by Ian Stewart
The question that vexed them now was: what to do about it?
Eventually they agreed to refer the whole thing to a subcommittee.
12
Shaanxi Province, 2213
Once more, Moses found himself lying flat on his back. His shoulder hurt, but his pride hurt more.
"What did I tell you, stupid child?" the instructor screamed at him. The instructor was nine years old, and female, but Moses had learned long ago to treat her like an adult. Sometimes she taught him to speak, read, and write, and sometimes she taught him to survive.
"Respected One, you told me to be quicker coming out of the dragon stance when the attack came from my left side," he replied in broken and not terribly grammatical Mandarin.
"And did you carry out my instructions, Mo-Shi?"
Moses grimaced and shook his head. "I remembered them too late. Respected One."
Silent Snowflake, who had been entrusted with the task of educating Moses during the year that must elapse before his return to Ecotopia could safely be arranged, made no attempt to disguise her disgust and reminded him in no uncertain terms that the art of gongfu was not something that one attempted to rememher. "Your response must flow inevitably from the actions of your opponent, as fruit follows blossom on a healthy tree," she pointed out. "Your stance was stranded in the dead zone between frog and snake. You must pay more attention and practice harder."
It had been the first time she had been asked to teach martial arts to a seven-year-old, and a barbarian at that, but she did not question the motives of her mother. Jeweled Jade, and her father, Deng Po-zhou. The boy had responded well: she was proud of him. And today her father had honored her beyond measure by being present at Mo-Shi's training.
It was so utterly different from the anarchy of the buffer zone, the feral children, and Moses' dog pack. Children can be astonishingly resilient—at least on the surface—especially the young ones. As he began to regain confidence and put the horror of his past behind him, Moses fell in love with his new family. His father, Deng, was stern but fair, Snowflake was simply wonderful, and Jeweled Jade made sure that the servants catered to his every whim.
The decision had been impulsive, but Deng had learned to trust his impulses. He had been intrigued by the persistent rumors of the black street child who had become the leader of a pack of wild dogs, and he had sensed in the young barbarian an unusual quality that he might turn to advantage at some future time. On being informed that his rival Xi Ming-Kuo was intending to capture the boy, he had acted without hesitation to spirit the child away and place him in his own household. Here Deng could keep the child safe from prying eyes, for a time; observe him, and have him suitably educated. In particular, he ordered the boy to be trained in the ancient art of gongfu as an aid to his future survival. All of his children were gongfu adepts, for the same reason.
Deng had plans for Mo-Shi. The White Dragon Gang dealt in many things, but the core of their operation was drugs. It was forbidden to import barbarian drugs—it was forbidden to have any contact with barbarians whatsoever. But there was demand for such drugs, and money to match it. Cinoxacin for urinary tract infections, famiclovir for Herpes zoster, dextro-moramide for severe pain . . . above all, novoviagralin for impotence. The White Dragon Gang dealt in barbarian medicines, and unlike most traditional medicines, these often worked. Moses could become a very useful conduit to Ecotopia. Deng knew that the child could not be kept in China for long—it would be too dangerous. Dangerous for the boy, for Deng's family, for the White Dragon Gang. One year, and one only—that would would be enough to permit the extensive changes to barbarian records that must be made before it was safe for Mo-Shi to return. But not to freedom . . . The initial destination that Deng envisaged for the child was to be geographically in Ecotopia, but outside the mainstream of barbarian culture. It must be somewhere that Xi Ming-Kuo would never be able to track down, and totally insulated from the prying eyes of the eXtraNet—because, forbidden as Xconnections were in Free China, Xi would have many. Certainly Deng did. Then, when sufficient time had passed, Mo-Shi could be unleashed upon Ecotopia proper.
