“Ah.” Lin nodded quietly to himself. “I see.”
“You wish to serve as a soldier?” The woman from the Advisory Committee was taken aback.
“Though I have never served in anyone’s armed forces,” Aristide said, “I have a certain amount of experience in combat. It’s a matter of where my experience is best applied.”
Tumusok narrowed his eyes, then slowly resumed his seat.
“The Standing Committee will consider your application,” he said.
Aristide bowed. He was about to thank the general when Endora spoke.
“I am being attacked,” she said. “Preliminary evidence indicates an anti-proton beam fired from Courtland.”
Tumusok looked up with sudden, intense concern. “Are you suffering damage?” he asked.
“Bits of me are being blown off,” Endora said. “Though this is survivable in the short term, obviously long-term results will be less favorable.”
Aristide returned to his seat.
“With the committee’s permission,” he said, “I’d like to stay for this.”
Aristide entered Daljit’s living room to a sudden silence. He had found Daljit with three others, two women and a man.
“I interrupt you,” Aristide said. “I beg your pardon.”
The three visitors had lowered their coffee cups and were looking at him with polite scrutiny. The scent of the coffee filled the room. The low table featured several empty plates.
Daljit rose, a smile on her face, and kissed Aristide’s cheek. “Allow me to introduce my colleagues,” she said.
The burly round-faced woman was Huang; the willowy man was Osbert; the woman with the shaved head, six-fingered hands, green-and-gold scales, and forked tongue was Kagame. They were all biologists or geneticists.
“We’re trying to decide the best way to proceed in the emergency,” Daljit said.
“You’re taking a proactive stance in the matter of your employment?”
“Indeed,” said Osbert. “If we take steps to form our own team, we can choose goals that will suit our abilities and interests. Whereas if we wait for the government to decide where to put us…”
“You’ll be low on the lists of rewards and priorities.”
“I was going to say,” said Osbert, “that we might not be employed in the most efficient manner.”
“Again,” said Aristide, “I beg your pardon.”
“Would you like coffee?” Daljit asked.
“Is there anything to eat? I’ve been through a long meeting and I’m starving.”
Daljit told the kitchen to prepare an omelette. Aristide took a cup of coffee and drew a chair from the dining room into the main room.
“We’re being directly attacked, by the way,” he said, and was immediately the subject of intense, silent scrutiny.
“Packets of antiprotons,” he said, “riding electron beams from Courtland. When they hit Endora, the result is a lot of pi-mesons and high-energy gamma rays.”
“And,” Daljit calculated, “holes in Endora.”
“Yes. Eerie glowing holes, actually.”
Endora had the mass of a fair-sized moon, but her plate-shaped structure was very thin, in order to maximize exposure to solar energy. The antiproton packets were punching holes in Endora’s material body.
“If this keeps up,” Aristide said, “Endora’s going to resemble a lace doily.”
The others looked at each other.
“So are we going to be incinerated,” said Kagame, “or not?”
“Vindex isn’t interested in incinerating us,” Aristide said. “He wants us alive and bowing down before him. So he isn’t targeting the areas around the wormhole gates—instead he’s trying to degrade Endora’s performance.”
Daljit regarded him levelly. “And how’s he doing?”
“In the short term, the damage is bearable. If this goes on for another few weeks, Endora will be the idiot of the matrioshka village, but still smarter than any of us.
“What Courtland’s attack is doing,” Aristide went on, shifting to a more comfortable slouch on his small chair, “is not only degrading Endora’s grand total of zero-point operations per second, but forcing a diversion of resources. The mass that has been turned into gamma rays has to be replaced, so any number of Jupiter’s smaller moons will have to be disassembled and shot out here, and that will absorb time and assets best deployed elsewhere. And of course it’s not just Endora who is scrabbling for extra matter—now the rest of the Eleven have realized they’re vulnerable and will be rounding up as many asteroids, moonlets, and chunks of moon as possible.”
“Is Endora shooting back?” asked Osbert.
“At present we lack ammunition. Vindex has presumably reconfigured Courtland’s wormhole factory so that it now generates antimatter instead of producing wormholes. But the United Powers—that’s us, by the way—have no such resource at present.”
“The United Powers could build their own solar power pockets,” Daljit said.
“We will, as soon as calculations are complete. And we’ll have ten of them, or more. That’s why I think Vindex may regret starting this mode of warfare—Courtland may be riddled.”
The others pondered this in silence. Then Huang spoke in a deep, thoughtful voice.
“I believe that gives us a deadline for setting up our project,” she said.
“Yes,” Osbert said. “I think so.”
Daljit turned to Aristide. “Are you even supposed to give us any of this information?” she asked. “Isn’t this a deep military secret?”
“The public will be informed in the next few hours. Tumusok’s first impulse was to classify everything and deny every rumor, but Lin pointed out that if the public were aware of the situation, their collective minds might be able to suss out a solution.”
Daljit raised an eyebrow. “Lin’s a shrewd man,” she judged.
“He is.”
“Perhaps,” she offered, “he ought to be running the war effort, and not Tumusok.”
