The Dog Said Bow-Wow (12 page)

That crack-like little rille — did it split two kilometers ahead, or was there a second rille that didn’t quite meet it? She couldn’t tell. She would have gladly paid for the premium service now, the caviar of info-feed detailed enough to track footprints across a dusty stretch of terrain. But with her uplink disabled, she couldn’t.

Patang ducked into a rille so narrow her muscle suit’s programming would have let her jump it, if she wished. It forked, and she took the right-hand branch. When the walls started closing in on them, she climbed up and out. Then she ran, looking for another rille.

Hours passed.

After a time, all that kept her going was fear. She drew her legs up into the torso of her suit and set it to auto-run. Up this canyon. Over this ridge. Twisting, turning. Scanning the land ahead, looking for options. Two directions she might go. Flip a mental coin. Choose one. Repeat the process. Keep the radio shut down so MacArthur couldn’t use it to track her. Keep moving.

Keep moving.

Keep moving….

Was it hours that passed, or days? Patang didn’t know. It might have been weeks. In times of crisis, the suit was programmed to keep her alert by artificial stimulation of her brain. It was like an electrical version of amphetamines. But, as with amphetamines, you tended to lose track of things. Things like your sense of time.

So she had no idea how long it took her to realize that it was all no use.

The problem was that the suit was so damned
heavy!
If she ran fast enough to keep her distance from MacArthur, it left a trace in the regolith obvious enough to be followed at top speed. But if she slowed down enough to place her walker’s feet on bare stone when she could, and leave subtle and easy-to-miss footprints when she couldn’t, he came right up behind her. And try though she might, she couldn’t get far enough ahead of him to dare slow down enough to leave a trace he couldn’t follow.

There was no way she could escape him.

The feeling of futility that came over her then was drab and familiar, like a shabby old coat grown colorless with age that you don’t have the money to replace. Sometime, long ago, she’d crossed that line where hope ceased. She had never actually admitted to herself that she no longer believed they’d ever make that big strike — just one day woken up knowing that she was simply waiting out her contract, stubbornly trying to endure long enough to serve out her term and return to Earth no poorer than she had set out.

Which was when her deviling had turned nasty, wasn’t it? It was when she had started touching herself and telling MacArthur exactly what she was doing. When she’d started describing in detail all the things she’d never do to
him
.

It was away of getting through one more day. It was away of faking up enough emotion to care. It was a stupid, stupid thing to do.

And this was her punishment.

But she couldn’t give up. She was going to have to… She didn’t finish that thought. If she was going to do this unnamed thing, she had to sort through the ground rules first.

There were three rules. One: No Violence. Two: Protect Company Equipment. Three: Protect Yourself. One overruled Two and Two overruled Three.

Okay, Patang thought. In order to prevent violence, I’m going to have to destroy Company property.

She waited to see if she’d pass out.

Nothing happened.

Good.

She’d come to a long ridge, steep-sided and barren and set her suit to auto-climb. As she climbed, she scanned the slope ahead, empty and rock-strewn under a permanently dazzling cover of sulfuric acid clouds. Halfway up, MacArthur emerged from the zigzagging valley below and waved jauntily.

Patang ignored him. That pile of boulders up ahead was too large. Those to the right were too small. There was a patch of loose regolith that looked promising but… No. In the end, she veered leftward, toward a shallow ledge that sheltered rocks that looked loose enough to be dislodged but not massive enough to do any serious damage to MacArthur’s suit. All she wanted was to sweep him off his feet. He could survive a slide downslope easily enough. But could he hold onto the laser drill while doing so?

Patang didn’t think so.

Okay, then. She took her suit off automatics and climbed clumsily, carefully, toward her destination. She kept her helmet up, pointed toward the top of the ridge, to avoid tipping Mac Arthur off to her intentions.

Slantwise across the slope, that’s right. Now straight up. She glanced back and saw that she’d pulled MacArthur into her wake. He was directly beneath her. Good. All systems go.

She was up to the ledge now.

Stop. Turn around. Look down on MacArthur, surprisingly close.

