teeth just thinking about it. Let me tell you about Berry."
Berry's mother, Sri Hong-Owen, was a gene wizard with a shadowy, mysterious history. The system of artificial photosynthesis she had invented had made her as rich and famous as her rival, Avernus, but she had also done a lot of covert work before and after the Quiet War. Before the war, she was rumored to have set up an illegal experiment in the accelerated evolution of vacuum organisms somewhere in the Kuiper Belt for the Demo
cratic Union of China; during the war, she had helped design the biowar organisms that had taken Europa, and she was said to have been involved in a covert program of human gengineering. After the war, she had announced that she was retiring (which no one believed), and had taken advantage of the resettlement scheme to take up residence at the edge of the ring system of Saturn.
"Potato One and Two," Jackson said. "Remember?"
"Sure, but they're just a couple of rocks, something to do with the military, I think. Anyway, no one lives there."
"That's what they want everyone to think," Jackson said.
Potato One and Two were the nicknames of a pair of co-orbital satellites, tiny chunks of rock that had probably been shattered off a larger body by some ancient impact. Their orbits were within fifty kilometers of each other, beyond the edge of the F Ring. Sri Hong-Owen lived in absolute seclusion on the larger moon, Janus; she had registered the smaller, Epimetheus, as an experimental area. Berry had left— or had been thrown out— ten years ago; the other son by her failed marriage, Alder Topaz Hong-Owen, was working somewhere on Earth, perhaps as liaison with whichever government or
corporado
was sponsoring his mother's current work. She had good and influential connections in the Three Powers Occupation Force; Jackson said it was likely that she was working on some covert military gengineering program. The two moons were off limits, protected by fierce automatic defense systems, but Berry had the right to return there.
Jackson told Baker, "Berry misses her badly. He talks about her a lot, but there's something that stops him returning. I think he was kinked, given some sort of conditioning. He has the codes that can get us through her defense system, and I know what they are— it didn't take anything more than withholding his margarita ration for a couple of days. We can say that he paid us to bring him back, ask for money to take him away again. It's like kidnapping, but in reverse."
"Suppose she doesn't pay up?"
Baker didn't need the prompting of his sidekick to know that Jackson wasn't telling him the whole story, not that it really mattered if his own scheme worked out, but he found that he liked the illicit thrill of becoming involved in her shady plot. Perhaps this was the way he had felt in the brief moments of combat, all those years ago before the accident had changed his life forever.
Jackson shrugged. "She doesn't pay, then we say we'll kill him, or we'll think of doing some damage to her experiments. But really, why wouldn't she pay? Who'd want Berry around all the time?"

*

Baker and Jackson got Berry out of the pool of polystyrene balls and helped him totter on shaky legs up the ramp to the outside. He flopped down on the grass like a pink barrage balloon and demanded that Jackson rub cream into his skin. That took a while, Berry grunting and sometimes giggling as she rubbed coconut-scented lotion into the hectares of his pink flesh. Baker was pretty sure it would end in some kind of sex and wandered off, taking
big floating steps, and found some shade under a stand of umbrella trees. A herd of miniature red-haired mammoths was grazing off in the distance, moving in tentative tiptoe slow motion. A vine twisted around one of the umbrella trees and Baker picked at its grapes, each a slightly different flavor bursting on his tongue, wondering if he should reactivate his sidekick. The truth was, he didn't want to hear what it would say; it wasn't programmed to take risks. He used his net to dial into Phoebe's infoweb and did a little research of his own. At last Jackson floated down beside him and told him that Berry was asleep.
"So," she said, "will you do it?"
"Remind me of the percentages again."
"Twenty per cent goes to you, less any costs. But that's still a lot of credit."
"Sure. I mean, yes, count me in."
He realized that he'd been thinking about it while seeming not to think about anything at all. His net was very sophisticated. It was risky, but the potential— not the silly scheme of Jackson's— was huge.
Jackson leaned over and kissed him; he kissed her back.
"He's sleeping now," she said after a while. "All that drinking and floating and floating and drinking does tire him out."
"He hasn't asked why I'm here?"
"I said you were my brother. He accepted that. Berry doesn't like to think too hard about things. He's like a kid. When he wakes up, he'll want a drink, and I'll put something in it that'll keep him quiet so we can get him aboard."
"We have to take him?"
"I don't like it either. But it's the only way we can file a flight plan, and we'll need proof that we really do have him when we get there."

*

Once they were aboard the scow and had everything squared away, Jackson stripped off her jumper and trousers and they fucked. Baker couldn't think of it as making love; it was as much a business transaction as his wedding night with the youngest wife of the collective. Jackson wanted to interface systems during sex, the way they used to, or so she claimed, but Baker held back. She fell straight asleep afterward, and Baker thought about it all over again, looking for loose threads and unexpected angles.
They had gone aboard late at night. Jackson had slipped a tranquillizer into Berry's nightcap and he had fallen asleep almost immediately. They had used a luggage cart to get him to the docks, no problem there; the Redeemers didn't care what was loaded onto ships as long as they got their tax. That was another reason why Phoebe was so successful.
There hadn't been a problem stowing Berry away, either; Jackson had already thought of that.
As for the rest, the run itself was fairly simple, and Baker had already filed a flight plan, getting clearance with Berry's identity code just as Jackson had said he would. If Sri Hong-Owen had an agent in the intelligence network of the pan-Saturn flight-control system, she would already know that someone was on the way; she might already be taking countermeasures. Baker would have to think of what she might do, and how to get around it.
He was scared, but also elated. After going over everything in his head, he could at last fall asleep.
But when he woke up, things had gone badly wrong.

