by Steve Perry
Emile wanted to laugh, but he held it, waiting to hear how Jeda was going to react. After a second, she came oncom. “That’s stupid, Hamay, really stupid.”
Emile didn’t say anything—his bottle was sliding down the trough of a big wave and he was trying to hold the nose into the wind. It wasn’t that stupid a joke, really. Actually, it was kind of funny, but he didn’t laugh. Suddenly, what Jeda thought of him seemed more important than what Little Hamay, his friend for years, thought. And his gut churned in a funny way that was only partially due to the sudden roll of the bottle as the storm clawed at it.
“—your duty to the Confederation requires your participation in galactic service. You should all know the alternatives by now, but I will list them again.” The Confed rep stood in the center of the assembly hall in front of an active holoproj unit. The two hundred seats were filled with young men and women, all watching the rep. Emile Khadaji watched maybe a little more carefully than most.
“First, there’s the military. Confed standard is six years. Then there’s medical, you’ve got eight years’ tour there. Those of you with weak stomachs can try for Civilian Corps, but the input is limited and we are talking about ten years minimum. That’s it, people. You will have to do your duty, one way or another. It’s up to you. Personally, I would hope you’d do military. The pay is better, the chances for advancement better, and the tour is shorter. Who knows? You might even get posted to your homeworld.”
Several people laughed at this. The military contingent on San Yubi consisted of a hundred troopers; chances of anybody here making it into that post were slim and snowball. Besides, Emile didn’t want to be stuck on his home-world. He wanted to see the galaxy, he wanted to see action.
Jeda leaned toward Emile from her seat next to him. “Medical is the best deal.”
Emile smiled, but said nothing. They talked about joining Medical together and asking for link-posting. But Jeda wasn’t as… exciting as she’d once been. She was, Emile reflected, kind of… dull. He’d had other girls, even a few guys, to play nik-nik games with since that first time with her, and, well, she wasn’t-so hot. He was going for Military, for a new start. One thing he had learned: there were a lot of fish in the sea. He meant to sample a few…
“—won’t hurt, but you may notice a transient itching sensation,” the Medic said.
The goddamned fishfucker! ‘Transient itching sensation,’ was it? Khadaji felt as if someone had pumped him full of rock venom. It was all he could do to keep from clawing gouges in his skin. Each of the fucking bacteria must have teeth and talons!
But the augmentation process was working. He tried the test he’d heard about, the stack of coins on the back of his hand. When he dropped his hand from under the metal circles, it seemed as if he had all the time in the galaxy to pluck them from the air. Oh, he was fast! Of course, it didn’t make much difference in the barracks, since everybody else was auged the same way, but against a civilian? He couldn’t wait to get to a pub to start a fight.
The military minds weren’t completely stupid, though. Until the newness wore off, speed-augmented troopers were kept away from civilians. Too fucking bad…
“A guard? I don’t want to be a fucking guard, Sub!” “Seal it, Khadaji. None of us want to be guards. But the Confed in its wisdom has seen fit to bend us to Kontrau’lega for a time. You will make the best of it.”
Khadaji turned to his bunkmate, Theris. “Shit. After Nazo I thought they’d send us where we could see more action. We’re battle-tested, experienced!”
The small dark woman looked up at him. “So are half the ground forces in the system, Emilio, old dork. Way I hear it, Kontrau’lega is a reward for a job well done.”
“Shit.”
—airgun barked and Khadaji saw Theris’s left eye disappear. She fell, and he swept his carbine in a semicircle at hip level, firing on full auto. A dozen of the breakers were stopped by the lead wall, and the closer prisoners were blown apart by the explosive rounds.
“Theris!” Khadaji dropped, oblivious to the roar around him. He stabbed his thumb and forefinger at her carotids, but there was no pulse. The steel pellet must have gone right into her brain, she was dead before she touched the neatly clipped lawn.
When he stood, his rage was in full charge. The fuckers were going to pay for Theris, every goddamned one of them—
“—don’t want me to go!