If there was one thing Patang knew, after all these months, it was how easy it was to start a landslide. Lean back and brace yourself here, and start kicking. And over the rocks go and over the rocks go and —

LASER HAZARD

“Ohhhh, Patang, you are so obvious. You climb diagonally up a slope that any ordinary person would tackle straight on. You change direction halfway up. What were you planning to do, start an avalanche? What did you think that would accomplish?”

“I thought I could get the laser away from you.”

“And what good would that do? I’d still have the suit. I’d still have rocks. I’d still have you at my mercy. You hadn’t really thought this one through, had you?”

“No,” she admitted.

He flipped one hand dismissively. “Well, keep on going. We’re not done yet.”

Weeping, Patang topped the ridge and started downward, into a valley shaped like a deep bowl. Steep scarps on all sides caught whatever infrared bounced off the floor and threw it back into the valley. The temperature readings on her visor leaped. It was at least fifty degrees hotter out there than anyplace she had ever been. Hot enough that prolonged exposure would incapacitate her suit? Maybe. But there was MacArthur behind her, and no alternatives anywhere.

She stepped out into the open and looked across the valley.

The ground
dazzled
.

A network of cracks crazed the floor of the valley, each one blazing bright. Liquid metal was just oozing up out of the ground. She’d never seen anything like it.

Patang kicked a nearby puddle of metal, sending it scattering and setting off warning alarms in her suit. For an instant she swayed with sleepiness. But she shook it off. She snapped a stick-probe from her tool rack and jabbed it into the stuff.

Tin.

She looked up again. Little intersecting lines of molten tin everywhere. The pattern reminded her of her childhood on the Eastern Shore, of standing at the edge of a marsh, binoculars in hand, hoping for a harrier, with the silver gleam of sun on water almost painful to the eye. This looked just like a marsh, only with tin instead of water.

A tin marsh.

For an instant, wonder flickered to life within her. How could such a thing be? What complex set of geological conditions was responsible? All she could figure was that the noontide heat was involved. As it slowly sank into the rock, the tin below expanded and pushed its way up through the cracks. Or maybe it was the rocks that expanded, squeezing out the liquid tin. In either case the effect would be very small for any given volume. She couldn’t imagine how much tin there must be down there to accomplish that. More than she’d ever dreamed they’d find.

“We’re
rich!
” she whooped. She couldn’t help it. All those months, all that misery, and here it was.

LASER HAZARD

LASER HAZARD

LASER HAZARD

“What are you talking about?” MacArthur said angrily. But Patang dared think he sounded almost sane. She dared hope she could reason with him.

“It’s the big one, Mac!” She hadn’t called him Mac in ages. “We’ve got the goddamned mother lode here. All you have to do is radio in the claim. It’s all over, Mac! This time tomorrow, you’re going to be holding a press conference about it.”

For a moment, MacArthur stood, silent and confused. Then he said, “Maybe so. But I have to kill you first.”

“You turn up without me, the Company’s gonna have questions. They’re gonna interrogate their suit. They’re gonna run a mind-probe. No, MacArthur, you can’t have both. You’ve got to choose: money or me.”

LASER HAZARD

“
Run
, you bitch!” MacArthur howled. “Run like you’ve got a chance to live!”

She didn’t move. “Think of it, MacArthur. A nice cold bath. They chill down the water with slabs of ice, and for a little extra they’ll leave the ice in. You can hear it clink.”

“Shut up.”

“And ice cream!” she said fervently. “A thousand different flavors of ice cream. They’ve got it warehoused: sherbet, gelato, water ice…Oh, they know what a prospector likes, all right.”

“Shut the fuck
up!
”

“You’ve been straight with me. You gave me a half-hour head start, just like you promised. Now I’m gonna be straight with you. I’m going to walk into this blind canyon. There’s no way I can get out past you, okay? So you don’t have to worry about me getting away. I’m going to go in there, and you stay out here and think about it, all right?” Then, desperation forcing her all the way into honesty: “I was wrong, MacArthur. I mean it this time. I shouldn’t have done those things. Accept my apology. You can rise above it. You’re a rich man now.”

MacArthur roared with rage.

