Wheelers

by Ian Stewart

  The balloon probe continued to rise.

  Far below, a tiny dot seemed to be drifting toward the floating city. Then a layer of cloud interposed itself, and the dot was hidden from view

  "I hope to hell you got all that. Cash," Jonas worried.

  "Bet you a week's salary I did."

  Halfholder landed close to the rim, but safely—partially deflated, bruised, battered, leaking gas from a dozen wounds, trailing thin trickles of sticky fluid.

  She still held the strange object that she had succeeded in stealing from the weird creature that—by sheer good fortune— had come close enough for her to catch it. She congratulated herself on her quick thinking. She had certainly outwitted the monstrous creature. She hadn't realized she possessed so much courage. She had grasped the animal by its tentacle, subdued it, stolen its pretty toy—and gotten away before the stupid beast woke up and tried to take the toy back.

  It had been huge. It might have swallowed her whole. (She carefully omitted to ask herself where its mouth had been. Obviously it must have had one, somewhere.)

  This was the stuff of legend. She would compose a song to record the saga of her bravery. They would still be singing it a billion years from now . . .

  Rubbish. The story wasn't that good. Forty million years, surely, but never a billion.

  For several minutes she lay unmoving, as these mad thoughts rushed through her overstressed mind. Then her instinct for self-preservation kicked in. She had been skydiving. She had sown the seeds of a city's destruction. If the Elders of Whispering Volve caught her now, she would pay the penalty of ritual deflation. Painfully, she dragged herself across the surface of the city foam, ignoring how it scraped her hide, her mind set on only one thing—concealment.

  Partially hidden behind a tall stand of waving bladderwort, she saw an ancient, dilapidated blisterpond. Its skin was dull and flaky, its rim distorted, its lid sluggish and slimy. But it pulled clumsily open, just enough for her to fall inside. She exuded a puff of capture-hormone onto its walls to close it again.

  She dropped the object she had stolen. Later, when she felt better, she might decide to examine it. For now, she couldn't care less what it was, or what she might do with it.

  Eventually, she would be restored to her original self. The blisterpond still held a stock of preserved food. Her wounds would begin to heal. Soon she would be able to make contact with the skydivers of Whispering Volve . . .

  Above her, a city sickened and began to die. She mourned its impending loss. But even more she mourned the pockmarked surfaces of a score of worlds—moonlets, moons, planets—sacrificed to the blind fear of the Elders. What was one dead city, anyway, compared to their total loss through evolutionary stagnation?

  What was one dead city?

  Through her pain she came, slowly, to an understanding of what her crime would achieve.

  Nothing.

  The destruction of Sparkling Spires, she now saw, was little more than a futile gesture. The Instrumentality had misled her in its insistence that this terrible act of rebellion would—somehow—bring about the triumph of the Policy of Benign Neglect and end the carnage of the lesser worlds.

  Now she saw that it could not. The Elders' mind-set was too firmly entrenched, their power too great, public apathy about the Cause too prevalent.

  It would take more. Much more. How many cities would the skydivers have to kill before the Elders were goaded into action? Would blimps have to die, too? Might the cure be worse than the disease?

  She had been used.

  In a kind of delirium, crazy schemes flickered through her consciousness. Wait for approaching snowstrike and then sabotage the Diversion Engines . . . Assassinate the Elders as they estivated in their blisterponds . . . Cryptically reprogram the defense symbiauts . . .

  It might take all of those things. It would take all of those things.

  It was going to be a long campaign, and even if she avoided ritual deflation she would probably be dead before it succeeded. But there would be others, equally foolish, to continue her role.

  And about one thing, the Instrumentality had not lied: the wild, heady excitement of the descent, the senses sharpened by mortal danger. The reckless ecstasy of utter freedom.

  The rush.

  She put all thoughts of the strange new object from her mind and became lost in the wonder of her new awakening. Already she was planning her next dive.

