Analog SFF, October 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  With safety looming, Valerie was finding B. J.'s excitement more and more infectious. “The old-fashioned way. Galen's the key. He can't be making all of these things himself. And he's obviously got a lot more parts coming into his shop than go out on eBay. I bet we can document that—and find some of his employees. How many folks are there around here who can do this type of stuff?”

  “Not many.” B. J. stepped out of the vineyard ... and suddenly a beam of light pierced the darkness.

  “Freeze!” someone shouted. Valerie did, but B.J. leapt for the brush. There was a pop and a buzz and he went down, twitching.

  Valerie tried to slip back into the vineyard, but a hand came down on her shoulder. “Not a good idea.” Then a third guard moved into the light, carrying hers and B. J.'s backpacks, plus the telescope. He set them down and pulled out a phone. “Got ‘em.”

  * * * *

  B. J. was still twitching, so at least he was alive. Not that the guards seemed concerned. “Jeesh,” one said, nudging him with his foot. “How much voltage did you hit him with?”

  “The normal. He'll come around eventually.”

  Another guard had materialized on the scene. “Sure there were only two?”

  “Yeah. We've been watching them all afternoon. Ever since Louisa spotted the car over by Route 27 and got Frankie to run the plates.” He turned to Valerie. Like her, he had binoculars, but his looked like military night-vision hardware. “Did you think you were going to get away with this?”

  There wasn't anything to say, so she didn't say it. She was gradually coming to grips with the fact that she was headed to jail. She wondered if there was a way to strike a deal. It was a great story, but not that good. No corruption, nothing illegal: just a good example of politics making strange bedfellows. Blaine probably wasn't even involved. Definitely not worth going to jail over.

  B. J. was starting to groan. The guard with the phone turned away and talked quietly on it with someone, while another took Valerie's CompUphone. He powered it up and started fiddling with it, presumably checking her call log and recent web searches.

  The cell-phone guard seemed to be in charge. He nodded to his companions, two of whom pulled a still-wobbly B. J. to his feet. Then he picked up B. J.'s telescope. “What's this?”

  “What do you think?” B. J.'s voice was shaky but defiant.

  The guard hit him with the butt of the scope: a short, hard jab, straight to the gut. B. J. whuffed, doubled over, and the other two guards let him drop like a sack of beans.

  The first guard turned to Valerie. “Your turn.”

  “We were just curious,” she stammered. Her heart was racing. There were now five guards. One was watching B. J., but the others were focused on her. “We couldn't figure out how you could do it without illegal labor.” She tried to sound calmer than she felt. “Obviously, you've found a way, and it's perfectly legal. End of story.”

  He hoisted B. J.'s telescope. “This thing got a camera?”

  “No.”

  “You send any photos on your phone?”

  “No. It was too dark.”

  He turned to the guard who was fiddling with her phone. “That check out?”

  “So far.”

  “Good. Keep checking.” He turned back to Valerie. “Who else have you told about this?”

  Valerie hesitated and he slapped her hard across the face. “What's your editor know?” He slapped her again. “Sending you here makes him an accomplice.”

  Her ears rang and she could taste blood. Which was the better answer? But her uncertainty had been enough. The guard lowered his hand. “Nah, you were just on a fishing trip, weren't you?”

  He didn't seem to want an answer, and this time he didn't hit her when she didn't give him one. A mistake, perhaps, because it gave her time to think.

  What could be so important about a bunch of robots? Why couldn't they just patent them? Blaine and Angel's Head would still be natural allies, since robot-building was good, high-tech American labor—just the type Blaine wanted.

  Behind the guards, B. J. was staring at her, mouth working like a fish. No, that wasn't right; there was desperation in his eyes, and his lips were repeating the same motions. Not-something, he was trying to say.

  There are skills that Valerie had once tried to cultivate, back in her journalism-school days. Reading upside down was one, after she'd seen a movie in which a detective solved a case that way, from notes on a suspect's desk. Though sadly, most people don't leave incriminating documents in plain sight when you're interviewing them.

  Lipreading was more useful. “Not row, but s—,” B. J. was saying. Then she had it. “Not robots.” But there was more: something about patters, and shapes. He said it three times, but she still couldn't get it. Then, very distinctly, “Going to kill us.”

  The cell phone conversation was winding down. Time was running out, and there was nothing she could do.

  She could see the same recognition in B. J.'s eyes. “I wish we—” he mouthed. “If only—” And then, before Valerie could react, he twisted with surprising speed, grabbed the leg of the nearest guard, and bit.

  The guard yelled and staggered, and all eyes turned his way, as B. J., still biting, tried to roll him off his feet. Then the guard with the telescope swung it with a sickening thud and the sound of breaking glass.

