Outies

by Pournelle, J. R.

  In brief: for anybody looking, who did not know what they were looking at, a couple of yokels were making a quick crown ferrying third-class nobodies. And for anybody who knew what they were looking at, this little troop traveled under a local Mormon Stick’s protection. Maxroy’s Purchase was a long, long way away. Here, as the saying went, scratch a Stick, feel the club.

  The Librarian said nothing: merely stared out the window. They wove their way through dust-choked streets. They’d never been elegant, but decades of blockade had trashed even the major thoroughfares. In the traffic islands, dead palms wept brown fronds over shanty huts tacked together from reed mats. Alternately, garbage blew everywhere; trash was sifted into towering recycle piles, whence it blew away again. Kids sifted through debris, picking out bits that glinted in the sun.

  Eventually, they arrived at what passed for the University. Supposedly, work was already underway, in preparation to receive an Imperial Cultural and Trade Exchange Library, the better to “bring these primitives up to speed,” as HG had so graciously put it. HG made a beeline for what passed as the most richly appointed office, and settled in to suck down what Asach guessed to be a month’s supply of tea on this cash-strapped planet.

  Meanwhile, Asach completed an inspection walk-through with the civil engineers. They had done a stunning job, but the local librarian was clearly overwhelmed. She had not made any orderly plan for transitioning materials from old to new systems. Nanos were piled in haphazard mountains in the adjacent room, with hundreds of ‘tooth fones scattered about the floor. No effort had been made to clean the library area before re-sorting. Everything—shelving, nanos, desk surfaces—was covered with a thick layer of construction dust mixed with stirred-up muck and soot—of which she complained, showing her begrimed hands.

  Asach decided to let them get on with it a bit, but also to set up another working meeting specifically to deal with library issues. That would keep both librarians occupied—for clearly she had prepared none of the promised reports, would not be ready to receive shipped d-sets, and would not be ready for the next academic term—and this without even addressing the issue of system training for her.

  Asach explained carefully to the Librarian, an intelligent man, but one who clearly had little experience outside the sheltered halls of Sparta: “You need to appoint someone here that can provide close supervision of this. You need to give her the support she needs to do her job well. She is trying, but for her our gift imposes a tremendous burden of work and responsibility.”

  HG blustered, but the Librarian nodded, and took careful, meticulous notes.

  On the surface, Saint George life, fueled mostly by an injection of hope, seemed improved since Asach’s visit fourteen years before. More shops were open. More people were working. The suitcase imports brought by visiting family members were percolating through the consumer economy. Everyone was excited by the opening of a Retread Emporium with dirt-cheap clothes.

  Road traffic was heavier—even congested—and better policed. People had returned to following normal rules of the road. Lines were shorter at fuel cell charge points. Construction was booming, everywhere. There had been a lot of cleanup of outright rubble, but trash collection seemed to have fallen by the wayside. There were drifts of garbage and a dead dog even outside Orcutt Land and Mining’s new offices. Asach got the impression of a strain on managerial capacity. There may have been spare laborers about, but the city was clearly short on people to effectively train, and supervise them.

  Ensconced within the TC Security Zone, HG was buffered from electricity outages, but everyone else suffered in the summer heat through rolling blackouts. As spare parts trickled in, more capacity was brought online, but the grid was absorbing mountains of repaired and replaced refrigerators and air conditioners.

  Crime seemed less overtly violent. Weapons were no longer openly carried on every street corner. Boxes of large appliances remained outside on the sidewalk overnight, with only a few sleeping watchman to guard them. There were no sounds of nearby or distant gunfire. Despite all this, people themselves were grim and tense. The murder rate was extremely high. There were rumors of revenge and reprisal killings—of whom? By whom? For what? Chained to HG’s leg, which was chained to the oligarchy inside The Zone, Asach could learn little.