“—want me—!
“—don’t—!”
Khadaji came up from the sonically-induced sleep, fighting the dream. The pure white skin and flowing white hair of Juete filled his mind, along with her rage at being deserted. You should have let me refuse, she seemed to say. You owed me that much.
Khadaji lay quietly in the bed for a moment, allowing his heart to slow to normal. Sleeping was not the answer, not if it brought dreams. His past was not going to help him now. He had to start anew, to begin on the path he’d seen tantalizing him on Maro. He had to do something.
It was going to be a long trip to Bocca, he realized. Far longer than he’d expected.
Chapter Fourteen
A TROPICAL THUNDERSTORM was in full rage as the shuttle landed at the port of Nagas on Bocca. The attendants on the boxcar were moving among the passengers with hoops of reverse-os thinfilm. Khadaji stood as the young woman approached and raised the hoop over his head.
“Hold your breath for a second,” she said.
Khadaji took a deep breath and the woman brought the hoop down slowly around his body until it touched the deck. Khadaji stepped over the edge of the hoop and the woman raised it and moved to the next passenger.
The microthin plastic felt like cobwebs on his skin, and Khadaji quickly cleared his mouth and nostrils so it wouldn’t be sucked in when he breathed. The thinfilm sheet had already conformed to his body to form a water-repellent layer. It had a half-life of ten minutes before it would begin to die, but it would keep him dry long enough to reach the terminal. In twenty minutes, the material would be completely gone, evaporated harmlessly into the air.
The rain pounded at him as Khadaji walked quickly to the terminal. It was hot, the rain was nearly as warm as me air, and hard flashes of lightning were followed quickly by sheet-metal rolls of thunder. It was hard to see much, and Khadaji followed the passenger in front of him. A gust of wind shook him as he reached the terminal.
Inside, the customs officer checked him through.
“Purpose of your visit?”
“Student,” Khadaji said.
The man looked bored. Bocca’s single major industry was knowledge, in one form or another. “Subject?”
Khadaji didn’t speak for a few seconds. He hadn’t really decided, yet. He had some vague ideas, but nothing for certain. What was he going to study?
The customs man began to look irritated.
“Politics,” Khadaji said suddenly.
The man nodded, bored again. He returned Khadaji’s tag and waved him through.
It seemed as if the whole damned planet was a university. There were thousands of colleges, covering tens of thousands of subjects. Khadaji stared at the catalogue scrolling across the holoproj image. Politics? What kind? There were dozens of choices: Human or Mutant? Current or Past? System? Planet? State? Theoretical? And, assuming he could choose a particular branch, there were several ways to go about learning the material, too. Viral Inject. Hypnotic Induct. Real Time.
Viral Inject was the fastest. A few minutes and you could absorb an entire course, coded into educational virus which would become a part of your own nervous system. Hypnosis took longer, several sessions of an hour or so, but the information was the same and locked in fairly well. Real Time was the chanciest, there were no guarantees because the work had to be done by the student. Well, Viral seemed like the way to go—until Khadaji saw the prices. Buddha and Jackson! He’d saved most of the money he’d earned in the pub, but a single course would take all of that and more. Hypnotic courses were cheaper, but still more than he had to
spend. He could afford Real Time, that was all, and not too much of that. Holy Allah, education was expensive. He’d never thought much about it before: on his homeworld, he’d been schooled for free as a child, and part of his father’s benefit package had given Khadaji secondary training in BasicLib—a total of fifteen years, all for free. He wished he had some of that free time coming to him now.
The instructor was a pinched-faced woman of eighty, with frizzy short hair dyed brilliant green in a fashion which was fifteen years out-of-date. She faced four hundred students in the auditorium and gave her first and final lecture on politics.
“There are three files,” she said, waving at the air. A giant holoproj lit to her right, with the names. Khadaji pointed his comp at the image and pushed the inducer. At the same time, he heard several hundred other inducers click into operation. It sounded like a swarm of angry insects. The files were dutifully copied by his portable unit.
