Tony Daniel (45 page)

Quench went over to his mirror and touched his own hand to it, palm to palm. “I believe I’ll start my long division by calculating everything I’m going to buy with the hundred greenleaves you’ll soon owe me, Theory. We may as well switch over now, eh? I’m ready to go.”

“All right,” said Theory. “Ready when you are.”

“Switch,” said Quench. The whole idea of doing such a thing would be illegal in the Met. Free converts were not allowed to inhabit biological bodies without very specific permission that was rarely granted. But things were loose here in the outer system, and free converts were unrestrained by any of the constraint laws enforced in the Met by the Department of Immunity. Theory flowed out of the surface of the mirror and into Quench’s pellicle, while Quench joined his entire consciousness to his convert portion in the grist. He left a portion of himself controlling the autonomous portions of his body, and Quench was really inside his own brain, of course. Theory merely permeated his grist. If Quench wanted back motor control of his body, he could take it instantly. Theory saw to that.

“Why, you handsome devil,” said the reflection in the mirror, which now really was Quench. “Let’s go to the dance.”

“The trick is not to save any bullets for later,” Jill told Aubry. “You can’t pull the trigger later if you’re dead.”

She handed Aubry the semiautomatic and showed her how to turn the safety off, then helped her get into her stance.

Aubry lined up on the target. They were in a large room in a bolsa that nobody had named for Aubry, although she assumed they were still on the Diaphany. The target was set at twenty-five meters. It was a Department of Immunity holographic emblem, with the ancient crossed syringes on a microscope background. Aubry aimed at where the syringes met and pulled the trigger.

“Damn,” she said. She’d barely hit the edge of the emblem.

“Don’t swear so much,” Jill said. “It gives away intent.” She leaned over to Aubry’s ear, which wasn’t hard, since Jill was practically her height. “All of the bullets,” she said. “One after another.”

Aubry squeezed the trigger again. The gun jumped in her hands. She pulled it back level, and squeezed again.

“Good. All.”

She fired and she fired and she fired. It seemed the gun would never run out of bullets. It grew warm in her hand. Another and another. She wasn’t looking at the target now, only checking it out of the corner of her eye. Shot after shot. Finally, she’d emptied the pistol.

“Who do you kill?” Jill said.

“Bad guys.” It had been in the lesson. Aubry realized that mostly what Jill did was give lessons, and you could sort of tune in when you wanted to.

“How do you know who are the bad guys?”

“They want to kill me.”

“And what do you do to everyone else?”

“Leave them alone, or save them.”

“Let’s go look at your cluster.”

The two syringes were torn to shreds.

“Now that is what I call tight,” said Jill. “Aubry, you may be a natural.”

“I don’t want to be a natural at this.”

“A talent isn’t a good thing or a bad thing,” Jill said. She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself. “It’s just a talent.”

They went back and shot the gun some more. A lot more. Then they went to see Leo and Tod.

Leo was cooking dinner over a small stove. They didn’t want to use the grist for anything unnecessary, since some of it might communicate their whereabouts. It smelled good, what Leo was cooking, but Aubry could not identify the aroma.

Leo looked up from his cookpot and smiled. “Remember those nice boogers we saw in the Integument?” he said. “Well, tonight, it’s booger soup.”

“Disgusting booger soup,” said Aubry, “how I long for you.”

In the corner, Tod stirred from among a pile of blankets and sat up, wrapping two blankets about himself, one to cover his head and shoulders, and the other his legs. He was nine feet tall when standing, and sitting up, he was taller than Aubry. He was also skinny, and looked like he was made of some kind of metal. But Leo had told her that it was really skin and that Tod was a regular human being, body-wise. It was his mind that was really weird.

“Cold days to wear a child in,” Tod said. “But soup is where you find it.” His voice sounded like it was produced by rasping files rubbing together, or the wings of many insects. He took out a pack of cigarettes and shook a smoke until it lit. But instead of putting it in his mouth, he held it and watched it burn down.

“Don’t you ever worry that he’ll burn himself up?” Aubry asked Leo.

