Outies

by Pournelle, J. R.

  Longshanks 10 John leapt, and locked in union. They had been Very Good Boys, indeed. Their Messenger days were over. They were retired to stud, so to speak.

  Fifty miles away, his hands buried in soil, Farmer John muttered at his plants. He hoped to far moons Lord Sargon quit mooning around, and gave him decent replacements for Post 10 until Longshanks’s first litter came of age. He had a thousand sar of manna to re-seed.

  New Scotland, 3049

  Alone, unwatched by anyone, Kevin Renner stopped playing the role of Kevin Renner, and instead sat, eyes closed, forehead resting on one hand, leaning on one elbow, propped against the wing of his formidable chair.

  Absorbed in thought, by feel alone, with his free hand he opened the edenwood case beside him, and ran his fingers across the contents. Silky silver tongs, buttery resin chunks, the crusher, the clicker, the tin of fermented leaf, the rosewood cradle, the amber bit, and finally, the bowl itself. He rubbed one fingertip along the cool, soapy, luscious feel of spiral galaxies whirling away around the lip of his pipe, laser-carved at his direction from a pristine chunk of New Utah opal meerschaum by a Motie Engineer. Its draw was impeccable, as was its feel. He cupped it to his palm and felt it warm to his hand.

  Sighing, he opened his eyes, turned, and assembled the pipe. With the tongs, he dropped a chunk of resin into the bowl, then used the crusher, first to powder it, then to evenly smear the powder around the inside. Laying that tool aside, he flicked open the battered tin, rolled a plug of leaf between thumb and forefinger, used it to blot up any stray resin powder, and tamped it into the pipe. Finally, he raised the pipe to his lips, and with one long draw lit the mass with the clicker. The resin flashed red from bottom up, then glowed with an even white light. Renner smiled, and cupped the pipe with both hands. That last warmth of body heat tipped the scale, revealing the magic of the stone. The soapy meerschaum became translucent, rippling with opalene fire. With each draw, the galaxies sparkled in a milky blue field, as colors played across variations in temperature and the depth of the bas relief.

  Anywhere he had ever been or ever seen, his pipe was the finest of its kind. Renner breathed deeply, pulling cool, opal fire through every pore, exhaled a chain of smoke rings, and smiled again. He smoked, and thought, and cleared his mind until the last pale flicker faded to white. High above him, blue, wispy swirls vented through the roof, into the starless night, as he slammed the door behind him and strode downstairs to meet Governor Jackson.

  Jackson—now Sir Lawrence Jackson, and Governor of Maxroy’s Purchase, was momentarily flustered. “But Sally Fowler said—”

  Renner, now playing Renner, knocked back the thimble of poisonous brew, smacked the table, leaned forward, and looked Jackson straight in the eyes.

  “Governor, let me make one thing perfectly clear.” He held the pause for one heartbeat, then continued, earnest as a boy scout.

  “Sally Fowler, Lady Blaine, is a dear, old friend; the wife of one of the damned few members of the inherited aristocracy who has outright earned his titles, a do-gooder extraordinaire, and the mother of my Godchildren.”

  Renner leaned back a bit, and cocked his head.

  “That makes her a wealthy, useful, well-intentioned dilettante. But her actual credentials? One year of so-called graduate education, most of it stuck in a prison camp, followed by a cloistered life surrounded by the Fleet, Fleet officers, and aristos while she decorated her husband’s arm and patronized her pet projects. That does not make her an expert on anything except how to wrest money from people who have more of it than sense. It sure as hell does not make her a geomorphologist, anthropologist, or ecumenist, nor does it make her conversant with any reasonably current list of people who are. You had better dodge her request, and put somebody on that accession expedition who is—both expert, and stupid enough to speak truth to power.”

  Renner straightened completely, grinned, tossed back another shot, and grinned again.

  “Preferably, somebody expendable. Because I would bet my pipe that you ain’t gonna like what you hear.”

