Balance Point

by Robert Buettner

  Maybe I was vaguely jealous that my brawny pal liked my girlfriend best. At least I didn’t have to worry that he would wind up between the sheets with her.

  Mort’s coziness with Kit and with me aside, there were fifty billion other human minds spread across five hundred planets. Each of those fifty billion minds thought, dreamed, fantasized, truthed, and lied throughout every single day. But there was just one of Mort. Mort, or even a thousand Morts, could never distill that much information into usable intelligence.

  This biologic bottleneck had always been apparent to Howard and his nerds. OCWTR was never intended to enslave, or to enlist, or to breed grezzen as full-time mind readers, like some gargantuan K-9 Corps. Howard’s spooks planned to study Mort, then duplicate artificially what nature had created in him.

  The spooks’ humanitarian goal was to allow mankind to communicate across space in real time, rather than by the current best alternative method. That alternative method was sending messages physically, aboard starships, like mechanical carrier pigeons. Starships jumped across narrow places where the fabric of folded space bent back upon itself. The mile-long carrier pigeons traveled distances in weeks or months that took light, or anything else that traveled as fast as light, notably radio waves, which traveled the long way round, years or centuries.

  But Mort could read a mind light years away as fast as if it were across the room. Of course, since nothing in this universe could travel faster than light, the nerds assumed grezzen had a way to communicate by accessing a universe next door to this one. But no matter how Mort did it, he did it. So the nerds wanted to do it, too.

  Of course, the nerds’ objective wasn’t just faster birthday cards and junk mail. They had a less benign goal, too. Eventually, whatever made Mort tick would allow them to build a vast bank of mind-reading computers. The mind-readers would feed all the information they discovered into an equally vast bank of computers that would analyze it.

  The good guys would finally know everything. The bad guys would finally be cooked. And nobody would ever abuse the system. Of course.

  Howard frowned. “We do think we’ve learned about all we can from Mort. But we’re years away from any sort of practical application. We can’t read anybody’s mind.”

  That was a relief, considering the fantasy I was just having, with me in the role of the lustful high-value asset and Kit in the role of the voluptuous and compliant female agent.

  Kit’s eyes lit. “So Jazen and I can go back to field work?”

  No, that wasn’t my fantasy.

  For the last eight months, Case Officer Team Seventy-one, which was Colonel Catherine Trentin-Born and her junior case officer, which was me, had been detached from field work. “Field Work” was a euphemism for nasty things done unattributably in places where we weren’t supposed to be. In lieu of field work, we were attached for organizational and pay purposes to the OCWTR task force, which in turn was funded within black-ops line item 776312 of the American Defense Budget, most of which budget was these days expended in support of the activities of the Human Union.

  What that meant to anyone who lodged a Freedom of Information Act request was absolutely nothing, which was the idea.

  What that meant to OCWTR’s nerds was that Mort had the only two humans who he trusted nearby. With Kit and me figuratively holding his paw, he would allow the nerds to poke and prod him until they unlocked the physiologic secrets of grezzen telepathy.

  What that meant to Kit was an annoying delay in prosecuting Cold War II, which she believed she was obliged to do single-handed if the chain of command would just stand aside.

  What that meant to me was a vacation from sleeping on the ground in places where I wasn’t supposed to be that were too hot, too cold, too wet or too malarial, and from getting shot, or at least shot at, regularly. And I still got to wake up alongside the loveliest woman in the universe.

  Howard answered Kit’s question with a frown. “Field work? Kit, the numbers haven’t improved.”

  “The numbers” referred to case-officer pair survivability. For any given field operation, any given pair’s survivability averaged thirty-two percent. The odds were marginally improved for mixed-gender pairs like Kit and me. One theory that explained the improved odds was that het couples fit more plausible cover legends, so they got caught less. Another was that mixed-gender teams made sounder decisions, because they melded contrasting temperaments and viewpoints. For example, the spook shrinks judged Kit a risk taker, and me risk averse.

