Outies

by Pournelle, J. R.

  “But this means the Great Master would receive darts in the—hundreds?”

  “At least. Perhaps thousands.”

  “But that is impossible. Physically.”

  “Some do not survive.”

  “But those that do?”

  “Carry every line. Perhaps. Some lines may fail. But even if the Great Master is alone, many lines will not. If the ar is poor.”

  “If the ar is poor, the Great Master will bear many children.”

  “No. The Master will bear many get. Many castes.”

  Asach thought back to Swenson’s report. “So, when Great Masters are driven from their ar?”

  “They make the Royal Marriage before they go, and leave the rest behind to defend their retreat. They flee, and bear their get where it is safe to begin a new colony. This is how my ancestors came to Mesolimeris. Sargon’s ancestors.”

  “But if the ar is rich?”

  “Then they may have a true child. A Great Master, born to a Great Master. A Great Master, who also carries All, was raised by All, and Speaks with the Voice of All.”

  “Like you.”

  “No, not like me. I am only Sargon’s child. A Master, yes, who Speaks to the Household. But not a Great Master. Sargon is the first in a very long time. This is why Sargon has no family. This is why Sargon was named Protector. Sargon Speaks to All. All Cities, all Houses, all Lines. Sargon commands the Master’s Grip. Sargon is Protector of the ar of Mesolimeris. The ar of All.”

  “And beyond Mesolimeris?’

  “Beyond Mesolimeris lies fallow. Beyond that is the sea.”

  They broke off at a quiet sob from Laurel. She sat on the floor, hugging her knees, rocking slightly. She coughed once. “Sorry.” She choked on her own quavering voice. Cleared her throat. “Sorry.”

  They waited.

  “It’s just that—it must have been horrible. Horrible. They came, they plowed your fields, and all your—people—were left to be shot, gassed, poisoned. And then your—Great Masters—had to cross The Barrens, somehow, all alone, to come here, and start all over.”

  Enheduanna made the sign for great shame and sorrow. “Yes. It is The Great Lament. Beyond The Barrens were our best and richest colonies. Many lines, all gone. ”

  “But don’t you see,” she cried, “that’s our story too. The Great Weep. Driven from New Scotland. Driven from New Ireland. Driven from Maxroy’s Purchase. Driven from Saint George. Driven out from Bonneville, into The Barrens. Driven from our homes, then our lands, and all by them.” Her eyes flashed. “By the vermin. And now they’ve come again.” She climbed to her knees, hands clasped, and addressed a plea, not to Asach, but to Enheduanna. “I beg you. We have helped you! We defended this land so that you could return. Me. My family. Our lines. Now please, help us! Tell Archangel Sargon to help us drive them out forever!”

  Pulling herself to her feet, pulling herself together, wiping away her tears, Laurel aged about ten years before Asach’s eyes, and took Asach’s hands with genuine anguish. “I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. I thought you were my—problem. My burden. When really, you were my guardian angel.”

  That remains to be seen, thought Asach. The chips may fall without regard to you. “I think you’ll find,” Asach said, patting and releasing Laurel’s hands, “that you did most of the work yourself.”

  13

  Tortious Intervention

  Cunning leads to knavery. It is but a step from one to the other, and that very slippery. Only lying makes the difference; add that to cunning, and it is knavery.

  —Ovid

  Saint George, New Utah

  The blart from the flash pager was so loud that as Colchis Barthes flailed awake he nearly landed on the floor.

  It wasn’t clear what he could do. He’d cajoled the True Church archivist for direct access to Swenson’s data, without success. He’d answered Quinn’s brief questions about the Swenson’s ape report: Where? How? He’d played go-between as needed, downloading, pre-processing, and passing updates between Quinn and the Blaine Institute linguists. He guessed that Quinn must be locked up somewhere, with a narrow communications window to the satellite. He spent tense days, hands on notional business, mind elsewhere, ready to jump out of his skin at the blart that unpredictably but invariably arrived at odd hours of the night.

  So, Barthes was startled, but he wasn’t exactly surprised, until he saw the length of Quinn’s usually terse communication.