  Jackson toyed with his drink, calculating, resenting that charming grin. He wasn’t stupid. Renner had him in a triple bind. On the one hand, he needed Lord Blaine’s support if he was to succeed in reclaiming New Utah for the Empire. Absentmindedly, he slid the glass toward himself across the polished surface. On the other hand, the Mormon True Church Militant despised Renner, personally, and deeply. If the TCM dug in, there would be war, not trade, and he himself, Jackson, Governor of Maxroy’s Purchase, would be blamed for another failed mission to New Utah. Jackson slapped the glass from left to right, and caught it mid-glide toward the end of the table. On the gripping hand, Renner was Bury’s man; Renner was his inside to Imperial Autonetics; Renner was, so to speak, the man behind the Moties behind the—behind the what? He didn’t know. Nobody knew, yet. But in Jackson’s experience power followed wealth, and not the other way around.

  “I suppose,” he said, lifting the glass to toasting level, “you have someone specific in mind?”

  Renner smiled. He had the man’s tell. “Oh, yeah,” he replied. “I thought Quinn.”

  “Quinn!”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Asach Quinn?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Jackson nodded, once, downed the drink, and looked preoccupied. Then, to no one in particular: “Asach. Quinn. Oh yes. Indeed. Asach Quinn will do just fine.”

  He stood sharply, and donned his man-of-the-people face. “C’mon, Kev,” he said breezily, “we’d best get moving, before the Commissioners accuse us of plotting things we shouldn’t.”

  Horvath’s face was literally purple. Spittle flew from his mouth as he ranted.

  “Quinn?! Asach Quinn?! Asach Quinn is—” but his words were drowned out by the babble that ensued:

  “the most dedicated servant of truth this Empire has ever…”

  “living in a mucking hut on Makassar…”

  “arguably the most brilliant ethnographer since…’

  “a political hack unfit to…”

  “utterly incorruptible...”

  “not a team player…”

  “a polymath genius…”

  “used-up and overrated. Did you hear…”

  “a deft negotiator, with an uncanny ability to fit in…”

  “irascible, incorrigible, inscrutable, impossible to…”

  “singularly persuasive. Writes like an angel…”

  Among them, only Lord Blaine did not raise his voice. Nevertheless, all speech stopped when he spoke.

  “The only social scientist Horace Bury personally designated as useful to the Empire of Man.”

  All heads turned in shock.

  Horvath regained control, barely, biting each word in half.

  “Asach. Quinn. Is. Not. Morally. Suited—”

  “I am well aware of your personal differences with Quinn’s—demeanor,” continued Blaine, unruffled. “But you must agree that what is here at issue is of rather more import than—attire, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Horvath?”

  “With all due respect My Lord Blaine, you know that I am not referring to attire. I am referring to—”

  “My dear Dr. Horvath,” smiled Blaine. “You are not about to tell me that, after all we have been through, you are frightened of—hair? Are you?”

  Despite themselves, most of the table chuckled, infuriating Horvath even further, were that possible. His hands were actually trembling. Little patches of foam had congealed at the corners of his mouth. “You know full well that I am not—”

  “Excellent!” cheered Blaine, flashing his best old-school smile. “Glad that’s settled, then. We’ll have that vote, shall we? By acclamation, I think, don’t you? Shall I move that? Kevin, you’ll second? All in favor?”

  Of course, the vote carried unanimously. At least, out loud.

  2

  Accrual Methods

  Now it is unmistakable that even in the German word Beruf, and perhaps still more in the Englis
h calling, a religious conception, that of a task set by God, is at least suggested.

  —Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

  Makassar, 3049

  On Saturday afternoon, the eighteenth of August, Amari Selkirk Alidade Clarke Hathaway (Asach) Quinn sat down with a silk-smooth pen and a stack of creamy blank parchment, and commenced to write a novel. A book, in any case. A novel perhaps. It was a decision on the order of marriage or advanced degree-taking. It was not that the completion would mark an entirely new life. It was rather that the decision itself was life-ordering. On Saturday morning, Asach Quinn would not have made such a decision at all, but on Saturday afternoon did, and in so doing ended an era of waffling, and pondering, and unending waiting for some kind of unnecessary permission, and just got on with it.