  Kit raised her chin and crossed her arms. “Howard, the numbers don’t take into account the quality of the pair. We’ll be fine.”

  Fine? I disagreed. American Trueborns like Kit believed that the future would always work out, because for them it always had. The rest of us believed the future would fuck us, because it always had. And the future usually met expectations.

  As for the quality of the pair? Even if a case officer pair was Batgirl and Robin, the Joker was bound to turn up if you played the cards too long.

  Kit wanted us to return to field work. I wanted us to live happily ever after, playing the high-value asset and the voluptuous agent often. What the hell, maybe even raise some little assets.

  I squirmed in my chair, and at the motion Kit burned me with a look.

  If a man and a woman have been together long enough, neither needs a grezzen to read the other’s mind.

  I dunno. Some days I wondered how many teams among the missing sixty-eight percent went dark not due to enemy action but because the idiot’s contrasting temperament and viewpoint annoyed her so much that she shot him.

  Howard removed his glasses, then polished the lenses with his napkin. “Regardless of the numbers, Kit, you were right in recognizing that this new administration has new priorities. We’re pulling the teams out of the field.”

  “You’re taking us out of the war?” Kit’s eyes bugged.

  I suppose mine did, too.

  TEN

  Kit and I sat open-mouthed, staring at one another for what seemed like minutes. Then the two of us turned on Howard, with what I suppose looked like mutinous blood in our eyes.

  Howard raised his palms. “The President was a history professor before he entered politics. He refuses to preside over Cold War II deteriorating into the second phase of Cold War I.”

  I cocked my head. Over the last months of babysitting Mort, I had time to burn, and had burned it reading lots of Trueborn history myself.

  At the middle of the last century the American Trueborns won a massive war started by some of the other Trueborns. That war was so long and so devastating that it was divided into chapters, World War I and World War II, separated by a halftime show called a depression.

  The Americans won that war so thoroughly that when the second chapter ended they were the only ones with the capacity to nuke the crap out of everybody else, who had all pretty much stuffed one another down the economic toilet during chapters I and II.

  The Americans thought their preeminence was earned, because they were the demonstrated good guys. The people in the toilets thought the Americans were naïve opportunists who had simply come late to the brawl, were insufferably full of themselves, and would fuck them, just like the future always had.

  Surprisingly, the Americans thereafter lived up to their own fine self-image. They helped the rest of the Trueborns climb out of their toilets, and then prevented them, in the main, from restarting the stuffing-one-another process. After World War II ended, nobody else got nuked. Almost everybody was getting rich, although the Americans made sure that they were getting richest of all. It was the time that Howard had just described as the first phase of Cold War I.

  Then the Soviet Union, the part of everybody that was managing to not get rich, stole the capacity to nuke the crap out of people from the Americans. The Soviets had been both big stuffers and big stuffees during the World Wars, and remained comfortable stuffing people, including their own, down the toilet.

  This changed e
verything. Phase two of Cold War I became an ever-escalating pissing contest between two superpowers. Nuclear missiles by the tens of thousands were planted in the ground like seeds, were floated beneath Earth’s oceans, and were loaded into the bellies of airplanes, that circled the skies like nervous hawks. Neither the Soviets nor America wanted to be second on the draw. Inevitably, an itchy trigger finger somewhere was going to blow Earth to hell. Pundits drew up an imaginary clock that counted down the day before Doomsday. The hands were always set just minutes before midnight.

  Kit said, “But Howard, the Soviet Union imploded. Not a single nuke out of all those thousands was ever detonated. The good guys’ strategy won.”

  “True.” Howard shook his head. “But luck and a belief in the folly of collectivist economics is hardly a strategy to bet the farm on.”

  I turned to Kit. “Howard actually could be right. One fuck-up from Armageddon’s no way to run a universe, Kit.”

