Metaplanetary (A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War)

by Tony Daniel

  Loop 21

  We killed a great many sweepers in that manner. But there were always more.

  Loop 22

  Jill had saved my life. I felt immense gratitude.

  Loop 23

  A lot of rats did.

  Loop 24

  There were more rats than anybody had ever suspected.

  Loop 25

  Each of us would follow Jill into the sun itself.

  Loop 26

  When Jill calls, we will answer.

  Loop 27

  When Jill tells us to bite, we will bite.

  Six

  “Those Friends of Tod all threw themselves at the sweepers all at once. This is not the way to take out a DI sweeper. A rat I know figured out the best way and told me.”

  “A rat?”

  “It’s good to know some rats,” Jill replied. “The sweepers just injected the Friends of Tod who were in the office, one after another. Those needles are poison, you know.” Jill paused, took another spoonful of soup. “But those were brave people.”

  “You said ‘sweepers,’ ” Aubry said. “There were more than one of them?”

  “There were five.”

  “Five?” Leo said. “You took them all out?”

  “I was aided by the distraction provided by the Friends of Tod dying,” Jill said. “I fried the sweepers and pulled Tod out of there. Did you know he has an extra bend in his neck?”

  “I didn’t know he had an extra bend,” Leo said.

  “Well, it made a pretty good way to lead him along,” Jill said. “Made his neck into sort of a handle.”

  “Why did you save him?” Aubry asked. “Why did you save us?”

  “I heard that the Friends of Tod were good at finding out things,” Jill said. “I need to find something out.”

  “What?”

  Jill ate more soup, then lifted her bowl and drained it into her mouth.

  “Good Lord,” said Leo. “You’re a bottomless pit.”

  “Always eat when you can,” Jill said, and grinned ferociously. “How about making us more soup?”

  “Sure,” Leo replied. “There’s more boogers where those came from.”

  “Good,” said Jill. “I’m looking for someone named Alethea.”

  Seven

  Jennifer Fieldguide could not believe it when she saw the handsome captain approaching her to ask for a dance. She’d admired Quench from afar, and had even gone so far as to find out his name. And now he was asking her to dance. Jennifer had come to the dance as a part of the neo-Flares. Not that she was a poet herself, but she spent a lot of time in the coffeehouse where the Flares did their thing and, since finishing base school, had gotten a job there while she decided, as she told her parents, what to do about the future.

  It was not that she wanted to give logical consideration to the question, though she knew that was what her parents assumed.Feeling was always the best guide; she knew this in her heart. It was just that feeling had not told her what to do after graduation. She would just wait until a thunderbolt struck her (although, she had to admit, that that was an unlikely event on Triton).

  As the body of Captain Quench approached her, Jennifer felt distant rumblings that might signal a gathering storm. He was a large man, but also, somehow, fine-boned and elegant. His face suggested manly virtues and a feminine softer nature capable of deep compassion, at the same time. His voice was mellifluous when he asked her to dance. Quench executed the patterns perfectly, if a bit stiffly, Particularly when it came to the free-form section, but Jennifer interpreted this as the result of his being a military man. She had never particularly cared for soldiers before. In fact, among her friends, the Army was looked upon more as a necessary evil than as a good in and of itself. But there was something about the clean, stiff uniform and the smell of grooming—something else the neo-Flares were not overly fond of—that awakened Jennifer’s desire to impress. When they came away from the dance, Jennifer contrived to continue talking with Quench and to pull him to a corner sofa, where they sat and ordered up drinks from the grist.

  “Is it really true that everyone on Nereid is turned into a plant?” Jennifer asked him.

  Quench seemed alarmed for a moment, and Jennifer squeezed his hand. “You can hardly keepthat a secret, Captain.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss such things, ma’am,” he said.

  “Don’t ‘ma’am’ me, sir. The name is Jennifer.”

  “Yes,” said Quench. “And I am . . . I suppose I’d better tell you something, Jennifer.”