At this Huang looked thoughtful. “Do I know this Lin?” he muttered to himself.
“Tumusok’s learning fast,” Aristide said, “but war has a ruthless way of sorting out who is best in charge of what. Let’s hope that Tumusok isn’t one of those sorted.”
A chime sounded from the kitchen.
“Did I hear something?” asked Huang.
“My snack,” Aristide said. “Forgive me.”
“Well,” said Kagame, rising. “We’ve taken up enough of your hospitality.”
“I don’t wish to drive you away,” Aristide said.
“Oh,” said Osbert, “our meeting went about as far as it could, at least today.”
The visitors made their congé. Aristide collected his omelette and sat at the dining table. Daljit sat opposite and looked at him with an ambiguous smile. “Has it occurred to you to wonder why it’s Endora that Vindex is attacking?” she asked.
Aristide dabbed his lips with a napkin. “It has. Others of the Loyal Ten are closer. And others would present fuller targets.”
“Do you think Endora’s being shot at because you’re here?”
He laughed. “You mean to ask if I’m egotistical enough to think that Vindex might be targeting me because I had such a large role in uncovering his activities?”
Daljit nodded.
“But,” Aristide said, “how would he know it was me? My role has never been publicly revealed. Any information he might have would be about Franz Sandow, not Pablo Monagas Pérez.”
“He might check the timing of immigration to and from Midgarth. You used your real name there, I imagine.”
“So I did! So the Venger might be shooting at me, after all!” He considered the thought. ”I confess that I’m flattered by the idea.”
“You could move to another pocket universe on another one of the Eleven, and see if Vindex shifts targets”
“Too late. I’ve joined the army.”
“Really?” Daljit was taken aback. �
�We are going to have an army?”
“There has to be some means of… defense.” He had almost said attacking the enemy; discretion rescued him in time.
“Army. The word seems so archaic.”
He raised his fork, hesitated, and put the fork down. He looked at her.
“A lot of old, bad things are coming back,” he said. “And in any case, if the worst happens I won’t stay dead, any more than you did.”
“But—what does an army do in this situation, exactly?”
“Hold crucial installations against attack or sabotage.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not the sort of person to volunteer to sit in garrison for the duration. You’re anticipating a more active role for yourself than that.”
He cut a piece of the omelette. “If Courtland is defeated, then its pockets will have to be subdued and occupied.”
Her nose wrinkled, as if she scented something upsetting on the wind.
“How likely is that?”
He chewed, swallowed. “Too many unknowns,” he said finally.
“But still—aren’t you better suited to some scientific capacity?”
“My science is rather out of date,” Aristide said. “And besides—my reputation to the contrary—I was never an original scientific genius. All the ideas that I promoted really came from other people. I was able to package their concepts for the public, that’s all.”
Daljit’s eyes narrowed. “I think your contribution was a little more concrete than that.”
“I became the public face of a very complex social and technological movement,” he said. “But there were a lot of us involved—and if it hadn’t been for the fear of being trapped on Earth with the Seraphim, I think we would have failed, and most people would still be living on Earth.”
She leaned back in her chair as if to view him from a slightly greater distance. “Your modest façade is undermined, I fear, by a degree of arrogance.”
“And all arrogance,” said Aristide, “is undermined by Vindex and what he represents. We live in humbling times.”
“True.” Her eyes glittered. “Vindex has brought the whole smug world down a few notches, hasn’t he?”
“That’s true.” He rubbed his chin, and his mind echoed the question asked by the woman from the Advisory Committee. Why Courtland?
There had to be an answer to that.
He finished his omelette and gave the dish and silverware back to the kitchen for cleaning. He found Daljit on her balcony, gazing down at the great bustling city that shone with life. The scars of the zombie plague had for the most part been repaired, and the city glittered in the light of its tame sun.
Aristide approached Daljit from behind, put his arms around her, and rested his chin on the top of her head.
“It lacks something,” Daljit said, “without the gliders.”
Gliders, which had rained the zombie plague down on the population, had been banned for the duration of the war.
“I fell from this balcony,” she said, “didn’t I?”
“Does it bother you?”
“No. I don’t remember.”
But still, he thought, her death had changed her. In her resurrected body she had become grave, more thoughtful, perhaps more calculating. She was less spontaneous, and maintained an emotional reserve that he didn’t recall at any point in their long acquaintance.
Before Vindex, he thought, she had never had occasion to ponder her own mortality. There had never been any serious threat of personal extinction. But now there was Vindex—who if he did not exactly threaten death, nevertheless intended a more personal form of extinction, an extinction of self and volition.
Well might it give someone food for thought.
Aristide found that he missed the overcharged, exuberant Daljit of that first night on the Fathom Deep. The woman who was, he suspected, gone for good.
“And yourself,” Aristide asked, “and your committee of four? How do they fare?”
“It’s a committee of seven now,” Daljit said. “Our proposal has been lodged with the appropriate authority. We have reasonable hope, I think, of success—and if we don’t succeed here, we can apply in one of the other pockets.”
“On which proposal did you settle?” She had told him of several.