  16

  Wispering Volve of Late Morning, 2221

  For many Jovian days, Bright Halfholder of the Violent Foam rested in the cocooned environment of her newfound blister-pond, recuperating from her narrow brush with the Deathsoul Keeper and meditating on the incomprehensible manner of her survival.

  Her near-eyes kept returning to the object that she had stolen from the strange metal monster. Despite her courage in pulling off the daring theft, she felt a flurry of fear every time she looked at it. The object seemed so benign, lying on its side on the blisterpond's damp, rippled floor. It could have been a wheeler construct, except that the materials were exotic and the design was disturbingly unjovian . . . Yet, like wheeler constructs, it exuded a tangible sense of purpose. It was clearly made (she knew not by whom/what)—as, she now realized with a delayed sense of shock, was the spherical metal monster from which (not whom) she had stolen it. She knew that she should have understood this fundamental point much earlier, but in her disturbed condition there had been little chance of that.

  Hesitantly, she poked one of her sexfurcated trunks at the object. Nothing dangerous occurred as a result. Indeed, nothing occurred at all, except for a slight change in the object's orientation relative to the blisterpond's floor. Encouraged by this—though oddly disappointed—she poked again . . . and something made a sharp sound, all jagged high-frequency waves, uncannily like a small gas-sac popping under extreme pressure.

  Seconds later, a babble of the weirdest noises she had ever heard filled the tiny chamber of the blisterpond, and her hearing patches began to experience a worrying level of distortion. In mild panic, worried that the noise might attract guardians to her hideaway, she poked and pummeled the object, to discover that various of its protrusions could be made to pop in and out, or to move. Intrigued—and telling herself that the blister-pond's thick rind would stop the noise from reaching the outside world—she began to experiment systematically, and her intelligent explorations were quickly rewarded. One protrusion seemed to affect the noise level, and she found that she could turn down the volume until the noises became comfortable. And another . . .

  Created moving patterns of colored light.

  At first she thought that the patterns were diffused sunlight, filtered through colored clouds and playing across the object's surface, but she quickly realized that there was no suitable source of illumination. Increasing the sensitivity of her night-eyes enhanced the contrast. She swiveled around so that her chromatic-eyes could be brought to bear, and was rewarded by a riot of impossible color combinations. Then, with a suddenness that took her breath away, the patterns resolved themselves into a series of abstract scenes, primitively rendered in two dimensions, and changing faster than the eye could follow.

  Puzzled, she watched for a time, but the flashing images did little except dazzle her. They made no sense whatsoever. Bored, she silenced the babble and darkened the moving patterns.

  That was better.

  "What do you mean, he can't stay here? This is his homer' Angle had known it was going to be hard to make Charity see the obvious. Moses was safe ... for the moment. The Chinese from the autogiros had taken quite a pasting, and they must be wondering what had happened ... as indeed was Angie. It didn't take a genius to reconstruct roughly what Moses must have done, but how he had managed it was quite another matter. What kind of a mind must that boy have? It didn't bear thinking about. It was frightening.

  The area around the wreckage had been swarming with Diversity Police for days—the firefight between two Chinese factions on African so
il had hit the first layer of the newspages, and was still close to the top of the stack. There was no mention of a missing boy or a small yellow autogiro. As far as Angle's snoops could tell, no one in the Village had kicked up any fuss about the boy's disappearance—no doubt because someone influential there had been involved in smuggling him in to begin with and had no wish to draw attention to that. Already the boy had been removed from the Village's records, probably by the same person.

  There was therefore no reason for the police to suspect that the incident had been anything other than a skirmish between two opposing groups of Chinese illegals, probably over drugs or protected animals. Ecotopia naturally had spies in Free China—-just as the Chinese had them in Ecotopia—and already they were digging, but it might take years before any useful information came to light. It looked as though the two groups had fought a short, very nasty battle, with no survivors on either side. A rhinoceros seemed to have gotten caught up in the fight, doing quite a bit of damage before running off, and it was generally felt that this was poetic justice. The rhino responsible had been located not far away, intact but bearing enough signs of the fight to identify it, and it had become an overnight celebrity on the eXtraNet.