“It’s useless to talk about him as if he weren’t here,” Leo said. “He hears
everything
.”

As if in reply (and maybe it was a reply), Tod sighed, and said, “Don’t let these hard floors fool you. Everything is a far sight from here.”

“He seems to take care of himself in the little ways pretty well,” Leo said. “He can do stuff that only takes a few seconds or stuff that lasts a few months. Anything in between, he needs help.”

“Large meanings fall from a broken sky,” said Tod, then he went back to watching his cigarette burn.

Leo passed out bowls and spoons.

“Soup’s on,” he said. He ladled out some for Aubry and Jill, then went to help Tod feed himself.

They had been traveling for several days in the Integument. The series of room they were staying in now were service chambers that had been closed for cleaning. “But then somebody changed the code a couple of e-years ago,” Leo had told Aubry, “and the maintenance algorithms just pass the area over now like it wasn’t here. It’s not like the cleaning routines are free converts of anything and could figure out their mistake.”

Aubry had been taught that there was no place on the Met where the grist couldn’t be accessed and where somebody, somewhere, didn’t know where you were. But Leo seemed to be really good at finding all the loopholes. “It’s fun to be able to sneak around under people’s noses,” he had said to her, and Aubry had to agree that it was. Except she never forgot that it would mean her life if she got caught.

After Jill had taken out the DI sweeper, she’d led them a long way, through many corridors, and back into the Integument. They had gone by sluice, by walking, by taking a ride on an abandoned segment of pithway. At one point, they’d made a sharp turn and started working their way out one of the Diaphany’s dendrites; Aubry didn’t know which one. All that she knew was that she hadn’t been really dry in e-weeks. She’d lost track of the e-days, but they had been traveling a long, long time. All along the way, Leo and Jill had caches of equipment—blankets, some coffee, stoves, and eating stuff—and weapons. Lots of weapons. The weapons were Jill’s. Both Leo and Jill seemed to have chosen nearly the same hiding places for their separate equipment. Leo said this was because he and Jill followed the same logic.

They’d eaten things that Leo found in the Integument, but this was the first time he cooked up the boogers, as Aubry called them. Leo called them filtering nodes, or just “nodes.” They had seen no one. Absolutely no one. It had been the first time in Aubry’s life when this had happened—but there were lots of thing that had been firsts on this trip. Like shooting guns and learning the best places to hide when people were trying to capture or kill you.

The main thing that Leo and Jill had in common was a hatred for the Department of Immunity.

By every definition Aubry had ever been taught in school, she had fallen among terrorists.

Aubry ate her booger soup and wondered what she would have to do next that she would never have considered before in a million e-years.

He had a name, but nobody knew it. It had been lost years ago, worn away by the transformations, the transmutations, the scrape of the rough world as he had made his way into the future. People called him C. This would do as well as anything.

At this point, he was a nondescript man, dressed in neutral gray. He sometimes wore a hat, but then, lots of people did. He was a Caucasian at the moment, about five feet and eleven inches tall. His skin was pale and bespoke much time spent indoors. His eyes were the green of a tranquil sea. He didn’t smoke, although he would have liked to. He had smoked once, and missed it. But smoking left behind telltale signs, and that was something C simply did not do.

C walked through the arches of San Souci on Mercury, the central edifice in the vast conglomerate of buildings, all interconnected, that made up Directorate Headquarters in the Met. It was long night on Mercury. C liked it better that way. The pressurized passageway led into an enormous atrium that stretched upward for nearly two kilometers in great, delicate arches. There was the smell of sage and rosemary in the air, and pine trees lined the central promenade that led to the base of the mountain the atrium enclosed. From there, C boarded a cablelift that carried him upward, past the tree line, past the rocky lower reaches, and over the fortnightly snow that fell when Mercury had its other face to the sun, and up to the summit, where the lift terminated in the monastery-like prominence of La Mola, where Director Amés dwelled. The mountain itself, Montsombra, was grist—all of it was grist.

And in that grist was nothing but Amés.

It was incredibly gaudy, insanely wasteful and expensive, and all necessary as a symbol of power and control. But San Souci didn’t impress C.