It had given the warlord of the White Dragon Gang tremendous intellectual pleasure to devise a solution to this difficult conundrum. There must be no way for any barbarian to trace the childs real origins, either, so Deng's small team of illicit computer hackers had to create an entire fake background for the boy. There was no safe way to erase his real background, but it would be simple to modify the police records so that "missing, presumed dead" became merely "dead." Once equipped with a new, fully substantiated identity, Moses could be removed from China, where his presence was always a potential danger, and taken to a place where he could grow to manhood without his past being traced back to Free China, let alone the White Dragon Gang. And after that? The warlord had no specific plan yet. He just sensed that Mo-Shi held the key to the destruction of Xi Ming-Kuo. In a way, it was obvious: their two paths of destiny were opposed at every turn. Mo-Shi was a powerful piece in a game of chess, and Deng intended to make sure that he remained on the board.
It did, of course, mean that the boy would have a very peculiar, fragmented upbringing—a succession of more or less willing foster parents from at least two distinct cultures—but he would simply have to cope with this. He was young enough that by the time he reached adolescence he would remember only those things that he was being trained to remember . . .
Silent Snowflake decided Moses was ready for a rather different lesson. She knew that Deng, waiting silently, would approve. "All right, Mo-Shi. You have worked hard. Let us practice something you have already mastered ... I know! The ankle throw. But first we will refresh ourselves."
Carefully, she poured out two cups of green tea. Moses, thirsty from his exertions, emptied his in a single gulp; Silent Snowflake sipped daintily at her own and set it to one side. Deng watched attentively—this would be a defining moment.
"Now, Mo-Shi: you know what you have to do!" Moses advanced warily. He was good at this one. He paused, feinted, and then darted toward her feet.
Silent Snowflake threw her tea in his face.
Moses crashed to the floor. He sat up, close to tears, tea soaking the front of his robe. Nothing like this had ever happened before. "That's not fair," he shouted. "You cheated!" It was humiliating, especially in front of his . . . father.
Silent Snowflake gave the boy a very serious, though kindly look. "Mo-Shi: learn this lesson well, for it is the most important that I shall ever teach you. Survival is not a game, it is war. There are no rules. But there is technique. Remember this: any context conceals within it the means of advancing ones own desires. Use such means without inhibition."
Moses puzzled over the long words for hours. When he worked out what she'd meant, something else puzzled him.
Why hadn't she thrown the cup?
* * *
Outside Europa Base, the noon eclipse was once more bathing the corrugated terrain in the suffuse salmon pink of jovelight, refracted through the outer layers of Jupiter's atmosphere. The gas giant was an eerie orb of midnight black, ringed with orange fire. The magnificent spectacle recurred every three and a half days.
The task force personnel seldom bothered to watch the eclipse anymore, not even through the base's instruments—let alone to suit up and go outside into the -190°C vacuum, as they had so often done in the early days.
They'd seen it all before.
Dust.
Heat.
A year had passed, all preparations had been made . . . Deng Po-zhou had known that he could prevaricate no further. He had also known that Silent Snowflake would be distressed. So he it.
Animal smells. Goats, mostly. Some cattle. Innumerable scruffy, uncared-for dogs.
Food, cooking over open fires. Wood smoke. Latrines.
A trail of army ants.
Huts—woven more than built. Huts of reeds, huts of grass, huts assembled from palm leaves . . .
Huts.
&n
bsp; Moses had never seen a hut. He'd seen more animals than most people on the planet, but he'd never seen a hut.
He'd never seen a goat, either. But there were more goats than huts. More goats than people. The Village was awash with goats. They were its lifeblood, its purpose, its currency . . .
It was a new world, and Moses understood absolutely nothing about it. Though he understood perfectly that he would never see Silent Snowflake or Jeweled Jade again. Which is why he was bawling his eyes out when the wagon passed between the twin columns of the Village gate.
Another child? X'nambawa tried to conceal his annoyance. It was difficult enough to play the role of father to a family of ten thousand. Harder still when he knew —as his family did not— that somewhere beyond the golden smear of the horizon was a world that made theirs seem no more than a pinprick on the hide of a rhinoceros. The real world, in which their entire universe, the Village, counted for less than nothing.
Someone had to be a conduit.
Someone had to know the Truth.