  Kit’s lip curled. “Jazen, that’s not the way we’re running it. The Yavi can’t nuke anybody but themselves. So we’ll never have to nuke them or anybody else.”

  Howard nodded. “This administration wants to keep it that way.”

  Kit said, “That’s what the teams have been doing for the whole Cold War! Keeping it that way. Containing the Yavi with a poke in the ass here, a slap on the wrist there. Hell, it was your idea, Howard.”

  Howard shrugged. “This administration thinks the teams and the rest of the strategy are too expensive. The nonaligned worlds hate our meddling, and even our allies aren’t crazy about it.”

  I raised my palm. “Howard, during Cold War I, in the first phase before the Russians got nukes, plenty of American planners wanted to nuke the Russians first. If you pull the teams down, that’ll be the only strategy that’s left.”

  Howard raised his palm back at me. “There’s no reason to think it will come to that. The Yavi don’t have starship technology.”

  “But if they get starship technology, this administration will nuke them?” I rolled my eyes. “To save money? And suck up to a bunch of outworlders who take that money? But still they hate our guts.” I heard my voice quaver.

  The quaver, I realized, resulted less from righteous political indignation than from fear. Fear that Howard’s announcement might change my crummy life, or more accurately, change my relationship with Kit, which was the only thing that made my life uncrummy.

  Kit turned to me, eyebrows raised. “Since when does Mr. ‘Trueborns are pricks’ take the side of us against the outworlds?”

  “Us? Kit, I grew up on Yavet. So did thirteen billion other people who don’t give a shit about Cold War politics. Killing them and claiming premature self-defense is fucked up.” I pointed first at Kit, then at Howard, and snorted. “I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, you people exterminated an entire intelligent species and call yourselves heroes for doing it.”

  Howard leaned forward, eyes hard behind his glasses, “Jazen!” Howard stabbed a bony finger at me so hard that it quivered. “Jazen, your own parents fought that war right alongside me. Don’t judge people and events about which you know practically nothing!”

  I pointed back at Howard, and my finger shook, too. “And why do I know practically nothing? Because you won’t tell me, you mendacious old paranoid!”

  I knew Howard didn’t know where my parents were in the universe at any given time, or at least he claimed he didn’t.

  I knew, because they had both been enlistment age when the War started, that their straight-line chronological age now could be pushing one hundred. But I knew from what Orion told me about the way they had looked, and my mother’s condition when she gave birth to me, that their subjective physical age was now more like fifties. That partly reflected Trueborn medical care, and partly reflected a lifetime of war spent traveling time-slowed near light speed.

  I knew my father had been a hero, a dumb grunt like me, who had risen through the ranks. And my mother had been a kick-ass pilot all her professional life. Then they had both been involved in something that happened at the war’s end, something so bad that the two of them disappeared from the history books, and now wandered the universe as clandestine exiles. Profiteering, atrocity, who knew? If you can do something terrible even in the context of something as terrible as war, it had to have been unspeakable. And it was unspeakable. Only people at Howard’s clearance and above knew the details.

  My parents’ disappearance from history meant I’d never even seen so much as a paper photograph of either one. Hell, I might have passed them on the street and never have known it.

  And so I was a downlevels mutt with no speakable pedigree, born illegally and raised in poverty in a culture that the Trueborns despised. So I clung to my relationship with a woman out of my league the only way I knew how, which was by risking my life for her.

  With uncharacteristic restraint I shut my big mouth for once. Partly because I had just backtalked a general officer who outranked me by seven grades. Mostly because I’d never, ever seen Howard angry before.

  All three of us sat back and took deep breaths. Sixty feet away, Mort dozed after his meal, the rasp of his snore mingling with the drone of flies that swarmed his leftovers.

  Finally, Howard drew another breath, laid his palms on the checked tablecloth, and stared at Kit, then at me, as he spoke. “Jazen. Kit. Neither you nor I can predict American policy. Nor as members of the military can we set it the way we prefer. You may think I’m some goofball professor, but I’m soldier enough to know my place.”