*

He woke up because Jackson was slapping him, slapping his face, slapping him hard in a back-and-forth rhythm with the same angry intensity with which she had attacked the servitor, saying over and over, "You fucker. Come on out of it, you fucker. Come on. Don't die on me."
He tried to get away, but he was trussed like a food animal in the web hammock in the center of the scow's compact life-system. Jackson's left hand gripped his right wrist tightly. His head hurt badly, and behind the pain there was a terrible absence. Stuff hung in front of Jackson's angry, intent face— columns, indices, a couple of thumbnails. She had jacked her net into his, broken into it using some kind of Trojan horse, and was using it to run the ship. Hand-holding, the pilots had called it, a kind of piggybacking that had been used in training.
The soundscape of the scow had changed. Beneath the usual whir of fans, the steady chug of the humidifier and the nearly subliminal hum of the lights was the intermittent thump of attitude thrusters and a chorus of pings and popping noises.
Baker jerked his head back so that Jackson's next blow missed; she swung halfway around with the momentum. "What," he said, so full of fear that he thought for a moment he would start to cry. He swallowed something salty and said, "What have you done?"
"You work it out," she said, and let go of his wrist and turned her back on him.
It took him less than a second to call up the data. The scow was in orbit around Phoebe, docked with its chain of cargo pods and slowly rotating in barbecue mode.
A thumbnail picture showed the patchwork of the little moon's tightly curving globe. Only two hundred kilometers in diameter, it was a captured, unmodified primitive object, mostly carbonaceous material mixed with water ice, almost entirely grown over with vacuum organisms that used the energy of sunlight to turn methane ice and carbonaceous tars formed five billion years ago, when the Solar System had first condensed, into useful carbon compounds. The patches were of all shapes but only four muted colors: orange-brown, reddish-brown, sooty black, mottled gray. Phoebe was like a dented and battered patchwork ball or a gigantic version of the four-color map problem, curving away sharply in every direction.
Another thumbnail showed Berry floating in faint red light, half-filling the scow's water tank. An air mask was clamped over his face. Baker had objected to Jackson's idea on hygienic grounds, but she had pointed out that the water was recycled anyway, and that the filter system could easily be rerouted to clean the water coming out of the tank as well as that going in. Berry seemed to be asleep, curled up like a huge late-term embryo, the umbilical cord of airline and nutrient feed connected to his face rather than his belly, hands
clasped piously under his chins, a continuous chain of bubbles trickling from the vent of his air mask.
Baker clicked everything off. Jackson was hunched up at the far end of the cramped life-system, an arm's length away. She had livid marks on her throat, and deep scratches on her arms were still oozing blood into the air. She said, "You almost died. Your net shut down your vagus reflexes when I hacked it. And when I tried to revive you, you tried to kill me. Don't you know what they did to you?"
"You shouldn't have messed with it," Baker said.
"I did it to free you!"
Jackson's face was pinched white, harsh and old-looking; only her bright blue eyes seemed alive. She shuddered all over and said more quietly, "They made you into a slave. A
thing
."
They had both had military neural nets installed when they had been inducted, but Baker's net had been considerably upgraded after his accident; it was now more like a symbiont than a machine enhancement of his nervous system. When Jackson had jacked into it, she had been able to access only a few of its functions. She had got the ship up into orbit, and docked manually with the train of cargo pods, but she hadn't been able to activate the flight plan he'd filed. And when she had tried to hack into its root directory, his net had easily repelled her efforts and had triggered a number of defense routines.
Baker said, "Why are you doing this? Aren't we friends?"
"Because I'm tired of giving blow jobs to Berry. Because I can't bear to see an old comrade turned into a zombie so dumb he doesn't even know what he is. Because I was in prison in Angola for ten years and I'd sooner die than go back."
Half of the Redeemers' business was running the port. The other half was running the correctional facilities for the Saturn system— the vacuum farms. Angola was the worst of them; eight out of ten prisoners died before completing their sentence.
Baker said, "Well, I did wonder about the tattoos. What were you in for?"
"Just load and run the flight plan," Jackson said, and smiled bloodlessly. "Okay, maybe I got greedy and fucked up. I need you, and I won't let you back out."
Baker said, "I wasn't your first choice of pilot, was I? You had an agreement with someone else, and I bet that's why you were in the pilots' canteen. But then you saw me, and thought you could make a better deal."
"I still rescued you," she said.
"How much were you going to get? From the first deal."
"It was the same as the one we made, except I was to get the twenty-percent cut. But that's blown away. We're in this together or we're both dead, and Berry, too. Your call."
It might be a bluff, but Jackson didn't look like the kind of person who would start something she couldn't finish. Baker pulled down the flight plan, checked it over out of habit, and activated it.
The rumble of the scow's motor filled the life-system. Acceleration gripped Baker; he drifted gently onto the padding at the rear of the cabin. Jackson hooked an arm around a staple and stared at him from what was now definitely the ceiling. And in the tank, Berry woke up amidst clashing pressure waves that distorted the red light into clashing lines and sheets and plaintively asked what was going on.