Someone had to know why the outside world not only permitted the Village to exist, but insisted upon it. For the Village was an anachronism, and it existed for a very specific purpose.
It was a warning.
This, the Village said, is what you would be without the intelligence that makes you human. If you were severed from the Xnet, cut off from the sum total of human knowledge, deprived of the understanding of a thousand prior generations—you would be nothing more than clever animals. Able to learn tricks, but unable to devise the tricks to begin with. Apes with attitude.
Primitive, tribal. . . Emotionally and culturally advanced—intellectually, nowhere. Your highest technology, the clay cooking pot. Your highest aspiration—godhood.
To a Chinese warlord with a tentative long-term plan and a pressing short-term problem, it was the ideal place to bury the problem where it would cause him the least trouble. And so, into this unsustainable mix of hope and innate talent, came Moses Odingo, trussed like a turkey, half buried beneath sacks of planting seed.
The boy awoke to the smell of a bonfire. He opened his eyes . . . and nothing was as it should be. In place of the gilded walls of Deng's mansion, there were walls of interlaced rushes.
In place of the ancient vases and jade sculptures, there was a crude wooden carving of a giraffe. The floor was not smooth, polished planks of cedarwood, but dried mud. The voices spoke a half-remembered barbarian tongue, quite unlike the mellifluous tones of high Mandarin. And instead of the songs of the nightingale, he heard the mournful honking of ducks on a lake.
He had been told, warned . . . reasons had been explained . . . it didn't make the reality any less distressing.
Everything was wrong. Yet, on some deep intuitive level, he also knew that it was his life from now on. And so he sniveled, reserving his weeping for an indefinitely postponed future.
"Squawks? They communicate in squawks."
After more than a year's fruitless study of the wheeler visitor, Europa Base had finally made a breakthrough. Not that it helped.
"No, Sir Charles: squarks. And they communicate with them." You didn't have to be empathic to read the look on Sir Charles's face. "A squark is a supersymmetric twin particle of an ordinary quark. As predicted by Witten's superstring M-theory at the turn of the millennium."
Now Charles understood, and became exasperated. "Why the hell did nobody tell me this before?"
"Because, Sir Charles, nobody had any reason to anticipate it." Wallace Halberstam, a wiry man with thick black eyebrows and short gray hair, was in charge of the Jovian Task Force's Logistics Division—in effect making him second-in-command— but his degree had been in the philosophy of reductionist physics. Finding his speciality unexpectedly useful, he was taking full advantage of his fifteen minutes of fame, and he expanded on his theme. "You see, nobody even knew that squarks existed. Superstrings enjoyed a brief vogue about two centuries ago. Mathematicians loved them for their elegance and their connections with esoteric questions in topology; physicists were intrigued by them until they found that they couldn't do any of the theoretical calculations needed to test them against reality. They went out of fashion not because they were wrong, but because the theory was too intractable for anyone even to begin finding out what it predicted."
Charles found this explanation less than enlightening. "So what's changed all of a sudden?"
Halberstam gave a mirthless chuckle. "What do you think? Wheelers." He pushed a sheet of paper across the desk, trying not to launch it into the air. He still hadn't fully adjusted to Europa's low gravity
Sir Charles grabbed it before it could become airborne.
It bore a pattern of white dots of various sizes on a navy blue background. Jagged red and green streaks ran diagonally across the page, and he recognized them as transmission errors—lost data. The image had been produced in a hurry; no doubt a tidied-up version was being processed at that very moment.
"What the—devil is this, Wally?"
Halberstam beamed with pride. "Charles, this could be the big breakthrough!"
Subordinates could sometimes be extraordinarily obtuse. "Wally, what I meant was—what's this an image q/?"
"You don't—no, you wouldn't. . . Um ... A team at the Magnetic Resonance Labs in Paris took this image from Trabant— the wheeler that's really corroded and ancient and doesn't respond to laser light like the rest. Confound that Odingo woman—gave us all the . . . crap, kept the good stuff for herself! Bloody lawyers prattling on about rights . . . but you know how I feel about liberals. As you know, Trabant is considered more expendable than our other wheelers, though this particular observation is nondestructive—"
"Wally—just give me the bottom line, okay?"