“Read them carefully,” the professor said. “Introduction to Basic Terran Politics will hold its final examination in six weeks. The schedules will be filed under class times in the library’s mainframe matrix.” With that, the professor waved her hand again, wiping the holoproj image away. She turned, and walked from the auditorium.
Next to him, a jet-skinned boy of sixteen or so muttered, “Shit. I’m gonna line my parents for Viral stads. I hate this Real Time suck.”
Khadaji stared at the names projected above his comp.
THE PRINCE - NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI - 6934561-POL-1
A BOOK OF FIVE RINGS - MIYAMOTO MUSASHI - 7105436-POL-l
THE ART OF COMPROMISE - CARLOS PERITO - 3451509-POL-1
Khadaji looked at the boy and raised an eyebrow.
“That’s it,” the boy said. “She gives us the reading, we do it, they test us at the end. They’re trying to weed us out, there’s too many of us, so seal it, you can bet your orbs the test will be a humming peter!”
Khadaji only nodded. It didn’t matter to him if he passed the test or not. He wasn’t here to get a degree; he was here to learn. Three files. It didn’t seem as if he would be able to learn much about politics from them.
He was wrong. Machiavelli had been something called an Italian, and he wrote his theories in pre-Galactic times, but his insight was fascinating. Much of the text first seemed incomprehensible, due to archaic references to Terran sub-states like France and Rome and Tuscany, but Khadaji was able to decipher those using a basic history file in the library. The more he read, the more he understood.
Musashi’s book was concerned with sword fighting, of all things. But a deeper look showed strategy beyond that of waving a sharp metal blade. Khadaji couldn’t help remembering Pen’s lessons with the curved knife, back on the Darkworld.
Perito was an early post-Galactic, writing on Alpha Point in the Centauri System. His psychological insights delved deeper than the others, and he talked much of ethics.
Amazing, that such men could know so much. It made Khadaji realize how little he knew.
Military Science was structured differently. There were regular class sessions with a live instructor, and Khadaji felt almost at home in the classes. He had, after all, been a soldier. He was done with that, but since the Military was the enforcement arm of the Confed, it seemed like a good idea to learn as much as he could about it.
“—is your basic antipersonnel, fully automatic, blowback-operated shoulder weapon,” the instructor droned in a bored voice. “It holds five hunnert rounds of point one-seven-seven explosive ammunition with a rate of fire of eight rounds per second. This here shoulder weapon weighs three point six three kilograms empty and five point one kilograms fully loaded. People, this is your weapon, not your gun.” He waved the Parker in the air. “This is for work.” He dropped one hand to touch himself on the crotch. “This is for fun. Don’t mistake one for the other. Those of you not male or electively equipped as such might remember that easier.”
Khadaji found a small bar in the town serving the university branch and managed to get hired as a backup tender. The pay wasn’t that good, but the job included a communal sleeping room and at least one meal a day. The money he had saved from Kamus wouldn’t last forever, and, it seemed, there was a lot he didn’t know. The vastness of human knowledge seemed like some monstrous void looming in front of him. He was ignorant, he realized, and ill-equipped to challenge a galactic Confederation in any area.
