by Jerry
I hungered for her response to this situation even as I surveyed the area for potential threats. Like Geeta and Ibo, I’d emped the culture and language memod for Tice last night. I still wasn’t sure about the companion animals; they’d be easy to mimic. Some looked like large dogs, some like pack animals, and some walked upright like the humans they accompanied, and looked like nothing I’d seen before. What if one of them was the kind of fan who wanted Geeta to experience death or pain so they could share her intense response to that? She’d encountered threats before.
Because of the nature of her memories, most people had no idea what Geeta looked like. She rarely looked at herself in mirrors. If her reflection happened to show up in a memory, GreaTimes fuzzed it. She had been captured in some tourist vids GreaTimes could do nothing about, though; a tricky outsider might have some idea of what she looked like. Plus there was always the general threat anyone might fall under in any place.
Ibo took the lead. We went through customs scan. They determined that Ibo and I were licensed to carry the stun weapons we had. We had no luggage. Geeta never stayed anywhere overnight. It only took her a few hours to collect several salable memory sets. She had already started. She had a long conversation with the customs official about what kind of people he met, what their stories were, what people tried to smuggle in. Ibo and I stood patiently while the customs official called over his superior and had her tell more stories. All part of Geeta.
I had the rubies in a shielded belt. I wasn’t sure the belt would fool sophisticated scanners on Tice, or even the ship’s scanner, though I hoped the stones would show up as just rocks and metal. (Emps triggered the ship scanner—it was looking for them.) Then again, rubies weren’t illegal or dangerous. I didn’t want Captain Ark to know about them, though, or Ibo.
We left the terminal through close-pressed crowds of various kinds of people and animals. Geeta smiled at them, and they found themselves smiling back, maybe without thinking about it. The usual ripple of pleasant spread around us as we moved. Even the pickpocket whose hand I caught in Geeta’s purse smiled after I retrieved Geeta’s pay-ID, because Geeta said, “Better luck next time,” with a short warble of laughter, and kissed his cheek before I released him back into the wild.
On the curb of Hollow Street, Geeta engaged a cab. She sat in the back sandwiched between me and Ibo and told the driver we wanted to go to the Queen’s Sculpture Garden, the first of four planned stops here.
Last time Geeta came to Tice, she started with the amusement park. I wasn’t with her then, but I’ve heard from people who have emped that module. They love it. Even when she threw up on the big roller ride. I was surprised that wasn’t edited out.
The sculpture garden was quiet when we got there, apparently not a big attraction early on a work day. Only some of the sculptures were made by humans; others had been left behind by vanished alien civilizations, or some made by the three alien species we regularly traded with. All were meant to be touched. Geeta was in her element, studying the sculpture with eyes, ears, nose, fingers, palms, finally full-bodied embraces. She climbed into the lap of a Greatmother and curled up there, hugging herself, her cheek against the smooth dark stone. The bliss on her face made me wonder if she were thinking about her own mother’s lap, or some other place where she had been perfectly comfortable. Her emotions loaded with the memods, but you couldn’t read her thoughts, though sometimes I felt like I could.
Ibo and I had been standing at an easily editable distance, watching Geeta make memories for half an hour, when she looked around and said, “Ibo, we’re safe here, aren’t we?”
Ibo and I both surveyed the garden, using our detection gear to see if anyone or anything dangerous was nearby. No threats.
“It’s okay for Itzal to take half an hour of his leave now,” Geeta said. “I’ll be here at least that much longer.”
“What have you two cooked up?” Ibo asked.
“You took leave on Geloway,” I said. We had been walking a tour trail through a spectacular lava field when Ibo begged time off. He had come back, smelling of sex shop perfume, when we were in the sweet shop at the end of the tour.
“True,” he said. He frowned as though he realized it was a mistake to accuse me and Geeta of anything during a memod. The GreaTimes people edited us out, but for sure they listened to our conversations before they eliminated them. “All right. See you later, Itzal,” he said, and I left.
We are not supposed to know how to hack our trackers, but my last job before joining the Geeta team was with a research and development security company, and I learned a lot there. I entered false coordinates in my tracker and headed for Pawn Alley.
Twenty-nine minutes later I was back in the sculpture garden with news I kept to myself.
The rest of our tour of Tice went without trouble, and Geeta, Ibo, and I taxied back to the terminal, our arms full of souvenirs—boxes of Tice teacakes in five flavors, soft and textured stuffed animals, three new dresses for Geeta with hats, shoes, overtunics, and jewelry to match, and an infostream address for the man Geeta had met and kissed at the races. Having walked through the day with Geeta, and watched her differing delights, including that kiss, I wanted the whole suite of today’s memods. Maybe I’d get them, one at a time, though there were so many Geeta memods on my wish list already . . .
Geeta had a party with the ship’s crew, sharing the treats she’d brought back, and talking about her day. We were all charmed, as we always were the night before the company extracted her memories. We got to see who Geeta might be if she could have held on to her experiences. We all loved the woman she would never become.