  Zone operations were retrenching, with offices moved into dug-in concrete shelters surrounded by blast barriers. The True Church Elder insisted that this was merely “precautionary,” pending accession talks. Asach was unconvinced. Ominously, their old hotel—with many apologies—would no longer accept Imperials. While HG blustered his credentials as a True Friend of The People at the front desk, Asach pulled a waiter aside and switched to Tok Pisin.

  “Mipela pret .” Was all he would say. “Mipela pret TCM. Mipela Kristen. Emtupela longlong. Emtupela setan setan.” We’re afraid. Afraid of TCM. We’re Christian. Those guys are crazy. Those guys are devils.

  Clearly all was not love and roses on New Utah. Everyone claimed that the killings and kidnappings were being done by outsiders pouring in through the newly porous “borders”—from Maxroy’s Purchase, New Ireland, New Scotland, who knows where—but nobody knew what to do about that. The second night, just after two a.m., a man was gunned down across the street from Asach’s hotel room window. Police sirens blared and flashed; he was taken away in the back of a flatbed. Asach could not tell if he was dead or alive, or whether he was a criminal shot by the police themselves. The high prevalence of Tok Pisin speakers amongst the security forces, laborers, and service staff perhaps leant credence to that notion, or perhaps was just a by-product of the appalling penchant for contractors smelling Treasury money to bring in their own workers, rather than employ locals.

  Everyone seemed nervous about standing in the shadow of foreigners, yet clearly they were grateful for the change and wanted to help as much as they could. The Saint Georgians, inured to the dangers, asserted the right to act as if things were normal, while the Zonies dug into their bunkers. Blending in was increasingly important. Asach found a little safe-ish triangle bounded old offices, the hotel, and new offices, which were half a block away. The hotel was several notches down from past accommodation, but the price was right and the food was excellent and cheap. The weather was blisteringly hot, which felt right at home.

  HG barely ruffled the sheets and choked down a meal before deciding to “head on back” and “report in,” as if (a) they actually had much of any substance to report, and (b) a report could not be sent by outbound courier. Asach had finally had enough, ignored HG’s insistence that they “keep the team together,” and just failed to show up at the spaceport. It was time to get out of the moon raking capital and find out what was going on.

  Saint George, New Utah

  According to the duty log, Captain Legrange took the first garbled report over the landline from the gatehouse at 7:03. Specialist Theo Parker, the unit’s fastest runner, had been dispatched from the scene to summon the duty officer. Nobody had a ‘tooth, because the commander had forbidden their use during runs. It had not occurred to Parker to check for one at any of the closer military housing; he had accomplished his mission by the simple expedient of sprinting the two-thousand-plus meters back to the main gate, a feat he accomplished in slightly under seven minutes.

  This left Parker doubled over, head between his knees, gulping for air while the guard on duty contacted the operations desk. On top of his airlessness, Parker was a supply clerk. He could balance an ammunition accounting ledger down to the last bullet without error, but he could not construct a coherent sentence to save his life. Between Parker’s agonizing thought processes, and his agonized breathing, Legrange had trouble ascertaining what, precisely, Parker was reporting.

  Legrange gathered that it involved a girl, the woods, and a great deal of blood. For a moment she thought that a military vehicle had run over a child and struck a tree. Finally, after much quizzing, Legrange came to understand that there had (clearly) been a murder, not
an accident; that the victim was in the tree (and did not appear to be military); that there was a girl on the scene who seemed to know who the victim was; and that a detail, with a vehicle, was wanted to secure the scene pending the arrival of civil authorities.

  It was the luck of the draw that Legrange had pulled duty the night before, and equally happenstance that the duty NCO, not herself, was out making the hourly checks just as the call came in, but as chance would have it, Legrange was the post security officer, and would have been called in any event. Indeed, had she not been on duty, she’d have been on the run. She was also a linguist. These two facts—security, linguist—had landed her the additional joy, among her many additional duties, of serving as the installation liaison officer to the local police authorities. Murder of a local civilian in the philosopher’s woods well outside the installation perimeter clearly fell in their jurisdiction, not hers.

