Balance Point

by Robert Buettner

  The resultant rising seas shrank the land upon which Yavi lived. This allowed Yavet to raise great cities, and to select among the citizens who inhabited them those who contributed and those who were mere burdens.

  The Trueborns complained that the Ring was built by slaves, as an overflow prison for slaves. Easy for them to say, gifted a planet kept pristine by the accident of war, and then further gifted with the means to expand from that planet to other worlds. Yavet had been denied those gifts, but had fashioned greatness from adversity. Yavet and the Ring would prosper for a thousand years.

  The Trueborn cruiser drifted stationary above the rotating Ring, so the great edifice sped past below. Linear miles of factories gave way to the agricultural quadrant, its solar arrays drinking in sunlight.

  The House, dark and foreboding as befit a penal facility, next flashed past, then the military quadrant crawled by as the cruiser slowed.

  At last the cruiser’s speed matched with the Ring’s, and Ring Station came into view, now only a mile beneath the Trueborn ship. Red-winking visible light beacons outlined the sole starship mooring tower. Even the empty, waiting tower dwarfed the Yavi intrasystem ships nearby. They drifted in their berths like flimsy white insects, their anti-matter bottles joined by spindly frames.

  Yavet had developed antimatter drive decades before the Trueborns had, years before the Trueborns stumbled into the gravity manipulation of cavorite drive courtesy of their war against the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. A Yavi antimatter drive ship needed months just to reach the other cold rocks that orbited her sun. In a similar time a Trueborn cruiser could travel between, and jump across, temporal fabric insertion points. The Trueborns’ accidental gift let them reach five hundred verdant and diverse planets spread across entire galaxies. The Trueborns exploited their gift to dominate the rest of mankind, and to suffocate it with their self-referential and self-indulgent culture.

  An electronic whistle trilled, then the purser spoke again. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our final drift approach into Ring Station. If you aren’t already in line, please move to disembarkation immediately. From your Earth-based flight crew, it’s been our pleasure to show you a little bit of our universe.”

  Polian snorted.

  The Trueborns claimed that today their cruisers carried only defensive weapons, not nukes. Nobody believed it, and even if it were true, the Trueborns could take nukes aboard as easily as Polian could change his shirt. Enormous as they were, gravity-manipulating cruisers could nonetheless outspeed and outmaneuver any antimatter ship. The Trueborn’s smaller Scorpions were big enough to carry a nuke, too, and were shiftier and stealthier than their cruisers. The power projected by the Trueborn fleet hung above Yavet and the rest of the Union like a sword. When the Trueborns called it “our universe,” they were right.

  Polian looked back as he paddled aft. The mooring tower was now just five hundred feet away. He smiled. If things went according to plan, it wouldn’t be the Trueborns’ universe much longer.

  The moment he disembarked the cruiser, Polian noticed a bounce in his step. Not entirely due to his pleasure at being home. Unlike starship rotational gravity, the Ring’s rotational gravity was less, and less consistent, than planetary.

  As Polian waited in the immigration line like an ordinary tourist, an arrivals steward moved down the line handing out arrivals robes. Unlike the Trueborn’s cruisers, most of the Ring’s interior volume was minimally shielded against the destructive cosmic radiation that a planet’s atmosphere filtered out. The lead-foil-lined robes were more security blanket than protection, given the minimal exposure time transfer passengers experienced.

  Polian slipped on a robe like everyone else, anyway, to deflect attention more than to deflect radiation, but also because the lead ballasted him.

  At baggage claim, Polian pointed out his bags to a porter. “Bay fourteen.”

  The porter eyed the civilian one-piece visible beneath Polian’s arrivals robe, then wrinkled his pale forehead. “There’s an official shuttle in fourteen just now, sir. You want seventeen, maybe.”

  “Fourteen.”

  The porter’s shoulders slumped. “Fourteen. Right away, sir.” He had probably hoped Polian was bringing in contraband, which might have garnered him a few extra coins in his tip, but no one risked smuggling aboard an official shuttle when it was so easy to do it on a civilian vessel.