  It was unapparent why Asach had taken so long to arrive at this literary gate. Asach sported the requisite advanced degrees, the marriage, no end of supporters, and even talent. And the experience: that elusive life experience, intense, and intended to inform.

  Asach had lived in the Americas. Not in the sense of an Old Earth America, the United States of, as opposed to some other land. The Americas, as in all of them. All of those planets that had taken their names, and tried to resurrect some version of their customs, from the cities and states of that ancient republic.

  That meant Asach had lived in many flavors of revivalisms and pretenses of resurrection on a dozen member worlds, and another score at least passed through. Had drunk deeply of millennium-old, Pre Empire, Pre-Secession, Pre-transport nostalgia.

  Had lived in towns where wheat and monotony were punctuated only by rampant gossip. In villages that had only ever existed as adjuncts to slave markets or recruitment centers or training posts for grunts and jarheads and navvies. In world-class cities big enough to be Targets; cities old enough to have flown five flags before the Crown was welded to The Seal. In cities that remade themselves each decade with such enthusiasm that their natives became economic refugees, fleeing the booms that transformed fishermen’s shacks into priceless boutique-side properties.

  Had lived in desert vastnesses so unending that news of rain was carried on late-night breezes spiced with the scent of sage and desert varnish. In rolling hills so dense with trees that travel anywhere was like being catapulted through green tubes of foliage, with nothing to see for a hundred miles but litter and fat beasts browsing in the verges. In America the beautiful, America the urban, America the wild, America the suburban, America of the (pseudo-)potato salad and (mock-)apple pie.

  And Asach had not just traveled geographically. Asach had known poverty, and at least seen rich; had known position, and had stood next to power. Most people had, at best, some dim opinion of parochial rivalries, but walked, at best, in the footsteps of their high school valedictorian. Asach had seen levels of society so low, and so high, and so bizarre, as to be unimaginable to broadly-defined middle-class harmony. Or working-class dissent. Or upper class segregation. Yet, for fifty years, Asach had written nearly nothing of import. Reams of drivel—term papers, and white papers, and reports daily, weekly, monthly, and annual. Proposals, and abstracts, and summaries, and overviews, and briefing notes, and speaking points, and outlines as uninspired as obligatory postcards home. All, in the end, barely necessary, and even less memorable.

  It began with a cup of coffee. Asach wrote: About Coffee, and underlined both words with one stroke. And then sat and pondered for a good long while about every angle, drip, and smell related to coffee. A diner, with chicken-fried steak. And pie. Asach wrote: Pie, and underlined that, then thought some more about coffee. Coffee could carry you anywhere. Just the geography of coffee could fill walls of maps. Just the price of coffee—Oh Brother! Can you spare a dime?—could fill hours with economics and trade news, fair and unfair. Midnights of exhausted wakefulness: that was the taste and sludgy smell of bad coffee, instant coffee, reheated coffee, coffee ersatz and chicory.

  Asach sighed, and put down the pen. The problem with writing was where, and what to begin. The mind begged to write into being every moment of intensity, or imagination, or serendipity. The pen demanded rather more organization than Pie and Coffee. It demanded a sense of place, and a sense of being. Coffee’s place was everywhere Asach had ever been or cared to go, and its being was most of humanity. It was exquisitely broadening, but insufficiently narrowing. A book needed characters. Asach sighed again, picked up the pen, and wrote: People. And then pondered some more.

  Saint George, New Utah, 3049

  Zia stopped, half whirling, and tugged in exasperation at her billowing black dress, snagged on the iron stump of a sawed-down street sign.

  It was just too typical. Nothing worked. The streets had not been swept in a month, and trash was drifting around a desiccated dog that no-one wanted to touch because it was, well, dead, and a dog. For three days, there had not been enough electricity to fill the water tanks on the roof, so now the laundry was piling up to the rafters and the kids were whinging with the awful pouty, edgy crankiness that is the inevitable aftermath of sticky drinks and too little sleep.