  “Have you got a girl?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. I mean,I like them. It’s just . . . do you know what a free convert is?”

  “Sure,” answered Jennifer. “We had them at school, and Dad works with one down at his law office. They’re nice enough. Very useful. I’m not sure if I could be friends with one, though.”

  “You’re not?” Quench seemed alarmed.

  Oh shit, Jennifer thought. Maybe his best friend is a free convert or something.

  “I don’t have anything against them, I mean,” she stammered. “It’s not like I’m some bigot from the Met. I just . . . am not around many of them.” She felt herself trying to conform to some sort of expectation that she couldn’t even put a name to, and this angered her a bit. If you want to truly impress him, she thought, follow your feelings. “I find them bit creepy,” Jennifer said, “to tell the truth. But I would never let my feelings stand in the way of treating them as free and autonomous members of society. You know the drill. I believe it, I guess, even though I have to admit I haven’t given much thought to it.”

  That’s it—admit that you’re an idiot right in front of him, she thought.

  “The point is . . . what was the point? Got a little lost there—”

  Jennifer looked at Quench to see if she’d wholly alienated him, and she found him blushing slightly. Poor guy is embarrassed. For me, she thought. Jennifer sighed. And she had thought the thunderbolt was so close to striking.

  “Well, I guess you’ve had enough of my ill-considered opinions for one night, huh, Cap’n?” She favored him with a halfhearted smile.

  Quench looked at her—he stared at her. For a moment, the intensity of his gaze frightened Jennifer. Then she felt something like a cool wind blowing through her.

  “I should like very much to share another dance with you,” Quench said. “And I’d very much like it if I might have your company for the rest of the evening.”

  Kablam! Jennifer thought. She felt her heart give a funny little sideways jump.

  “Sure.”

  They waited for an AK groanfest to be done, and then went through another fifteen minutes of dancing. Quench began to question her more closely about her opinions on free converts. Jennifer did her best to answer as truthfully as she could—Quench seemed to like that—but she hadn’t really given the matter a great deal of thought. Free-convert rights were just something you werefor if you were outer system. The second dance ended, and she and Quench took a lift up to the new pressure dome that had been hastily constructed over the site of the old Meet Hall. A few bushes and flowers had been planted, and various of the revelers were seated on benches or standing about. Jennifer and Quench found an unoccupied bench near the dome’s wall. It was Triton day outside, and Neptune was full and nearly directly overhead, but at the moment, the Blue Eye was turned to the other side of the planet. There was a muon-replacement fusion “hot spot” at the top of the dome, but it was turned off. Though it was day, and the sun and Neptune both in the sky outside, there was still a twilight feel beneath the dome. For the local plants, the “hot spot” was what was important, and not the feeble, distant sun.

  “I wish I had more to say about free converts and all,” Jennifer said. “Do you have to deal with them as a part of your job?”

  “They are a specialty of mine,” said Quench.

  “Well, what doyou think about them? Don’t you get tired of their chopstick logic and the way they ar
e alwayscounting everything, as if that would tell you something about the overall thing’s properties?”

  “Fascinating,” said Quench. “I’ve never really considered it from that viewpoint. So you sort of picture them as sort of giant buckets of beans or something like that?”

  “I picture them all as being, you know, sort of like my parents’ accountant. He’s like, out of India, or something. Small guy with this face like a screw. He’s always sighting in on crumbs or pieces of lint or anything that the cleaning grist missed, and picking away at them. He had these pudgy fingers, but he uses them like tiny pincers to pick up stuff that I wouldn’t even have noticed.”

  “I see,” said Quench. “So you see free converts as screw-faced accountants with obsessive-compulsive tendencies?”

  “I told you, I don’t really know any of them very well,” Jennifer answered. “Do you want to kiss me?”

  Quench seemed shocked. “Are you sure you want me to?”

  “Of course.”