  The Ring, for all its wonder, presented its share of Cold War contradictions. Yavet’s borders were policed by the External Operations Directorate, not by Polian’s Internal Operations Directorate. Therefore, immigration and customs procedures were ruthlessly and efficiently airtight when it came to blocking Trueborn spies and saboteurs. But Trueborn heroin got smuggled down, and the payments for it up, with a wink and a nod.

  Not that Polian minded. The junk palliated the little people. And the human rot and violence that the drugs fueled thinned population without government expense. And best of all, illicit drugs could be blamed on the Trueborns and cited as an example of their system’s decadence and moral bankruptcy.

  The skeletal, stooped porter, scarcely taller than Polian’s waist, struggled even with the two modest bags. The fellow was the first second-generation Ringer Polian had seen.

  The odds of a child gestated and born in the Ring surviving radiation exposure, muscle atrophy, bone-density depletion, and workload to adulthood were tiny. But the downlevels little people waited years to get up-emigration permits because, regardless of laws and incentives and biologic controls, they wanted to make babies. Tiny odds were still better than the odds of dodging the sterilization codes, then getting a permit for a downlevels birth. And the odds of an Illegal and its parents surviving down below, given the efficiency of Polian’s Directorate, were virtually nil. The porter would be dead inside a year. But there were plenty who longed to take his place.

  Polian trailed along at the back of the small knot of returning up-levels Yavi until he reached a door marked “Internal Security. Access Restricted.” He leaned forward, tripped the retinal, slipped through the doorway.

  Back at last to the friendly confines of cubic volume he controlled, rather than volume controlled by the External Operations Directorate, Max unbelted his lead robe. Polian’s aide waited in an interrogation room off the corridor beyond the door, and snapped to attention when he saw Polian, so abruptly that the boy’s salute nearly knocked his provi cap off.

  “Ease, Varden.”

  Provisional Lieutenant Varden relaxed as he straightened his cap. They said that the only thing more awkward than a provi was the long-billed cap provis wore for their first commissioned year.

  Varden flashed a thick-lipped smile. “Pleasant trip, sir?”

  “Three months among the Trueborns? Successful, perhaps. Pleasant, no. Anyone inquire about my ‘medical leave?’”

  Varden removed a uniform bag from a wall hook and held it out to Polian. “No, sir. Everyone knows the best medical’s offworld if you’re—”

  “Old?” Polian smiled.

  Geriatric medicine wasn’t a priority on an overpopulated planet. The privileged, like Polian, went elsewhere, and went elsewhere quietly. Polian smiled and peeled the bag off a freshly pressed uniform.

  A half hour later Max Polian sat beside Varden, the two of them alone in the twenty-four-seat passenger compartment of the downshuttle as it bucked through the leaden clouds of Yavet’s stratosphere.

  Polian gripped his seat’s rails until the shuttle’s gyrations smoothed. He opened his briefcase, walked his fingers through the papers and chips in its compartments.

  Varden said, “It’s good to have you back, sir.” The boy’s face glowed as he said it. Varden wasn’t a boy, of course. He had worked two tours as a noncommissioned vice inspector, as Polian himself had once, down among the little people in the constriction and grime of the downlevels.

  When Polian had needed a new aide, he had chosen Varden not so much because he had worked vice, but because Varden reminded him a
bit of Ruberd. Except that Polian’s son had chosen the romance of external service rather than follow his father’s path up through the internal security ranks. And Ruberd’s choice had let the Trueborns kill him.

  Polian kept digging through his case until he found what he wanted, a napkin bearing a handwritten scrawl that Cutler had made during one of their meetings on Rand. “As soon as you drop me off, run this.”

  Varden unfolded the flimsy cloth, read, then pursed thick lips. “What is it, Director?”

  “A surname. A few details.”

  Varden frowned. “It’s not much to work with, sir. Priority?”

  “Highest.”

  “I’ll go straight to the office and get started after I drop you at home, sir.”

  Polian shook his head. “Not at home.”

  “If I may, sir, you look beat.”