  If any nation except Free China had been responsible, the affair would have blown up into a major diplomatic incident, but since neither Free China nor Ecotopia had diplomatic representation within each others territories, this was out of the question. The Ecotopian government had long ago become inured to Chinese isolationism, and it knew there was no way to register its displeasure, but it did take the elementary precaution of stepping up its military presence in Eastafrican airspace and its satellite surveillance of the Chinese borders, land and sea. This made things a little easier for Angle, because it meant that for a few weeks it was unlikely that there would be any attempt to kidnap or assassinate Moses. Nevertheless, the Ecotopian bureaucracy would soon assign the incident to its fat file of Chinese violations and gradually remove the current precautionary measures.

  Even before that, the boy was vulnerable to a well-organized strike—by Hunters or mercenaries, for example. However he had pulled off his astonishing survival trick, it would be unlikely to work against a laser-guided antipersonnel missile fired by a sniper several miles away. However, one factor was in their favor: it would take time to organize such an operation, and during that short window, Moses must be spirited away. She doubted that the Chinese would be much interested in Gooma Facility if the boy wasn't present, but all the while he was, there was a distinct danger to Charity. As she was now trying to make clear.

  Charity didn't care about her own safety, but Moses' was another matter, and eventually she got the message. It didn't help that Charity was trying to exorcise some demons of her own. Ever since that final spat with her sister, she had been wracked with guilt. Why shouldn't Prudence go hunting wheelers if she wanted to? There had been no communication between them— not while Prudence was en route to Jupiter, not even to help relieve her boredom. Charity knew it was foolish, but emotionally she still blamed herself for sending Prudence away.

  In principle, Moses' return must cause all that to change. Prudence was the child's closest relative, apart from his mother. There was no way that Charity could hide the joyful news from her own sister, however difficult their personal relationship had become. She knew that events were forcing her to get in touch with Prudence, and that meant she would have to apologize— even though she still thought that Prudence was in the wrong.

  As soon as Angle had worked out that this was the problem, she agreed. "Honey, she's your sister. You can't cut her out of your life altogether, however much you disagree with what she's done. I'll bet she feels just as bad about it as you do. And I know she'll be just as stubborn." Angle was a skilled negotiator, once she sensed a leverage point, and before Charity quite understood what was happening, she found that she had agreed to Moses' being taken into hiding in return for Angle's service as a mediator between the Odingo twins.

  In the end, the reconciliation was easier than Charity had feared. For a start, it is difficult to have an argument when there is a ninety-minute delay between accusation and defense. Both sisters had changed considerably since they had last met, both were wracked with guilt, and both were secretly relieved to be on speaking terms again. Moreover, Prudence had not, as it turned out, been digging up valuable wheelers at all. Over the heavily encrypted channel. Charity came to understand that her elder twin had been sidetracked into something far more interesting and far more laudable: attempting to save the human race. As Prudence explained how they had been losing confidence in Charles Dunsmoore's task force and had decided to take matters into their own hands. Charity found herself muttering approval. But then, they both had good reason to despise the man.

  Angle brought Moses into the room so that his aunt could see him. Despite being prompted, the boy said very little, but Charity comforted herself with the thought that it was hard speaking into an unresponsive 'node. Moses was taciturn even in ordinary conversations: time-lagged ones would be totally beyond him. With such long delays, normal two-way conversations become pointless. Instead, one party transmits a lengthy monologue. The recipient records the lot, takes electronic notes along the way, plans out a reply, and transmits his or her own monologue in return. Charity did, however, manage to engage Moses in a reasonably articulate conversation about the animals at Gooma Facility which she relayed to Prudence.