  He leaned over and took her in his arms. She tilted her head back and, after a bit too long of a moment, his lips met hers. She drew him to her fervently, felt resistance at first, but then his giving himself back to her. She tickled his lips with her tongue, then slid it into his mouth. Quench drew back sharply.

  “What are you doing?”

  “French kissing you, Captain.”

  For a moment, Quench remained nonplussed, then something seemed to click, and he said, “Oh.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Strange,” he said. “Meaty.”

  “Meaty! What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Like bodies. A thing only aspects can do.”

  “Well, of course.”

  Quench considered further. “Ido like it, however,” he said. “It has been so long since—well, I’m over her now. She was—she was the opposite of you. That’s for certain.”

  And with those words, Quench strode off quickly, leaving Jennifer sitting on the bench with Neptune shining down and the sun blazing like a fire coal in the blue-black sky.

  Eight

  After two more e-days, by Aubry’s internal clock, they reached the end of the dendrite they’d been traveling out. The Integument started changing there, for this was a growing edge of the Met. Things started looking more incomplete, somehow, and the going became more difficult. There was no more sluice that they could travel in, and so they did a lot of walking.

  “I wish I could show you all the stuff that’s out here,” Leo said. “This is one of the most fascinating areas in the Met. There’s lots of radiation, and so things mutate. The evolutionary selection algorithms sort them out and adopt the changes that work. Also, there is bioengineered life out here that is adapted for a hard vacuum.”

  They descended a series of cliffs on ropes that were already attached, for the most part. In some places, Leo had to put lines in. He used part of the Integument itself for rope, and Aubry and Jill alternated belaying him while he fixed the way. By this time, Aubry had become so adept at rock climbing and rappelling that she felt she could probably do it in her sleep.

  Finally, they came to a thick, mucus membrane that stretched up and up until Aubry lost sight of it. You could put your hand into it as far is you could reach, but it didn’t come out the other side. Leo said you could actually walk into it for a little ways and still be able to breathe, but that it got harder and harder, and after a few meters, you could go no farther.

  “This is the e-mix-space boundary,” he said. “On the other side of that membrane is the vacuum.”

  They walked along the membrane for what seemed miles to Aubry. Finally, they came to what looked like a notch in it, a split. It formed a cave that went back as far as Aubry could see. The space was not wide, but it was tall, and would fit Tod, as long as he bent his neck a little at the extra joint he had.

  “Where we’re going,” Leo said, “is to a transmitter pod. We’ll all pile into it, and that will take us to Nirvana.”

  “Nirvana?” said Aubry. “As in the state of nonbeing?”

  Leo laughed. “Or being,” he said. “But actually it’s one of the mycelia, the disconnected islands of Met-like cables that—”

  “I know what a mycelium is,” said Aubry.

  “Sorry,” said Leo. “I’m getting stuck in guidebook mode lately. I made my living that way for a few years, you know.”

  They wandered onward, and the green bioluminescence of the Integument began to die down. Soon they could barely see in front of them, and several times Aubry stumbled against Tod, who was ahead of her. He was bracing his arms against either wall. When she grabbed him, he held steady. But each time she touched him, he let out a little shout, and said something like “Hallelujah, mustard and quicksand!” So she tried to keep her balance as much as possible and stay a little distance back.

  Finally, they arrived at the end of the tunnel, and the walls began to glow again, this time a pale blue that flashed and sparked.

  “Cherenkov radiation,” Leo said. He began feeling the wall. “Now right around here,” he said. “Yes. Here.” He ran his hand over a bump, and part of the wall drew itself back like a curtain—or a puckering set of lips. In the space beyond, Aubry saw what looked like the inside of a pumpkin, minus the seeds. It was very stringy, and lookedvery sticky. “Our own personal transmitter pod,” said Leo. “Made to order. Sort of.”

  “People ride in this thing?” said Aubry.

  “Well,they can, andwe will,” answered Leo. “But most people visit the mycelia using transport ships, or just wait for a conjugation with the Met. But Nirvana is one of those places that never conjoins—by design. You can’t get there from here.”