  Under normal circumstances, the duty officer would have simply made a call to the local police like any private citizen, and sent a patrol to keep military personnel clear of the area until the green-and-whites took charge of the scene. However, the proximity to Moorstown, bordered as it was by a patchwork of leased military housing, installation warehouses, and the warren of apartment blocks full of cheap flats rented by private soldiers normally required to live in barracks, made Legrange uneasy. She didn’t like sending those Maxroy’s Purchase boys on public duty at all, but that’s what she had suited up and ready at that hour of the morning. She told Parker to go and find the Duty Sergeant, out making his rounds with the Charge-of-Quarters, contacted the police, then got through to her civilian counterpart.

  His desk sergeant informed her that he would not be in until seven-thirty. She asked for a callback when he did, then called the MP detachment for a two-person detail, stressing “Hancock, give me somebody with civil patrol experience, not any of your deadly-force-authorized watchtower rats.” Ringing off, Legrange kicked the dozing duty driver on his boot soles to wake him up.

  “Sorry, Swanson. One more run. Get down to Charlie company. There’ll be a detail waiting. Pick ‘em up, then come back for me. We’re going over to the road apples.”

  The TCM contracted the commons out for grazing, and the public trails were shared by riders with mounts stabled within and beyond the industrial fringe. The more intrepid among them used the greenbelt section of the Philosopher’s Way, where it cut along the river past the warehouses, as a pass-through to open hill-and-orchard country beyond. This remnant of old city agrarian activity was the subject of much scatological merriment among the troops, mostly of urban extraction, who jogged past (and over) the results every morning. Their children had a kindred, unofficial appellation: “the wee-wees,” derived from the Founder name on the sketch map included in the family welcome packets given to all new arrivals: “the Wiese,” meaning, simply, the meadows.

  La Grange updated the duty log, signed off the end-of-shift inventories for safes, keys, documents, codes, and communications checks, and was just pulling on her field jacket when Porter reappeared with the Duty Sergeant and Charge-of-Quarters. She opened the cage door.

  “It’s all in the log, Top. I don’t know any more than what Parker’s told me, and if he hasn’t told you by now, make him. As soon as the Civvie checks in, fill him in and ask him to please meet me at the scene. Remember: Civil. Liaison. Officer. Don’t forget the please. The police will be there already, and I’ll need that C-LO to make sure that we find out anything that we care about. And call the main gate. Tell ‘em that we’re coming through.”

  The First Sergeant grunted, then grunted toward the pot of bilge sludge stewing in the corner.

  “Parker. Coffee. Report.”

  Legrange bolted out of the headquarters, dragging her cap onto her head with one hand, zipping her field jacket with the other, and jumped into the shotgun seat of the FLIVR. At the main gate, not a hundred meters away, already backed up past the external buffer strip and around the corner along the main traffic way, the installation rush hour had begun, with civilian employees racing the clock to be at their desks by seven-thirty. This vehicular tidal surge was already spilling into the first waves of regular commuter traffic, pouring past the post and on into the city. In an attempt to minimize the congestion, from seven to eight the installation police designated both lanes at the main gate as inbound-only. Legrange would catch hell for having the gate block traffic to let her out, but so be it. Meandering across post to exit by the back gate would add another quarter-hour delay.

  The duty driver didn’t even slow down as he gunned it past the guard. At the checkpoint, Legrange returned his salute on the fly, and shouted “Thanks Conway!” as the FLIVR careened past the second guard, who’d had the good sense to ignore the law and block traffic at the street intersection as well. No doubt Parker’s garbled story was already known to half the MP company by now. Those Maxroy’s Purchase boys were a tight little bunch.

  The FLIVR bounced overland, ignoring marked pathways, in a beeline for the crime scene. They covered the distance to the meadow in just under two minutes—urgency or no, Legrange did not want her driver flattening some schoolchild on the way to a SART stop—and halted where the pavement turned into gravel.