  FLASH EYES ONLY

  FROM: QUINN

  TO: RENNER

  CC FOR ACTION: BARTHES

  1. Prime assessment:

  No immediate threat to Empire. No immediate threat to trade or commerce. No immediate violations of prime directives. Human-“Motie” contact is centuries-old and of local origin. No offworld information or technology transfer observed. No immediate military action required. No immediate economic sanction required.

  2. Accession Considerations:

  Implications are strategic and political, not military.

  a. Prior Claims of Status: New Utah “Moties” unified. Claim pre-human residence, expulsion from native residence by True Church colonists, historical First Empire contact with Swenson as Imperial Surveyor under Murcheson, pledge of enduring mutual aid and assistance, no subsequent resistance to Imperial or colonial claims or actions, no participation in Secession Wars, and current request for renewal of previous ties. No evidence of contact with or awareness of Mote System aliens or other offworld entities. Human legal status would be: Active Request for Accession by Neutral Allied Prior Colony.

  b. Planetary Government: Procurator (Senior Master) “Sargon,” representing “Moties,” may form alliance with Barrens Himmists re: alleged land and rights violations from sand mining. Attitude actively defensive. No active resistance to TCM government, but extremely hostile to further expansion into jointly claimed territories. If legal interventions not instituted, potentially destabilizing to planetary unity.

  c. Space Travel: No capacity observed.

  d. Prior External Claims: Unknown. Lillith Van Zandt reported on-planet. Possible link to sand mining. Coordinates, Ping image follow for interp.

  3. Tactical Assessment:

  Military strength, deployment unknown. None apparent. Few Warriors observed, serving as household bodyguard. Himmists have no apparent military organization but do organize for self-sufficient pilgrimage. Claim TCM holds monopoly of force in region.

  Junior Master “Enheduanna” reports six cities, population unknown. Population my location estimated 3-5,000, all castes. No Mediators observed. “Enheduanna,” older Keeper “Lagash” fill this role. No Engineers observed; may = Miners. No “Lesser Apes”(=Watchmakers? War Rats?) observed.

  4. Economic Assessment:

  “Moties” possess staple-financed state-administered economy with accounting, higher mathematics, surplus warehousing and distribution, organized by city-state with overarching common defense of western borders. Observed optical and ceramic technologies are highly sophisticated and use solar concentrators. Primary observed agricultural and food base appears to be a filamentous, human-palatable cyanobacteria (“blue-green algae”) grown in reclaimed wetlands. Himmists prize this crop as livestock forage.

  Himmist ranchers subsist in church-organized community cooperatives with secondary, opportunistic income from opal meerschaum sale in Bonneville. Primary agricultural activity is stock-keeping, although this is becoming stressed by climatic change. Aggressive TCM tithe-collection practices have fostered the stripping of mineral resources for quick cash. Primary mineral activity is silica-sand and related mining in support of Bonneville solar-optical industries. Moties prize Himmist buffering and protection of land areas around my location from further development.

  Major resources: Unknown. Disputed sand mining may be in pursuit of fine grade silica sands for New Utah solar-optical industries. Himmist sacral sites characterized by raised seamount geology.

  5. Status: In no immediate danger. Tracker act
ive. DO NOT ATTEMPT RESCUE. Negotiating return to Bonneville.

  6. Recommendations: Assess impact of sand mining dispute.

  7. Instructions to Barthes:

  Find current registered ownership; review prior claims by family names Swenson, Courter, Orcutt, registered Bonneville. Ollie Azhad, TCM Security, Saint George; Zia Azhad, c/o Michael Van Zandt, Bonneville may help.

  USE EXTREME CAUTION. Azhad children recently murdered/kidnapped, Saint George. Michael van Zandt estranged from mother Lillith, but relationship complicated.

  Barthes was now wide awake, very excited, very relieved, and reading the entire message a second time. He’d been worried about something—martial. A requirement for a fumbling commitment to an action at once bellicose and futile. As a Librarian, he would have been poorly cast, Boy’s-Own-Story-Reserve-Lieutenancy to the fore, doing something very keen like heading up some brave little army in defense of the Crown.