  Valerie wanted to freeze, scream, or turn away. But she owed it to B.J. to use the advantage he'd so dearly bought.

  Once upon a time, she'd had a roommate who'd tried to convince her to take self-defense lessons. Unfortunately, between academics and soccer, there'd never been time. But soccer had taught her a few things. One was how to kick.

  The guy holding her was at the wrong angle for a knee to the groin, so she gave him a roundhouse, desperation-fueled kick to the shin. If she'd been wearing soccer cleats, he wouldn't have walked for a week. As it was, her trail shoes connected solidly enough.

  The man bellowed, and Valerie was twisting free even before his grip loosened. Then she was employing a second lesson from soccer, which was that she was quick. Give her enough lead, and with adrenalin nipping at her heels, no muscle-bound guy was ever going to catch her. All she needed was to make it a few hundred yards, and the night was hers.

  The only way to go was back into the field, so that was the direction she dashed, flashing through an endless alley of grape vines.

  Behind her were shouts and running footsteps, flashlight beams sawing the darkness. But she had a ten-meter lead and was lighter on her feet over the uneven, clodded dirt, her legs remembering lessons that predated soccer, from cross-country running in high school, when you had to feel your way over terrain whose surface you could never quite trust until you touched it.

  The guys behind her, if they'd played a sport at all, looked like football players, whose only running would have been on surfaces smoothed to the fineness of a golf green. By the time she'd gone a hundred meters, the footsteps were no longer gaining. Valerie still played soccer in a weekend pickup league. If she had to, she could do this for miles.

  Then the shouting changed. “Out of the way,” someone ordered, and there was a pop, like fireworks, only louder, and something whizzed past her.

  A gun changed everything. Somewhere ahead, the vineyard hit a hill and the neat lines of grapes shifted to curves, but the guard was going to have a lot of shots at her before she got there, and even if she was just a dim shape in the dark, the damn rows told him which way to shoot.

  Valerie knew nothing about guns. If he stopped and took aim, or simply sprayed bullets at her, what were the chances she'd get hit? Too high, she decided.

  Soccer reflexes kicked in, and she cut hard to the left, away from the lights of the robot pickers. Intervening vines might not stop a bullet, but they'd make it harder to aim.

  Unfortunately, the reflexes worked faster than her brain. She tried to run between two vines and hit something, right across her upper chest: something firm and springy that threw her backward, hard
.

  She came down on her butt and hands. There was no time to stand up, so she scrabbled backward, out of the line of fire as the guard's next shot scuffed dirt not far from where her feet had been a second before. Then she rolled to hands and toes and plunged through several more rows, low enough to avoid the wires that had caught her before.

  But the fall had knocked the wind out of her, and the inability to stand up without hitting more wires had stolen her advantage. The guards were closing in, and even if they no longer had the night vision equipment they'd used to track her and B. J., it was only moments before they'd find her.

  Not robots, B.J. had said. Shapes and patters. Or had she gotten that right? Maybe it was grapes and patterns.

  And suddenly she had it. If there was hope, it lay with the lights. She scrambled toward them, even as cries of “There she is!” rose in her wake.

  She reached the nearest machine and threw herself in front of it. “Help!” she yelled, hoping it had some kind of acoustic sensor. “They're going to kill me!” And then her eyes were pierced by a flashlight beam, behind which, she knew, lay a gun.

  * * * *

  From the moment the flashlight hit her, she would have estimated her life in milliseconds. But seconds dragged by, and nothing happened. Instead, the lead guard was back on the cell phone, while another continued to blind her with the light. Move, she realized, and she was dead. Don't move, and she wasn't dead ... yet.

  This time, the cell-phone guard didn't try to shield his conversation. Valerie still couldn't catch it all, but she got enough: “Tried to run ... no ... under control ... no, can't just drive her off the road ... yeah, I know people saw her drunk ... problem is ... injuries ... autopsy won't match.” There was a long pause. Then: “Sure, lots of cliffs ... yeah, hiking accident ... move the car ... good, no one'll know where to look.”

  He clicked off.

  “You,” he said, “are a pain in the ass. But you're down to two choices. Die now or die later. Most people would prefer later. If that's you, get up. Slowly.” He backed up a couple of paces, well clear of kicking range.

  When options have run out, dying later is indeed preferable. She started to rise, but was interrupted by another, heavily accented, voice. “No. That ees murder. I did not take thees job to be part of murder.”

  The guard's head swiveled, but Valerie knew it wasn't one of his crew. The grape-picking machine had never moved. There had always been the prospect that, with her and the guards blocking its way, it was simply idle. Or that it hadn't been designed to hear or speak, and that instructions were given entirely by other means. But now, she knew she'd been right.