  Polian waved his hand as though a fly buzzed between them. “At External Operations.”

  The younger man squirmed.

  As an inspector, Varden had been accustomed to asking questions and getting answers. As an aide to a cabinet-level official, he knew better.

  “Yes, sir. They say not much’s getting done over there these days. Shall I wait?”

  Polian shook his head again. “I may be awhile.”

  NINE

  Three months after Kit and I renewed our acquaintance at her father’s boathouse, Howard Hibble invited us to join him for a picnic lunch, which invitation was an event as frequent as a total eclipse of the Sun.

  We met in a field in the middle of the Okeefenokee Chemical Weapons Test Range, a hundred yards from a rusty corrugated steel Quonset known as “The Barn.” The Barn was the only above-ground structure within the perimeter fence. The Quonset had a sliding door at one end that looked to be made of weathered wooden planks, and was big enough to admit a taxiing tilt-wing, an eighteen-wheeler, or an ambling alien the size of a bus. Between the Quonset and the main gate wound eleven miles of roads that, if one thought about it, were better paved and maintained than they needed to be to provide access to a rusty tool shed.

  Eighty feet beneath the Quonset, at the base of an elevator shaft, a subterranean tunnel complex radiated out like an octopus. The octopus was home to one hundred fifty troglodyte xenobiology nerds, who rotated in and out by bus in monthly shifts of seventy-five nerds per, and all the equipment they thought they needed to understand Mort. The nerds were kept happy and quiet by the opportunity to study the sole other intelligent species in the known universe, which species communicated telepathically in real time across distances that light traversed only over years. Also by a cafeteria with a passable wine list.

  The whole operation was overdesigned, secret to the point of paranoia, and the work it did had the potential to change history. In other words, it was pure Howard Hibble.

  Howard, Kit and I ate at a folding table covered with a red-checked cloth, beneath a four-posted canopy that shaded us from a warm sun. We dined on cold chicken, bone-in, served with a drinkable Chablis.

  Howard’s third lunch guest lounged sixty feet from us, curled in the grass and mercifully downwind. Mort dined on a half-ton, three-week-old woog haunch, also bone-in, served with a wading pool of pH-optimized water. The afternoon’s calm was broken only by the drone of flies that roiled around Mort’s lunch like an impending thunderstorm.

  Howard set his napkin on the tablecloth as he waved fingers at the three of us. “You all finish your meals. I’ll just get started.”

  Mort twisted a tibia as long as a fence post in his forepaws. The bone creaked, then split lengthwise with a crack like a discharged rifle, and rotted marrow blebs exploded in my direction like a claymore had detonated. Mort cocked his head and scraped the bone’s exposed interior with one tusk.

  I set down my drumstick. “S’okay. I’m done.”

  Howard said, “I wanted to tell you three about this before I address the staff. You deserve to hear the truth in person.”

  At the word “truth,” Kit looked across the table at me, eyes wide above her wine glass. Hair rose on my neck.

  They say that on the first day of kindergarten, Howard Hibble’s teacher asked him “How are you today, Howard?” and he answered, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Maybe Howard was born a secretive paranoid. Maybe the War made him one. Regardless, Howard Hibble gave up the truth like Leonidas gave up Thermopylae.

  Howard said, “We’re shutting The Barn down.”

  Kit coughed Chablis back into her glass. “What?”

  “Without proximity to Mort, the program can be conducted cheaper in a conventional setting.”

  I looked over at Mort, who was washing down marrow with fifty gallons of water, and pointed. “Proximity? He’s right over there.”

  “It will soon be my time, Jazen.” The first time a grezzen speaks into your head while his mouth is full, he seems like an eleven-ton ventriloquist. But you get used to it.

  “Ah.” I nodded.

  Mort’s “time” was the onset of puberty.

  Grezzen were apex predators so perfectly adapted that they dominated their world with no need for tools or cooperation, no need to exercise the breadth and depth of intelligence with which nature had blessed them. They communicated across vast distances, joined only mentally, as an anarchy comprised of mother-and-child absolute matriarchies. If the grezzen’s place in its own ecosystem resembled the place of any animal on Earth in ours, grezzen resembled killer whales. But the two species were hardly identical.