  On the rare occasions when I saw Howard in uniform, I noted that he wore the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. Just because I didn’t care for medals, they proved to me that Howard Hibble was soldier enough, alright.

  Howard sat back, folded his arms across his scrawny chest. “If either of you have trouble knowing your place, file your discharge forms.”

  Kit and I shared a glance. Discharge? Yikes.

  The two of us had most recently been party to one of those poke-and-slap outworld actions that Kit had just mentioned. A spaceport had been destroyed, a neutral shuttle had nearly been shot down, a Yavi major and hundreds of Yavi troops had been killed, and the Yavi had gotten away with enough cavorite to fuel a fleet of starships. To say nothing of torturing Kit and nearly killing us both. But cavorite’s useless without C-drive technology.

  Since that dustup, the Yavi had bungled a high-risk attempt to salvage a power plant from a Scorpion that had crashed on Dead End last year.

  The Trueborn intelligence community had failed to sustain reliable human sources on Yavet for years, and so relied by necessity on electronic eavesdropping to produce predictive intelligence product. Howard’s tea-leaf readers, wherever they were hiding, believed that the Yavi External Operations Directorate, his and Kit’s and my blood enemy in this Cold War, was currently in disfavor and disarray, and harmless for the forseeable future.

  My rant, however righteous, seemed mismatched to real-world probabilities. Especially if it required me to resign in protest.

  I hazarded a question. “Uh. Howard?”

  “Yes, Jazen?”

  “If this place is shutting down, and the teams are standing down, is this an exit interview? Do the two of us still have jobs?”

  He smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  ELEVEN

  The orderly behind the desk in the outer office of the Director General of External Operations sprang up and saluted when he saw Polian’s shoulder boards. “Sir!”

  “Keep your seat, sergeant. I need to see the director.”

  Polian glanced around the vastness of the outer office. Unopened shipping plasteks were stacked along one wall, and the other walls were bare of the usual tiling of unit citations, statements of general orders, notices of promotion boards, and chain of command portraits common to such places. What Varden had told him about EOD’s upset looked to be true.

  The orderly stared into his scree
n and poked at it. “Ah—sir, Director Gill’s so new here—we all are—your appointment must have gotten—”

  “I don’t have an appointment.” Polian pointed at a door set in the opposite wall of the directorial suite, which was a twin to his own eight miles away. “I’ll meet him in the bubble.”

  Four minutes later Polian stood alone, hands clasped behind his back, and stared out through the single, multilayered window set in the curved wall of the suite’s secure conference room. It had been three hours since he had left the Trueborn cruiser, ten minutes since he had shown up here unannounced. Cops were used to waiting, and he still thought of himself as a cop.

  Polian stretched again as he stared across Yaven. Vented smoke from Yavet’s capital hung like a delicate veil between him and the brass toned pyramids of the other directorates that studded the main pinnacle. The directorate offices were all at level Eighty Upper and above, and the executive levels sparkled with optical windows, like the snow he had seen on the peaks of the High Rand. Through the shimmer of vented heat, he made out the pyramid that housed the Internal Operations Directorate, with his own suite at its apex.

  It was a grand sight, but one to which he had become accustomed. He yawned, turned away from the window. His only prior contact with Ulys Gill had been the condolence letter Gill had sent after Ruberd’s death, as Ruberd’s commanding officer. Max didn’t know the man personally. But cops were used to knowing a person of interest by what they didn’t say. What the room, bare, silent, businesslike and anonymous, said about Ulys Gill was consistent with the man’s story.

  Ulys Gill had a flawless up-through-the-ranks external military record. On merit, Gill should have risen higher than he had before now. But Gill had been held back by the suspicion that he was born and raised illegal in the downlevels, skipped offworld by joining the Legion, and returned with a phony—albeit perfect—identity bought at Mousetrap or one of the other cesspool hubs where Trueborn starship routes intersected.