“Mine.” She seemed pleased. “We shall study the mind of Vindex, and try to duplicate his work.”
They relaxed in his hotel suite after a long day of committee meetings. The walls were white and gold; the lighting indirect. It had rained all day, and drops still spattered the windows. Daljit had been with her colleagues, and Aristide had found himself roped into a subcommittee of the Standing Committee, one involved with recruiting, training, and equipping the army.
“I joined the army so that I wouldn’t have to attend committee meetings!” he’d protested, but it had done no good.
Freshly showered, Aristide half-reclined on the floral-patterned couch, his green dressing gown clashing with the cushions. Daljit sat cross-legged on the floor, a glass of golden Viognier in her fingers. Bitsy drowsed, chin resting on one paw, beneath a cabinet.
“We know who’s working for Vindex on his worlds,” Daljit said. “All his top people. We can make a guess as to the directions of their operations. So we’ll try to duplicate them, and produce countermeasures.”
“I wish you every success,” Aristide said. He sipped his own wine. “All the more so as I may be deploying your countermeasures in the field.”
Outside the insulated universe of Topaz, Vindex had broadened his attack. More antimatter beams were hitting more of the Loyal Ten. The only defensive measures the Ten could take were to shift their attitude within their orbit, so that they faced Courtland edge-on and presented a narrower target to the bombardment, but this altered their attitude to the sun and made solar collection, and hence themselves, less efficient.
Within Topaz and the other pockets, life remained strangely placid, except for the violent speeches of politicians and a comical series of public service announcements: what to do in the event of Biological Attack; what to do in the event of Invasion; how to avoid Radiation; what to do if there are Zombies. The fact that the threats were real did not make them any less detached from the lives of ordinary people.
Vast numbers—tens of millions—had volunteered to join the fight against Vindex. As yet, there was little for most of them to do but cooperate with restrictions on travel, the better to avoid biological attack. Enormous numbers of people wanted to fight, but could do nothing more important than to stay home. Normal life, given no choice, continued.
Daljit uncoiled, rose from the floor, and joined Aristide on the couch. She laid Aristide’s head on her lap and bent over him. Her lips browsed his. Her warm hair brushed his cheek. He reached for her.
“Perhaps,” she said, “we could seek a bit more privacy.”
“I’m not looking,” said Bitsy, from under the cabinet.
“But still.”
“Do you know,” Bitsy said, “how many acts of sexual intercourse Endora observes in any given day? Observes without trying, just because they take place within range of one camera or another? Do you know how uninterested I am in these matters?”
“You’re not helping,” Aristide said, and rose from the couch.
The cat sighed, loudly. Aristide and Daljit stepped into his bedroom and closed the door.
“Do you think,” she asked, as they embraced, “we might escape from everything for a few days, before our schedules grow too crowded? We’ve never had a proper honeymoon—Vindex keeps interrupting.”
“Where would you like to go”
She looked thoughtful. “Do you think we can rent Fathom Deep for the weekend?”
“I’ll check.”
She kissed him. “And please,” she said, “may the ship’s cat stay ashore?”
Fathom Deep proved available—the emergency had cut severely into vacation rentals. Aristide provisioned the boat for five days, and he and Daljit cast o
ff for Tremaine Island, where Aristide had his primary residence, the small cabin he had built himself, but had never actually managed to visit since his return from Midgarth.
Bitsy, left behind in Myriad City, submerged herself in the data stream and planned a lengthy hibernation.
The first night under sail was cool, brisk, and clear. Aristide and Daljit sat in the cockpit, sharing a blanket and sipping hot buttered rum as they watched the darkened sun’s corona limned against the night.
Aristide woke early, before the sun’s destabilization. Daljit was curled in a little self-contained bundle on the far side of the mattress, so Aristide slipped quietly out of bed and put on a pair of elastic-waisted trousers and a pullover. He drew some coffee from the kitchen, where it had been kept hot since the previous evening, and took his drink on deck.
Fathom Deep heeled over on a broad reach, the hissing sea just lapping at the lee rail with its foaming tongue. Mother-of-pearl clouds sped overhead, driven like snowdrifts before the wind. No land was visible, and there was no sea traffic on the horizon. The boat was no longer a machine striving to master its element, but it and the sea and the wind had merged into a single great unity, a perfection in which the boat’s natural artifice, and the surrounding artificial nature, had become one. Everything from horizon to horizon had been created by humanity for its own purposes and pleasure.
Aristide stood for a moment on the canted deck, enjoying the moment’s sheer perfection, and then ducked into his pullover and took shelter from the wind.
He sipped his coffee and considered Vindex, the great disturber, the enemy of everything he and the boat and the sea represented. What objective, he wondered, had Vindex now set for himself?
The Venger’s attempt to infiltrate the worlds with reconstructed humans had failed. The zombie plague had failed, and along with it the attempted coup.
The antimatter bombardment from Courtland continued to expand, and more of the Loyal Ten were being riddled by highly accurate fire. But the Venger’s advantage on this front was temporary: eventually the United Powers would duplicate, equal, and then exceed the Venger’s fury, and Courtland itself would be in danger of being shot to bits.
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