  But he understood what he was reading here. Any decision that established an Imperial precedent regarding non-human accession would be made at pay grades orders-of-magnitude above those on the Jackson Commission. It would be governed by forces in play on Sparta; in Mote space; at The Sister; on the Board of Imperial Autonetics; in the corridors of Naval power. New Utah’s importance had never been particularly economic. It had just become extremely strategic. Strategy likes predictability. It despises careening spoilers. Unknown to themselves, the economic parasites that swarmed beneath the rocks of accession politics were about to be exposed to some very bright lights.

  And, as a senior librarian with a lifetime spent poking in the shadows of what people wrote, doodled, and archived, conflict-phobic Colchis Barthes was no master of derring-do, but he was ideally suited to the role of Imperial spy. He listened, and people talked to him. He showed interest, and people showed him things. He picked up bits and bobs, until he’d curated brilliant collections.

  As weak, grey light seeped behind the curtains, he began by doing what he did every morning. He donned his brocade bathrobe. He moved deliberately into his kitchenette. He carefully, neatly, made a pot of tea, and laid it out on a tray with full service. He quietly sat to drink it. Behind him, a distant boom shuddered the windows and rattled the tray. It had a familiar, comforting quality. The distant sirens played sweetly, like astral music.

  Buried deep within her basement office, Linda Libiziewsky’s fingers drummed on the desktop as she stared at the tacked-up mountain scene that passed for a window. Hugo Azhad dripped from every bough. The meadow bloomed with the purple flowers of Marul’s eyes. Deela’s laugh splashed along the brook her brothers’ footsteps sprinting up the red-earth track.

  Linda wasn’t particularly close to the Azhads, but everybody knew Ollie. He was a bright spot in the TCM. While MP blow-ins fired up their fanatical goon squads, Ollie hired and trained all-local boys for supplemental security contracts. He kept them supervised and out of trouble. He was intolerant of thugs and bullies. He cultivated good relations with the civil police; with Zone and Church authorities. His recruitment net was ecumenical. “It’s a warehouse,” he’d shrug, “not a sanctuary.” His lads were quiet, effective, nearly invisible, and in high demand. New Utahans were pragmatic.

  No local, drummed Linda’s fingers, would have done this. Not at all; and not like this. What was the point of kidnap? Ransom? There was no percentage in it. TCM Security profits went to the Church, not Ollie. The Church didn’t ransom kidnap victims. It ruthlessly hunted down the perpetrators, declared them and their families excommunicants, confiscated their property, exiled them to The Barrens, and placed them under shunning orders. There was nowhere to take the money and run to. Extortion? Over what? Warehouse security? VIP escort? Nobody local would pick that fight lightly. Ollie was too astute a politician and businessman. He was a decent man, but he controlled the equivalent of an infantry division with eyes and ears in every community on the planet. There wasn’t a contract out there worth measures as extreme as murdering his eldest son and stealing his youngest kids, because there wasn’t a contract out there worth the potential retribution.

  No, this murder smacked of offworlders: offworld prejudice, and offworld threat. It was meant to look like a local cock-up. That was the prejudice part. It was what an offworlder might imagine a local blood feud would look like; some offworlder framing of negotiation hostages. But New Utahans didn’t do blood feuds. They did litigations and shamings and shunnings and banishments. They might tie each other up in court for decades determining just compensation, but they didn’t tie each other up in trees for public guttings. They didn’t steal one another’s kids.

  So, it was a message. A disgusting, public threat. To whom? To whom? To whom? drummed Linda’s fingers. To Ollie? It just didn’t make sense. To Moorstown? It had certainly soaked the community in fear. Street play all but shut down. Parents hovered over their kids. Whispers and rumors flew everywhere. But to what purpose was that? What message was sent? Why shouldn’t kids go to and from work or play outside?

  The drumming stopped. Linda went icy all over. She felt physically sick. Because nobody can protect them, she thought. That’s the message. Nobody can protect you. Not even Ollie Azhad. Not even the TCM. Now she went hot all over. Her faced flushed bright red. The message was bright and clear, to anyone who knew how to read it: deal with us, or you’ll have no future here.