  Once weaned, grezzen lived physically isolated from one another, but socially connected by telepathy, and a mother parented her offspring from a distance throughout her life.

  Physical contact occurred only once in an adult’s lifetime, during each male’s sole period of rut. The female who chose to be impregnated by him mated again only in the rare instance that her single offspring failed to survive to adulthood.

  In most ecosystems, zero-sum procreation is a ticket to extinction. Babies get sick or get eaten, so a successful species is ipso facto a prolific species. But the grezz were so physically and mentally advantaged that their species dominated Dead End for thirty million years without the need to bear spares in addition to heirs.

  Grezzen society, if you could call it that, was perhaps as purely libertarian as any society that had ever been tried, much less any that had flourished for thirty million years. If grezz drove cars, grezz would not only let grezz drive drunk, they would defend to the death their cousins’ right to do so.

  But as the only grezzen who had ever crossed the interplanetary road to see what was on the other side, Mort had to be feeling some telepathic heat from his cousins to come home and get busy.

  As a fellow bachelor, I could imagine how bad Mort needed a date when he was only going to have one. Ever. But to maintain the ecological balance point, his race needed him to get laid even more than he did.

  Kit cocked her head at Howard. “So you’re sending Mort home? Releasing a high-value asset? Howard, that’s uncharacteristically compassionate of you.”

  It was. We were in the middle of a Cold War. If this were the first Cold War, Americans versus Russians, a ruthless spymaster like Howard would have ignored ecological balance. He would simply have ordered his most voluptuous female agent to seduce the horny high-value asset and then satisfy the asset’s most twisted and lustful fantasies for as long as necessary.

  Mort thought, “You are correct, Kit. The true reasons the nerds are repatriating me are that I have become too costly to support here, and they no longer find me useful.”

  Howard tried to look hurt and failed. “Mort could’ve gone home any time he chose. He finds us as interesting as we find him.”

  Mort thought, “That is true, Howard.”

  It was true. Mort fancied himself a three-eyed Jane Goodall, enduring privation to study the cultural interactions of a lesser species on its home turf.

  Howard shrugged. “But the decision was multifaceted.” Meaning Mort was ri
ght. Not even Howard bothered trying to lie to a mind reader.

  Kit nodded like a politician’s daughter. “New administration. New priorities.” Then she shook her head, like a cold warrior. “But Howard, you can’t let Mort go. He reads minds! In real time. From light years away. He can eavesdrop on anybody.”

  Howard shook his own head. “No. He can eavesdrop on everybody. That’s the problem. TMI. It’s been the problem.”

  Now it was my turn to nod.

  TMI—too much information—had been the American intelligence community’s problem ever since the early years of the last century. In those days, computing power was increasing exponentially year over year, and virtually all human information not locked in someone’s head was adrift somewhere in the electronic ether. Every shared secret was available somewhere.

  True, the spooks in those days might have had to sift a thousand billion grocery lists and decrypt a thousand million love poems to find it. But eventually the Trueborn spooks built enough computers to know all the shared secrets they wanted to know.

  Of course, being spooks, they still wanted to know everybody’s unshared secrets, too. That was where Mort was supposed to come in. He could read any human mind, anywhere in this universe, in real time. He could zero in on a mind to which he was physically close, as he had on John Buford’s when John was reading about Cutler’s pardon.

  Even from a distance—a serious distance—Mort could also recognize minds with which he became familiar. For example, Mort and I had survived dangers together, in a boy-and-his-monster sort of way. So Mort could pick me out of a crowd from light years away, given time.

  But the Jazen-Mort bond was nothing compared to the Kit-Mort love-in. Since the day Mort’s mother had died, Mort had been able to converse with Kit across a galaxy as though the pair of them had their heads together across a two-top bar table. The nerds ascribed their relationship to “transuniversal transparency optimized by maternal bond transference.”