"Right. Uh . . . the bottom line is that this is an atomic structure found in regions of germanium alloy behind the wheeler's 'headlights.' The structure seems to be a squark generator, and very probably a squark receiver, too, though they haven't yet obtained permission to test one of the newer wheelers to make sure. It turns out that wheelers communicate using supersym-metric quantum-chromodynamic waves, not electromagnetic ones. Well, not exactly sQCD Mjaves —more like modulated soli-ton collectives of sparticles."
Sir Charles was an old hand at such discussions, and the jargon didn't floor him, even though to him most of it sounded meaningless. All you had to do was gauge the meaning from the rest of the sentence. A sparticle, for instance, was obviously a supersymmetric analogue of a standard elementary particle . . . whatever that meant. So Wally Halberstam was telling him that they had been wasting their time trying to detect alien radio messages.
The aliens didn't use radio—they used squarks.
He said as much, and Halberstam nodded energetically. "Yes, their 'headlights' are actually antennas. For squarks. Very quick on the uptake. Sir Charles! I'm impressed."
"I'd prefer it if you stopped being impressed and told me the answer to my next question."
"Sorry, what que—"
"The one I haven't yet asked but am obviously going to. Wally: can we pick up squark signals? We brought everything we could imagine might be needed—but I doubt that anyone imagined we'd need to detect a type of particle unknown to human science that went out of fashion two hundred years ago."
"Uh—they're working on that right now. Young Josie Mazur says she thinks we might be able to adapt one of the wheelers we brought along on Skylark . . . convert its squark radiation into conventional signals. Something to do with the crystal lattice of platinum. I gather that some group at the Macnamara Institute put the Paris guys on to the idea by discovering that wheelers don't react to laser light that's been reflected in a mirror. Unless the mirror happens to be optically flat platinum, that is. So they now think that coherent light from a laser carries with it little packets of squarks, a kind of supersymmetric piggyback effect. The disorder in glass scrambles the phases of the squarks, but not the light. A platinum mirror keeps the squark phase information intact.
"
"Couldn't they have discovered that two centuries ago?"
"No. They didn't have a wheeler to respond to the squark signals. The sparticle packets have been there all along . . . but nobody's had any way to observe them."
"Until now."
Binshaba was unhappy.
"Simeon—why?" She shook her head in disbelief. "We have more mouths to feed than we have food as it is . . . Why bring me this child?" She knew better than to ask where it had come from. The Witches, Simeon would tell her with a straight face. We men know about these things. Obviously it was from the Outside, but the women weren't supposed to know about that.
Her husband found it hard to answer. There were things known to the Council that should not be divulged to the Many. It was difficult, knowing of the existence of a greater world, to reaffirm the parochial values of this microcosm of humanity.
However, it was impossible not to.
"The child is . . . sick," he said, not untruthfully "He has suffered a substantial trauma. His close family has been . . . lost to him."
That, at least, was true. It didn't make it any easier to say. He knew that the truth concealed a lie. He didn't know that what he thought to be the truth was concealed in another lie.
"We have been chosen to . . . care for him. To replace the father and mother that he has lost. To bring him up in the ways of the Village."
Binshaba grasped his hand, urgently, imploringly. "But you and I know that that is not all," she said.
Simeon felt his heart skip a beat. Does she know? Do all the women know? One part of him knew that they must. What the men knew, the women must also know, for the women were shrewd. Shrewder, he acknowledged, than the men, who spent most of the time talking Village politics and making babies with their own or other men's wives, and formulating absurd plans and arguing about them. Not to mention brewing sour mash beer and drinking it in huge quantities. The women did the real work, the work that held the Village together. But, to be fair, the men also carried out the meat-hunt, of course, which was extremely important. And they did kill the occasional marauding lioness or leopard, which was both important and dangerous—and absolutely not a woman's task. Let the men acquire livid scars and get themselves killed . . .