Later, the cakes gone and souvenirs distributed amongst the crew, to be hidden any time Geeta came near—though she always got to keep any clothes and accessories she bought—I escorted Geeta back to her cabin. She went into the changing alcove while I spystopped. I found a new active camera and managed to remotely access its feed while my back was to it. Geeta fluttered back into the cabin in her exercise clothes, talked about her adventures, then started her nightly routine. Three repetitions in, I created a loop and sent the camera into nontime. As soon as I gave Geeta the all-clear, she rushed to me.
She saw my expression and sighed, two steps before she would have collided with me.
“They were fake,” I said.
“The rubies?”
“I went to three pawn shops and they all told me the same thing. Decent fakes, not spectacular. Worth no more than glass. Didn’t get enough to even contact anyone who might have disguised the real memods. I traded what I got for the rubies for a couple disguised bootlegs, the lava walk on Placeholder and the plunge valley on Paradise. I need to test them. Maybe they won’t be infected.” I had tried a couple of bootlegs of Geeta’s memods without testing them, back when I was younger and stupider. They were dirt cheap but still amazing, though they suffered from copy fatigue. Often the bootleggers placed compulsions in them that took money, time, and effort to eradicate. I still had the urge to gamble every time I passed an Ergo machine.
“Fake,” Geeta repeated. She wandered to her jewelry drawer, stared down at her treasures, and shut the drawer, her shoulders drooping. Then, angry, she stepped back into place and resumed her exercises. I unlooped the spy camera and we went through her night-of-a-collection-day routine, which included a shower for Geeta and a furniture keying for me: I had to shape the bed so it would do the extraction during the night.
Washed free of every trace of Tice, Geeta let me help her into the bed, fasten the restraints, and plug in her head. “Kiss me,” she said. “I want two kisses in a day. I never had that experience before, did I?”
I kissed her long and deep, kissing the woman we were killing. This kiss wouldn’t make it into the memods; her return to the ship was always cut out. We had done the Tice Ending Shot at sunset on a mountain where cool wind touched us with feathered fingers; it would be spliced onto the end of each of Geeta’s Tice memods.
Geeta would
not remember the kiss, but I would, the taste of her sorrow and desperation mixed with the last sweet tang of willowcake. She often kissed me last thing after a mission; I had a collection of these moments in my memory, moments that sometimes deceived me into thinking we were closer than we were.
Her lips relaxed, and I straightened out of the kiss, looked down into her tear-wet eyes.
“Good night, Geeta,” I said softly.
“Good night, Itzal.” She closed her eyes. I set the bed on COLLECT and touched off the lights as I left the room.
In my own much smaller and sparer cabin, I checked for spies. I had never found one; what I did away from Geeta didn’t concern the GreaTimes people, as long as it was legal and not going to impair my care for her.
I put the Hallen memod in the recycle slot and took out the memod I had bought with the ruby money, what I hadn’t put away. I had bought the horse people, the one she’d asked me for. It was a memod she’d made before I was part of her staff. I had read the sales copy on all of them, wanting to know who she had been as much as she did. This was one of the better ones; all the reviews said so.
I set the new memod in my receptor and settled down to emp.
Geeta walked down a ramp into a sky seething with dawn clouds and the tracks of skitterbirds. The air smelled of damp and green, and morning animals called, a random concert with notes that sometimes clashed and sometimes harmonized. In Geeta’s mind, it was all beautiful. The air was cool; Geeta felt it as a pleasurable hug from a chilly friend.
Three horses galloped up the soft-surfaced road and stopped just in front of her, breathing grass-scented breath, musky warmth pouring off them. She laughed and went to hug one, even though the culture memod said people weren’t allowed to do that. How amazing to have your arms around so much huge intelligent warmth; the texture of damp hair against your cheek, the solid muscles shifting against your chest. The smell of the horse’s sweat, salty and musky, stirred Geeta awake on several levels.
“Miss,” said the horse, “Miss, I don’t know you.”
She released him and stepped back. “Oh! I’m sorry. Please forgive me. You don’t know me yet, but I hope you will.” He watched her with one large dark eye, as intricate and beautiful a glistening eye as I had ever seen, with a depth in it that might lead to mystery. I fell in love with the horse. I knew Geeta smiled up at him, because I saw his response: charmed, his head nodding a little, even as his companions laughed at him.
I settled deeper into being Geeta, finding a home that wasn’t really mine but felt like mine. Geeta was home everywhere she went, and when I was emping her, I felt that way, too.
I didn’t know if I would ever share this with her.
THE LAST ROCKET
A.F. Allen
“Gentlemen that concludes my presentation, now are there any questions?”
Professor Bringham looked up at his audience having spent the last hour and a half talking, almost nonstop. The seven senior scientists, the ruling council, were staring at him, their faces impenetrable masks. Finally the committee chairman spoke up.
“Are you sure you can pull this off?”
“Absolutely sir.”
“You think there is enough metal left?”
“In this particular area, yes sir.”