From politics, Khadaji naturally slid into the study of history; then came psychology, sociology, biology and socio-biology. He delivered drinks and powders in the pub by day and attended classes and worked the library comp in the evenings. He took classes in physics and chemistry, in electronics and atomic theory; he learned about warps and drives; he immersed himself in astronomy and astrophysics. The more he learned, the more he wanted to learn. Knowledge became a joy for him, an end in itself. Time went by in a kind of intellectual blur, filled with something new each day. A line of study would often take a turn, dragging Khadaji into a new discipline which would blossom for him, making him grin as he tapped the controls of the comp and chased the information like a predator chasing prey. Astronomy, astrophysics, medicine, religion; they all called to him…
Confederation History: now there was a subject. Khadaji had paid little attention to such things before; after all, the Confed was so vast and ever-present, it was like worrying about breathing. On screen, the dates and facts were dry and lifeless: the first extee colony off Earth, 2000 A.D.; the first ship to reach another stellar system, the ill-fated Heaven Star, constructed in space and launched in 2072; in 2193, the Bender Drive was perfected, giving FTL travel. Then came the leap: from 2195 to 2255, there was the Expansion, a period of intense colonization; from 2255 to 2295, the Consolidation held sway, in which the galactic association became more rigid, less a loose association and more a bureaucracy. And, although the Confed frowned deeply upon it, the period since 2295 was becoming known as the Declination. The fifty-six planets and eighty-seven wheel worlds were growing ever more restless. In the spiral Sb which is the Milky Way, such a Confederation was less than a scratch upon the hundred billion stars which formed the galaxy; still, the Confed was spread over a thousand light years, and even at its fastest, the Bender took time. And what the official histories usually left out was the sense of oppression ordinary people felt from the vastness of the indifferent Confed. The beast had long since stopped serving to become the master. The Confed did what governments were famed for: it made more government. To oppose it was treason, and worth death. Even a monster has fear.
“—etiology of the pathogen was at first unknown, but experiments revealed that the viral matrix was consistent with that of an opportunistic symbiote of the class—”
“—type of geological formation is only found in areas of volcanic activity—”
“—of which tantric is the most popular form—” “—subatomic realm we must deal in theory—”
“—me a Bloody Mary, would you Emile? My fucking head feels like it’s going to fucking explode!”
Khadaji grinned and began to construct the drink. It was fairly busy, but not too bad. The pub was quiet as it almost always was—the college crowd would sometimes get loud, but usually only during the period around exams. Maurice, the owner, didn’t even have a full-time bouncer. He hired an off-duty pol when he thought things might get rowdy.
Three people came in while Khadaji was making the Bloody Mary, all dressed in Confed military uniforms. He felt the short rush of coldness in his gut he usually did when he saw legit Military—after all, he was a deserter. It might be half a galaxy away from Maro, but Bocca was a kind of crossroads. He was aware of the small chance of encountering somebody he knew whenever he saw a uniformed trooper.
The coldness faded. The three—two women and a man—were young, maybe twenty or so, and so wouldn’t know him. It had been six years since Maro.
That stopped him. Six years? That meant he had been studying here on Bocca for—what?—four years? At
least that. He blinked at the realization. Where had the time gone? He hadn’t begun to make a dent in what there was to be learned. He was still a young man, only thirty-two, but—six years?
Khadaji felt a break in the normal rhythms of the pub. Something was going on, something unusual. He glanced around. A soldier was standing, one of the women, glaring down at a single man at a table near where the other two soldiers still sat. The woman was angry.
Khadaji tried to tune out the background noises of the pub so he could hear her.
“—much care for the way you stared at us when we came in, chickie. What the hell do you think you’re looking at?”
The man, a slightly built redhead, shook his head. Khadaji didn’t recognize him, he wasn’t one of the regulars.
“Sorry,” he said. He had some kind of accent Khadaji couldn’t place right away. Baszelian, maybe? “No offense meant.”
“Yeah, well I don’t think much of your manners, chickie. And I think you were eyeing my partner too much.” The soldier waved at the second woman sitting behind her.
Khadaji began to work his way to the end of the bar. He could see trouble. The woman had already been into chem somewhere. From her sleeve insignia, he could see she was a combat vet; Khadaji was willing to bet the other two were, as well. All three wore air pistols clamped into plastic spring holsters.
“Like I said, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offer insult,” the redhead said. He had his hands palm up on the table. Khadaji noticed his right index finger was curled almost to his palm.
“I think I just might kick your ass,” the trooper said. “Right here and right now.”
The redhead said nothing, but shook his head.
“No? You don’t think I can?” The woman was psyching herself up to jump the man. Khadaji rounded the corner of the bar and started toward her. The confrontation had developed an audience by this time.