LASER HAZARD

LASER HAZARD

LASER HAZARD

LASER HAZARD

“Walk, damn you!” he screamed. “
Walk!
”

LASER HAZARD

LASER HAZARD

LASER HAZARD

He wasn’t coming any closer. And, though he kept on firing, over and over, the bolts of lased light never hit her. It was baffling. She’d given up, she wasn’t running, why didn’t he just kill her? What was stopping him?

Revelation flooded Patang then, like sudden sunlight after a long winter. So simple! So obvious! She couldn’t help laughing. “You
can’t
shoot me! The suit won’t let you!”

It was what the tech guys called “fossil software.” Before the Company acquired the ability to insert their programs into human beings, they’d programmed their tools so they couldn’t be used for sabotage. People, being inventive buggers, had found ways around that programming often enough to render it obsolete. But nobody had ever bothered to dig it out of the deep levels of the machinery’s code. What would be the point?

She whooped and screamed. Her suit staggered in a jittery little dance of joy. “You can’t kill me, MacArthur! You can’t! You can’t and you know it! I can just walk right past you, and all the way to the next station, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

MacArthur began to cry.

The hopper came roaring down out of the white dazzle of the sky, and burnt a landing practically at their feet. They clambered wearily forward, and let the pilot bolt their muscle suits to the hopper’s strutwork. There wasn’t cabin space for them, and they didn’t need it.

The pilot reclaimed his seat. After his first attempts at conversation had fallen flat, he’d said no more. He had hauled out prospectors before. He knew that small talk was useless.

With a crush of acceleration their suits could only partially cushion, the hopper took off. Only three hours to Port Ishtar. The hopper twisted and Patang could see Venus rushing dizzyingly by below her. She blanked out her visor so she didn’t have to look at it.

Patang tested her suit. The multiplier motors had been powered down. She was immobile.

“Hey, Patang.”

“Yeah?”

“You think I’m going to go to jail? For all the shit I did to you?”

“No, MacArthur. Rich people don’t go to jail. They get therapy.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Thank you for telling me that.”

“
De nada,
” she said without thinking. The jets rumbled under her back, making the suit vibrate. Two, three hours from now, they’d come down in Port Ishtar, stake their claims, collect their money, and never see each other again.

On impulse, she said, “Hey, MacArthur!”

“What?”

And for an instant she came
that close
to playing the Game one last time. Deviling him, just to hear his teeth grind. But….

“Nothing. Just — enjoy being rich, okay? I hope you have a good life.”

“Yeah.” MacArthur took a deep breath, and then let it go, as if he were releasing something painful, and said, “Yeah…you too.”

And they soared.

THE LANKY, DONKEY-EARED FEY
got onto the train at a nondescript station deep in the steppes of Fäerie Minor, escorted by two marshals in the uniform of His Absent Majesty’s secret service. He smiled easily at the gawking passengers, as though he were a celebrity we had all come to see. One of the marshals was a sharp-featured woman with short red hair. The other was a tough-looking elf-bitch with skin so white it was almost blue. They both scowled in a way that discouraged questions.

The train returned to speed, and wheatfields flowed by the windows. This was the land where horses ate flesh and mice ate iron, if half the tales told of it were true, so doubtless the passing landscape was worth seeing. But I was born with a curiosity bump on the back of my skull, and I couldn’t help wondering what the newcomer’s crime had been, and what punishment he would receive when he arrived in Babylon.

So when, an hour or two later, the three of them got up from their seats and walked to the saloon car at the end of the train, I followed after them.

The usual mixture of unseelies and commercial travelers thronged the saloon, along with a dinter or two, a pair of flower sprites, and a lone ogre who weighed four hundred pounds if he were a stone. This last was so anxious to retrieve his beer when the duppy-man came by with a tray, that he stumbled into me and almost fell. “Watch where you’re going, Shorty!” he barked. “You people are a menace.”

“My people mined and smelted the tracks this train moves on,” I said hotly. “We quarried the stone that clads the ziggurats at our destination, and delved the tunnel under the Gihon that we’ll be passing through. If you have any complaints about us, I suggest you take them up with the Low Court. But if your problem is against me personally, then Gabbro Hornfelsson backs down from nobody.” I thrust my calling card at his loathsome face. “Be it pistols, axes, or hand grenades, I’ll happily meet you on the field of honor.”