“That rocket will take thousands of tons of metal, and you cannot hope to keep a project of this scale a secret.”
“I know, sir. That’s why we’ll build a secure facility and use the troops for security the way I laid it out.”
“Allowing their wives onto the rocket as a way of securing their loyalty is a good concept, there especially the genetics bit. What about the construction workers? How will you select the crew from them?”
“By lot sir, green tickets will be selected by lottery.”
The seven scientists looked at each other. Bringham could see their lips moving but the privacy screens had dropped, disconnecting him from their discussions. They’d forgotten he was an excellent lip reader. He smiled, he could already sense the decision was going to go his way.
Three years later . . .
“There was another incursion in sector nine last night.”
“Oh, bad?”
“Yeah, quite bad, seventeen security bods, and twenty-one workers.”
Hope flared in Bob’s mind.
“Any of them green tickets?”
Tony shook his head, “Nope, not one. How come you didn’t hear it?”
“I was down in the rocket pit helping Professor Bringham; we were testing the auxiliary pod motors.”
“Ah. I thought that’s what the rumble was. I think the pops tried to coincide their attack with that.”
“Suppose it makes sense, I never heard a thing.”
The lunch line moved slowly forward. Finally the two of them were able to take their metal plates loaded with bread and cheese together with a tin beaker of coffee flavoured water and they headed to sit on the grass outside. Most of the workers stayed inside the mess hall but Tony loved the outdoors and Bob usually kept him company.
Suddenly the public address system barked into life.
Now hear this, now hear this. The populace attempted an incursion last night in sector nine. Although there were casualties the break was rectified and the fence patched. There is no cause for alarm.
“See, told you.”
“Yeah right, but the people out there are going to become more desperate as time goes on now. Surely they can see the rocket is finished.”
Tony shrugged in response.
“What can they do?”
“What can’t they do? There must be a hundred thousand out there and everyone thinks they have a right to be on that last rocket out of here.”
“They haven’t earned it.”
“You think that bothers them?”
The barracks complex they occupied was close to the crown of the second highest hill in the complex. From the grassy slope they could see all the way down past the lower barracks to the twin fences that marked the edge of the compound, over two miles away.
“They certainly look rather mad out there today.”
“Yep. I think they had a leader last night who had a good plan. Trouble is we had a better one.”
The pops were surging backward and forward outside of the second fence. The security guards were very much in evidence patrolling the dead ground between the two fences in armoured Hummers and the occasional Abram.
“You sure they didn’t get any green ticket holders last night?”
“Nope.”
“Damn! Might have had a chance at one if they had.”
“Why do you think the green ticket holders are in the central barracks? They’re not going to take chances. Still there might be a hope.”
“Oh, what?”
“I hear they’ve got a mass problem. A lot of the green tickets have been working too hard. Most of them have lost a bit of weight. There’s a rumour they might issue a couple of extra tickets to make up the mass.”
“Fingers crossed.”
“Yeah. Fingers crossed bud.”
Professor Bringham looked over the top of his specs as he raised his eyes from the printout.
“You are sure these figures are accurate?”
“Yes. We are about two hundred and seventy pounds down on total mass for the steerage passengers.”
“So what do you propose?”
“Well we could hold a raffle for two extra tickets.”
“And if two big men win, bigger than the hundred and thirty-five average we need?”
“We’d have a problem.”
“We cannot devalue the green ticket system by issuing a ticket and then not honouring it. The chance of a green ticket kept this project on track for three years. Drawing them a month ago was against my better judgement, but I was overruled. We’ll issue two more but we must pre-select the candidates.”
His secretary nodded, nervously.”
“How many men do we have who match the one
hundred thirty-five averages?”
“Only four sir, Bob Hancock your assistant is one.”
“Good, we’ll take him. Who are the others?”
“There’s his sidekick Tony Mortimer, who works on the attitude jets.”
“That’s settled then. Issue them both with green ticket passes today. Tell them it’s as a result of a computer glitch. We launch tomorrow. They’ll be glad to be onboard.”
The two white ticket men shared a tiny smile and then moved onto the next item on the agenda.
“Take your rifle and ammunition. Join your squad and cover your assigned sector.”
The line shuffled forward.
“Take your rifle and ammunition. Join your squad and cover your assigned sector.”
Finally Bob and Tony were at the front of the line.
“Take your rifle and ammunition. Join your squad and . . .”
“Excuse me sergeant?”
“What?”
“We’re the newbie green tickets. We haven’t been assigned to a squad or a sector.”
The armoury sergeant, a blue ticket holder himself glowered at the two men.
“Jesus! They don’t tell me nothing! Go wait over there. I don’t have time Whites are boarding in ten minutes.”
He turned to the next men behind them.
“Take your rifle and ammunition . . .”
“This is it Bob, we’re on the crew.”
Bob shrugged at his friend’s enthusiasm. He felt the same.
“Not exactly crew Tony, steerage passengers are not exactly part of the crew.”
“Yeah, but we got a ticket off this planet on the last rocket and that’s what counts.”
The tangy blared.