  Her face went rigid. She glowered across the expanse, teeth gritted in fury. A little blob of banana suits was clustered at the edge of the trees. Fanning back from that, like lines of ant trails, cutting across the fields toward the back gate; toward Moorstown; toward post housing, were the tracks of nearly one hundred-fifty soldiers, obviously released to return to their homes and barracks to prep for the duty day. It was seven-twenty-four. The police had not yet arrived. So much for controlling the crime scene.

  Legrange looked back at the two MPs. They were traffic cops, maybe. Housing Patrol officers, at best. And they had not yet been briefed. She sighed.

  “OK you two, time to go earn some of those hero’s wings.”

  They looked at each other, then responded in unison. “Ma’am?”

  “We’re gunna secure a murder scene.”

  “Yes SIR, Ma’am.” They bolted from the FLIVR, but the driver was already dozing. He’d been more-or-less awake, at that point, for twenty-six hours. Legrange bellowed, not out of anger: just to get his adrenaline flowing.

  “SWANSON!” He jerked.

  “Unass that machine!”

  He jumped.

  “I want YOU, AT parade rest, RIGHT here, right NOW!”

  She stabbed with a forefinger at the spot where the concrete ended and the gravel path began. He scrambled to.

  “Swanson, listen up! Nobody. I mean NOBODY, brings any vehicle down here unless the police tell them to, you hear me?

  “Yes Ma’am!”

  “And nobody, but NOBODY, walks across this field, or down this path, EXCEPT the police, you got that?”

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  “Say it back.”

  “I ain’t spozed ta let nobody cross here ‘cept the p’lice, and I ain’t spozed ta let nobody walk down there ‘cept the p’lice.” ‘Police’ had no ‘o’, and rhymed with ‘grease.’

  “You got it. And who am I?”

  “The D-O, Ma’am.”

  “And what does that make me?”

  “GOD, Ma’am.”

  “And who does God report to?”

  “Colonel Slam-Dunk, Ma’am!”

  So who’s the only one who can change that order?”

  “Only you or the Hoop, Ma’am!”

  Colonel Roger A. Hooper, aka Slam-Dunk Hooper, aka The Hoop, was the installation commander. Until he arrived on post, the Duty Officer acted with his authority.

  “C’mon, you two,” she grumbled, turning to go, but then stopping abruptly and facing back.

  “Swanson!”

  “Ma’am!”

  “You are NOT authorized to hurt anybody, you hear me?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Do not so much as breathe on a civilian. Politely. Tell people politely.”r />
  “Ma’am.” He looked crestfallen. Swanson was still new enough to suffer from the delusion that he was owed a hero’s welcome as part of a post-war occupation army helping to save the New Utahans from themselves and, inexplicably, Outies. When the New Utahans quite naturally, and not always politely, proffered differing views, Swanson still tended to take things personally. His toolkit of social skills being fairly limited in scope, this had the potential to lead to ugly scenes.

  “Just say ‘tasol polis’ if they don’t speak Anglic.”

  He nodded.

  “Say it.”

  “Taser p’lice.” It still rhymed with “grease.”

  “PO-lis,” she stressed. “It’s PO-lis.”

  “Taser p’lice,” he repeated.

  She sighed. “Good, Swanson. That’s really good,” and turned down the path, the MPs in tow, as the neeer-nor, neer-nor of the police sirens finally wailed in the distance.

  5

  Knowledge Management

  May my hymns be in everyone's mouth; let the songs about me not pass from memory. So that the fame of my praise ... shall never be forgotten, I have had it written down line by line in the House of the Wisdom in holy heavenly writing, as great works of scholarship. No one shall ever let any of it pass from memory .... It shall not be forgotten, since indestructible heavenly writing has a lasting renown.

  —The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature 2.4.2.05, lines 240-248

  Saint George, New Utah

  Asach and the Lads set off just after dawn, on a jaunt down the Bonneville highway, into the panhandle. They trundled through the old city, into and through the house furnishings market: rolls of flooring stacked against sleeping windows; parking lots lined with velvet-upholstered furniture. Out past Gazelle Springs, where Founder horse burials inhabited limestone caves above the source.