It was Amés who impressed C.

No one else could have flushed him out of his willful obscurity or caught him in a trap so finely constructed as Amés had. And the Director never let C forget the hold he had over him, either. Amés kept the memory box containing a convert copy of C’s lost love sitting upon his desk. C chafed at his gilded bonds, but there was nothing to be done about it at present. At present, it was necessary to do his job and attempt to work Amés’s will. Perhaps a time would come to slip away, perhaps not. C would wait. C was a patient man.

C debarked from the cable car and entered La Mola.

He passed several security checks and dropped off his weapon—a small automatic pistol—at the last of them. He turned left into an unmarked hall, walked past three doors, and opened the fourth, then went inside. Amés was at his desk. He looked up and grinned at C like a shark.

“Valentine Greatrakes,” he said.

“A name from a list in the novel
Ulysses,
” C replied. “It was used as a key for a Black Angel organization code during the problems in Antarctica last century . . . 2945?”

“Very nice,” said Amés, “Very nice. You broke that one, didn’t you.”

“I was on the team, back when I worked for the old Republic.”

“You headed the team.”

“Been leafing through the archives again, Director?”

“I like to keep up on prehistoric events.”

“Well,” said C. He stood before the desk, his arms at his sides.

“I want you to accompany me on a tour,” Amés said. He leaned back in his chair. “I want you to see what I’ve got and advise me on ways to keep it.”

“Where are we going?”

“Everywhere.”

C looked down at the Director’s hands. Amés had big thumbs. Long, delicate fingers, but big thumbs. This was perhaps the one fact that kept him from being a performer, and made him into a composer.

“I assume we are going via the merci?” said C.

“Oh yes,” Amés replied. “I’ll never leave Mercury. Not in this lifetime.”

“I’m ready,” said C.

Amés nodded. “I knew you would be.”

from

First Constitutional Congress of

the Cloudships of the Outer System

April 2, 3013 (e-standard)

a transcript

C. Mencken: This meeting will come to order! Order, ladies and gentlemen! No spitting, scratching, or biting allowed on the virtuality floor. We have antechambers for that.

C. Tolstoy: Mr. Chairman, I move that we immediately adjourn. Some of us have matters of more importance to attend to, and matters of a less foolhardy nature.

C. Mencken: Is there a second?

Chamber: Second!

C. Mencken: All in favor?

Chamber Right: Aye!

C. Mencken: All opposed?

Chamber Left: Nay!

C. Mencken: The nays have it. Committee reports. Special Committee on Responses to Inner-System Aggression.

C. Lebedev: Mr. Chairman, report out Resolution 1.1, and ask for an immediate vote on debate and movement into Special Legislative Session under the Chamber Rule B11, Constitutional Amendments and Dissolution to Form a New Government.

C. Mencken: Very well, sir. I hope
you
know what
we’re
doing.

Chamber Right: Objection!

C. Mencken: Cloudship Lebedev is within the rules. Objection must be overruled.

C. Tolstoy: Exception!

C. Mencken: Noted. But we are not in a court of law, Cloudship Tolstoy, and I am not a judge. Boy, am I
not
a judge. Let us continue. Committee Chairman, proceed.

C. Lebedev: Resolution 1.1: Actions toward the creation of a systemwide government for the human race, taking special note of an entity’s right to join or to decline and including all interested parties in the inner system. Section One, preamble. Plurality is the natural state of human beings. Taking into consideration the laws of rationality and the long history of our species, we, the people, do hereby demand and establish a united republican democracy for our solar system and all outlying human settlements and ships in space. This democracy shall be called the Solarian Republic, and all bodies and entities hereafter delineated shall belong under its provenance. Within the Solarian Republic, all thinking entities shall be free. Freedom is the fundamental tenet from which all laws and actions of this government shall be derived, and to which they are answerable. No thinking entity shall serve another without that thinking entity’s assent under conditions of complete freedom of choice. Implicit in this is the basic truth to which we accede as a species: All thinking entities are peoples.

C. Grieg: Mr. Chairman, point of order!

C. Mencken: What is your point of order, Cloudship Grieg?