  “But we’re going?”

  They stepped inside the transmitter. It was just as sticky as it had appeared, and Aubry soon found herself coated with orange fibers. She had to pull up hard on her feet to keep them from sticking to the floor. She was very glad she had ordered the Tromperstomper boots she wore. They stayed firmly on her feet no matter how hard she pulled. They walked a long way into the transmitter pod, and it got darker. Leo had broken off a piece of glowing pulp from the tunnel, however, and he held it up and led the way.

  “Where are we going?” Aubry asked.

  “All the way to the other end,” said Leo. “And then we’ll activate this thing.”

  “Activate it?”

  “There are some control sacs up front,” said Leo. “You break both of them, and when the chemicals inside mix together, the whole transmitter pod activates.”

  “Andthen what does it do?”

  “Then we get shot out like a watermelon seed between two squeezing fingers,” said Leo. “Or don’t you have watermelon on Mercury?”

  “Of course we have watermelons,” Aubry said. “They’re Sint’s favorite food.”

  “Sint?”

  “My brother.”

  “Oh,” said Leo. “Oh, yeah.”

  They pushed through more gooey strands and finally made it to the other side of the transmitter pod.

  “Now normally,” Leo said, standing in the last fading light from his piece of pulp, “if you got shot out at the speed we’ll be traveling, the initial acceleration would kill you. But instead of getting smashed, we’re going to sort of fall back through all those strings and inner meat, and by the time we hit the back wall, we will have been cushioned enough to survive.”

  “Wow,” said Aubry. “Are you sure it works?”

  “I’ve done it before, kid,” said Leo. “Lots of times.”

  Aubry resolved to get ahold of herself and face whatever lay ahead. “Sounds like fun,” she said, as brightly as she could.

  “Oh, it is,” said Leo. “And a little bit dangerous. You and I and Jill will want to sort of ball up and hold our knees to our chins before I activate the thing.” Leo glanced at Tod. He was standing, looking away from them, great tendrils of gooey strings dangling from his head and shoulders. “Tod will have to take his chances. But tha
t old tower is made of tough stuff, I think.”

  “But if it’s so dangerous, why were these things invented in the first place?” Aubry asked.

  “They weren’t invented,” Leo said. “Theyevolved . Very quickly, actually. And they started out in the mycelia and then were adopted by the Met Integument.”

  “But why did they evolve?”

  “To exchange gases and other stuff. We’re surrounded by a sluice reservoir, as a matter of fact. It serves the double purpose of filtering out cosmic rays and other nasty stuff, like micrometeorites. If we hit a big enough chunk of rock, though . . . well, let’s just hope we don’t. I never have, obviously.”

  “So people aren’t actually meant to travel in these things?” Aubry said.

  Leo didn’t answer. He set the glowing pulp on the floor and searched with his hands until he found the two activating sacs he was looking for. They looked sort of like long cow udders—with no cow.

  “Are we ready?”

  Everyone spread out a ways.

  “What about light?” Aubry asked. “After?”

  “You’ll see,” Leo replied. “Now tuck your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye!”

  Aubry was trying to figure out if he meant this literally when Leo squeezed the activation sacs. The entire worldlurched .

  Aubry was immediately and forcefully thrown backwards, very hard. She smashed into a clump of tendrils. She was pressed against them. They stretched, stretched, then gave.

  Back again, into another thick rope of them. She couldn’t keep her legs held tight, couldn’tdo anything, the force pushing her back was so strong. The rope gave.

  She smashed into another clump, and another. Every time she hit, she felt as if her teeth might jar out of their sockets. She was sure she felt the fluid in her eyeballs sloshing up against her retinas. There was a reddish light that must have come from this pressure, for it was not completely dark in the transmitter.

  Another clump.

  Splat!

  Another. She felt herself near to blacking out, fought it. But that wouldn’t work. She couldn’t help it if all the blood in her body was rushing in one direction only, like a tide coming in. Goo, falling, goo, goo, goo.