  Ollie had been gone for hours in a probably vain attempt to fill the transporter’s fuel cells, so that they could tap the fuel, in order to power the generator, in order to run the equally cranky air conditioner and get at least a few hours respite from the heat. Ollie— the head of TCM Contract Security; the man of a thousand eyes. Ollie Azhad, who recruited the local lads; the silent lads; the lads impossible to notice, and had thousands of plain-clothes troops assigned all over Saint George. Ollie-the-rock, now reduced to waiting, himself, personally, in refueling lines.

  Dirt was everywhere, billowing down the street in dust devils and forced by the hot, dry wind through every crack. Not that the city government could do anything about the wind, but it just seemed to illustrate the point, in that it was the wind that had snatched her dress and wrapped it around this damnable post—because the one thing the city had managed to do was enforce the signage easements. There might not be fuel, or electricity, or even dead dog removal, but what there was, was a row of sawn-down signs denoting some bureaucrat’s bizarre notions of progress.

  It was just too much. Furious, framed with a quavering halo of brown, wind-whipped dust, sick to death of the outfall of economic embargo and frustrated nearly to tears, Zia jerked again at the snagged hem, muttering curses alternately against her ridiculously conservative mother-in-law and the ridiculously officious city bureaucracy. The struggle was its own sort of respite: the world shrank; life shrank; into this one, dress-wrapped, but imminently winnable battle. She dropped her shopping bag and seized the offending fabric with both hands, yanking and swearing and just daring them to win. All of them—the heat, the wind, the dirt, the kids, the mother-in-law, the bureaucrats—just daring them to even try to make even one more day even one bit more miserable then it already was. She just dared them, and yanked with a fury.

  Tanith, 3049

  Rain lashed the driveway, running in sheets under the truck's wheels; giving life and body to the heavy weight of humidity. Harlan Clegg folded over his keyboard, tap-tap-tapping in the disjointed hammering of a four-finger typist who nonetheless stabs out sixty words per minute regardless of weather or circumstance. Folded over, around, peering through the little porthole of a view screen, hunched into a little universe of safe, virtual space defined by secrecy, unconnected to the gentle peeping of tree frogs emerging to dance their little rituals of increase.

  Tap-tap-tapping; peering, the screen glare casting his shirtfront with a bluish glow. He paused a moment. His brow furrowed slightly. He inhaled sharply. He stabbed the transmit key, sending his resume hurtling through the torrents with electronic certainty.

  Then, staring blankly at his now-blank screen, he sat a while, still folded around his blue virtual space, while the rain sheeted in a solid grey mist through the trees.

  There was a kind, hard edge to certainty. You could decide, right or wrong,
but just decide, and then you stopped being virtual, and started being hard and certain as the rain-pelted trees. As certain as the peepers in their quest to spawn in the midst of a hurricane. The wind could blow and blow; the trees could lash; you could just laugh at the rain hitting the truck like a shower of lead pellets, and all of that became real and green and smellable, and not hunched and wavering and peering. One keystroke, and you could walk right through the screen and into another life.

  New Scotland

  They were back upstairs in the anteroom. Back at the table. This time, Rod Blaine was with them. Renner was not playing Renner. Neither was he smoking. Blaine said nothing, for a very long time. Jackson feigned relaxed, patient interest, but clearly he was bored, and tired, and wanted to go home.

  Blaine’s fingers lay flat on the table, his thumbs wrapped beneath the edge. Still flat, they drummed a random, rhythmless sequence as he stared fixedly at the two men. Finally he seemed to reach some decision.

  “I’d rather hoped that either one of you might have carried that debate.”

  Jackson stopped feigning patience. Renner merely shrugged.

  “Let alone both of you?”

  Renner shrugged again. “You saw what it was. We made the pitch, and—”

  “And lost control of the Commission. ”

  Jackson was visibly irritated. “I’d hardly say lost control. You got your—representative—in, didn’t you?”

  “My representative? How amusing. I should have thought Quinn was your representative?”

  “Whatever. In any case—”

  “Whomever. In any case, at the cost of showing my hand.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “Oh, I think you do.”

  Jackson widened his eyes and shook his head in mock abject ignorance. “Please! Do enlighten me!”

  At this, Blaine’s thumbs slipped from beneath the table, and pressed into two thumb-shaped indentations on its edge. His fingers tapped that a-rythmic sequence again.