  The reply, when it came, had a remarkable effect on the child. Prudence began by saying that they'd found some new kind of animals in Jupiter's atmosphere. Charity and Angle could hardly fail to notice the boy's interest perk up as soon as her sister said this, and when some edited vidifilm followed, the boy was captivated. At first. Prudence limited her transmission to the curious floating fauna of the Jovian cloud layer, but she was working her way toward the climax. "I want you all to promise not to breathe a word of what I'm going to show you next, okay? I'm not going to wait for you to reply—just make the promise to each other. Done that? I'll assume you have.

  "Charity Angle, Moses . . . we've made contact with an intelligent alien! How do we know? Well, some bright spark in the Jovian Task Force must have decided that if we ever managed to get one of the communicators into the possession of what might be a sentient alien, then it would be a really good intelligence test to equip the communicator with a switch and present it in the off state. Maybe they were right, because the alien worked out how to switch it on. Great. Unfortunately, it also turned out to be intelligent enough to switch the communicator off again. We don't know why . . . maybe it got bored. We're hoping it will soon decide to switch it back on, but that may not help much. While communication was in operation it didn't respond to anything we sent it. I'm wondering if we're doing the right thing, sending it simple combinatorial patterns . . . squares, rectangles, number sequences . . . Maybe it's so alien that it doesn't find such things meaningful? But every philosophy text insists that mathematics is a universal language, and nearly all the alien contact groups seem to agree . . . Anyway, enough of that: you can see for yourselves. I give you: the alien!"

  The screen blanked, flickered, and then the image stabilized. Charity gasped. Angle shook her head in wonder. Moses jumped up and down in excitement, bouncing on the elastic webbing of his chair. "Ma! Look, look—Auntie Pru's found an alien!" He seemed to have reverted to childhood, and Charity felt her eyes stinging.

  Moses kept up an incessant commentary. Angle and Charity spoke not a word; their vocal cords didn't seem to be functioning. First, Prudence transmitted Jonas's film of their initial encounter with the creature falling spread-eagled through the snark pack like an isolated snowflake. The significance of the animal's belted bag was lost on no one. The explosive devastation of the predators confirmed their conclusions. Then the alien was dangling helplessly from the boom of the vacuum-balloon. They took in the domed bag, the ring of eyes, the skirt of dangling trunklike tentacles . . .

  The f
ilm now cut to the inside of the blisterpond, as seen by the portable communicator's cameras and heard by its microphones. The noises were decidedly odd. The creature's lack of response to the transmitted patterns was palpable and disappointing.

  "Doesn't look so intelligent to me," said Angle.

  "Pretty dumb, I'd say," Charity agreed. "I'm not even sure that it's watch—"

  "Yes!" Moses yelled. "Yes, Ma, yes, she's watching! Right from the start, she was looking at us with some of her eyes, the four at the front which see better details close up! Then she started to tune in the eyes beside those, the ones that can see better in the dark! And then—" He was leaping up and down now.

  animated, overexcited, but more alive than he had been at any time since he'd rejoined the world outside the Village. Charity and Angle started at him, wondering whether the child had gone mad, or whether he was a genius.

  Finally, Angle found her voice. "Moses, what are you talking about? How do you know—"

  "Why can't anyone see? It's obvious! Look at how she swivels her dome, how her eyes pop in and out!"

  "Moses, how can you possibly tell if the creature is male or female?"

  "Not a sex thing! Alien gender is . . . social! Role-play! Watch how she—no words ..."

  The two women looked at each other. Something quite unprecedented was happening here. Angle felt prickles running along her spine. Suddenly she knew exactly how Moses had managed to survive the firefight and what had happened to the Chinese paramilitaries.

  They'd never stood a chance.

  "My God," said Angle. "Charity—he's not making this up. Are you, Moses?"

  "No! Can't you see? Look, she's . . . proud of herself, but frightened. She isn't sure what the communicator is anymore. She thought she had captured it, but now she is beginning to worry that it has captured her."