  Suddenly, all the random violence made sense. At some level or another, Linda knew most things of any consequence in the Zone, because she paid all the bills. She didn’t need to pull up Trippe’s travel reimbursements. She knew them by heart. One FLIVR fuel receipt, for a weekly out-of-Zone community relations meeting with the current lessees of the old Founder’s Retreat. She reached forward; pulled down the picture, and thought deeply as she examined the cliff face, capped by the façade of the mountain aerie now occupied by Lillith van Zandt.

  Blaine Institute, New Caledonia

  The IA communications satellite was tiny. It didn’t hold a lot. It didn’t do a lot. It served a specific purpose, which was to burp transmissions at light speed and hideous expense to like-minded state-of-the-art transponders parked within eyeshot of the daisy-chain of Alderson points tenuously connecting New Utah to the rest of Empire space. That’s why Asach had dropped it into geosynchronous orbit above the Bonneville plains all those years ago.

  It did have a minuscule image acquisition system, which didn’t cover many bands. It had no onboard atmospheric correction, nor could it record data needed to accomplish same. It was lousy at punching through clouds. It was pretty worthless at night. But on a clear day, if nothing else was going on, if anybody asked it to, it could record whatever happened to lie beneath it. It couldn’t see a lot. It wasn’t strictly speaking directable, but you could fiddle with the aperture slit, so that it looked out at an oblique angle. If you had those settings, you could correct the image so that it looked something like vertical. If you knew exactly where you wanted to look, you could use all of your available storage to bump up resolution and get as much detail stuffed in as possible. Using it was like waving a camera above everyone’s heads at a rock concert, and hoping whatever you got would turn out well.

  Given those constraints, it was pretty amazing that they got anything at all. Anything much smaller than a house was little more than a dot. Waist-high scrub along dry washes was reduced to darkened streaks. Multi-story dunes appeared as hazy smears obscuring the white scars of bulldozed access roads.

  It didn’t matter. They stared at the scaffolded contraption with shock and awe. It looked like a skyscraper’s innards mated with an octopus. The tiny yellow cab must have been, well, bigger than a house, or it would not have been visible at all. But what was most stunning was the sand itself. It was not the stuff of palm-swept holidays or Scheherazade oases. Linear mustard yellow dunes banded with greenish black spilled like vomit across a vast expanse at the base of scruffy mountains. The octopus had chewed away square-walled sections seven stories high, and re-spewed
the multi-colored grains into a bracelet of neatly-sorted conical piles. In turn, SunRail spurs chewed away at these, ferrying gemstone-colored open boxcars in a necklace that cascaded to a ring of smelters, fired by a solar concentrator big enough to cast a shadow across the entire yard.

  But the alignment was not cooperative. They stretched. They rotated. They enhanced and cropped and magnified. But they could not get any clear image of insignia; branding; printing: anything at all that indicated the identity of the operators of the mine. So they called in Chief Snow, a Warrant Officer older than the sands of time. He looked at the mining booms. He looked at the operations layout. He looked at the SunRail boxcars. “Local,” he grunted. He looked at the smelters. “Nice adaptation,” he rasped. Then he shifted the view slightly, and looked at outbuildings; latrines; bunkhouses; warehouses, equipment yards.

  “Come ‘ere,” he wheezed. His breath was foul. “That,” he said, his tobacco-stained index finger poking at one nondescript building among many, “is the primary flinger house. And that,” he said, circling the array; walking his hangnailed, callous-encrusted digit along the lines and paths and buildings, “is a Van Zandt Mining Number Four-A layout.” He turned away, grey stubble glowing in the backlight; dandruff flecks carpeting his shoulders. “Colony concession model. Unmitigated, total extraction, open cut-and-strip. Not silica sand. Wrong geology, wrong color. You got a lot goin’ on here. That ridge is an old sea mount—undersea volcano—that went dormant, got ringed with reefs, then raised up, then baked in sun, then weathered down. Those sands are eroding out of an exposed shoulder of the mountain core. Best wild guess, rare earths, based on that geology and color.”