  The voice came again, and this time the guard found its source.

  “I have already called 911. Police will come. I am making video for them to see.”

  The guard stared. “What the hell? You're just a machine. Get back to work!”

  “No. I is not a machine.”

  Two of the guards were backing away, but the one with the cell phone snorted. His pistol went off with a series of bangs, and the mechanical arm, light, and electronic eye disintegrated. “What video?”

  He turned back to Valerie. “I don't know how you got it to do that, but it's dead now. Looks like you prefer to die sooner. Can't say's I'll miss you, though I'd rather not have had to carry your body out of here.” He ejected the spent clip and rammed another into place. “Can't be helped, though.”

  She tried to crawl backward, but there wasn't anywhere to go.

  And then, the voice came again. “You can kill the machine, but you cannot kill me.”

  Grape-picking machines were closing in from other directions. “In my country, this is good job,” another said with a very different accent. “But there are other good job. I turn you to police, maybe I get fire, but I sleep night.”

  The two guards who'd been retreating had disappeared. For one heart-stopping moment, Valerie thought the remaining one would kill her anyway. But then she heard sirens in the distance and he must have decided it would only intensify the manhunt if he did. A moment later he melted into the darkness, leaving her with the robots that weren't really robots.

  * * * *

  B. J. was alive but unconscious, and there wasn't anything Valerie could do but sit beside him and listen to the approaching sirens.

  When the police arrived, the first thing they wanted to know was why they'd gotten a 911 call from India. Then they saw B. J., and immediately called for an ambulance.

  Meanwhile, Valerie was introducing them to her rescuer, who'd followed her back, “just een case.”

  His name was Ulhas Mannava and he worked for a company that normally handled fast-food drive-through orders and provided operator assistance for cell phone subscribers. In his spare time, he was studying computers. “I am working on my college degree by internet,” he said. “When I get it, I want to come to America to work in Hollywood.”

  Fat chance, she thought. Ulhas was going to find himself at the front of a new wave of tele-immigrants who, for a few hours a day could see, but never taste, the land of opportunity. It made her mother's au pair days seem idyllic by comparison.

  She felt no hatred for the guards who'd nearly killed her. Hopefully they'd be caught, but even if they escaped to become mercenaries in some foreign war, their brutality had been no more personal than a lightning bolt or tornado.

  Anderson was a different matter. Not only was he probably the one to whom the cell-phone guard had been reporting, but he was the world's worst hypocrite, supporting Blaine with one hand while running a teleplantation on the other.

  She doubted that his role in planning her disappearance could ever be proven. He'd simply wring his hands and lament the overzealousness of his guards. And he'd point out that the telepresence robots were perfectly legal. But Valerie hadn't been top in her class for no reason. She could make him pay. She might even force Blaine to moderate his stand. And it had nothing to do with winning prizes.

  * * * *

  B. J. was unconscious for two days, hospitalized for nearly a month. Even then, he couldn't remember the hours leading up to what he called “the incident.” Not the walk in, the starwatching, the huddling in the cold. Not his “I wish we—” or offering up his life to give her the only chance either could ever have had.

  The doctors had no idea when or whether his memory would return. “It's amazing he woke up at all,” one told her. “Off the record, I wouldn't have given a plugged nickel for his chances.”

  She kept hoping he'd ask her to dinner, but days and then weeks passed and it never happened. When she wrote the story, she gave him top billing. When he asked why, she turned away. It had been a long time since she'd allowed herself to cry.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Richard A. Lovett & Mark Niemann-Ross

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  * * *

  Science Fact: HERE BE THERE DRAGONS: THE IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKER AND OTHER MYSTERIES OF AN EXPLORED PLANET

  by Richard A. Lovett

  There's an awkward time in the life of a planet, when most of it has been explored and almost as much remade—but not quite all.

  Once upon a time, when the land was young, there was a magnificent creature, lurking on the fringes of civilization. Maybe it was a roc, maybe a dragon. Perhaps a yeti or a sasquatch or a slavering carnivore carrying away children who ventured too far into the forest.

  Whatever it was, the elders remember it and pass on the stories. It was real, they say, but none has been sighted in two generations. “It's gone, and you, my child, will never see one."

  But the child wonders: is it really gone? Or does a remnant lurk on the dark edges of the civilized world, where few have the time, courage, or inclination to venture?

  * * * *

  Speculative fiction is full of such stories. Some are fantasy; some are hard science fiction, set on frontier planets. All draw on the hope that the world isn't fully tamed, that ancient wonders might still linger, if we only knew where to look.

  Such hopes aren't unfounded. Change the names a bit, and you have a story that might explode on your evening news any day.