Balance Point

by Robert Buettner

  “Very well. You are on, lady.” He paused for effect. Humans did that. “The lieutenant thought you were stubborn, overbearing, hot for a granny with a fat ass, reckless and a complete prick when she was just trying to help. And you obviously hadn’t gotten laid in a long time.”

  “Granny? Fat ass?”

  “Do not kill the messenger. Ha-ha. Kit, a deal is a deal. My turn.”

  A metallic voice said, “Multiple contacts. Range five thousand.”

  “Talk fast, Shylock. Gettin’ busy here.”

  “When Howard spoke with you at Mousetrap, I was unable to perceive what he told you. Only that it made you angry and confused. Since then you have trapped the memory in the part of your mind that I cannot reach, in the way I have trapped snakes beneath rocks in hopes that they might weaken and die before I must return and risk their venom. What did Howard say?”

  The voice said, “Range four thousand.”

  He felt the tension in Kit’s muscles, which had increased sharply when the voice first spoke, increase further.

  “Mort, I can’t look under that rock right now. The present’s trying to bite me.”

  “But when you must look? What lies beneath?”

  He felt anger and sadness well up in her.

  Kit did not speak aloud, but thought, “Mort, not now! Shop talk I can deal with. Not the other.”

  “Range three thousand.”

  Kit said, “Resume manual.”

  Then Mort felt the metal against her foreclaw, and in that moment her anxiety fell away, as it fell away within him when he finally confronted a striper or other competing predator that he had felt from a distance. It was when Kit was hunting that she felt to him most like his mother.

  Kit spoke, her voice free from expression. “Heads up: display targets.”

  An angular pattern glowed before her eyes.

  He modulated his inquiry so that she felt only a whisper. “There are machines ahead that will seek you? Like the crawling mines that have killed my cousins?”

  “Exactly like that, actually. Except this minefield is three-dimensional, and the distances are longer. And so far it’s asleep.”

  “That is good.”

  “That is expected. A Scorpion-T’s got the radar cross section of the bluebird of happiness and the heat signature of day-old pizza.”

  Ahead of Kit points of bright light showed, now diverging visibly because the Scorpion seed sped toward them so rapidly.

  “I’m gonna punch through equidistant from those six HKs in front of me at center display. Probably none of them will wake up. If one does, I’ll be through so fast it’ll think I was a system fault. If one chases and detonates, I’ll outrun the shrapnel, but the doorbell will ring down below.”

  “But detonation would pose no physical danger to you?”

  “If the chaser’s the one in twenty that’s nuclear, I’m not in danger, I’m dead.”

  Ahead, the light points were gone.

  “Huh. Non-event.”

  “What?”

  “I’m inside the chicken coop already, and the Yavi don’t know it. If we ever go postal on these people, they are so screwed.” Kit expelled breath through her nostrils, indicating derision. “Iron Helmet, my ass. Which, by the way, is not fat.”

  Now the area ahead of Kit was soft gray, not black. She was now so close to Yavet that the ball consumed her view.

  “Heads up: reset target display.”

  The space before Kit’s eyes swarmed with lights that spread all across her field of vision.

  “Hello! That is a lot of fighters.”

  “Fighters. Shells like yours, directed by humans?”

  The roiling lights both grew and diverged as Kit closed the distance to them.

  “Not like mine. They aren’t C-drive. Slow. Sluggish. Visible to radar, which lets their controllers direct them onto targets easier. And their controllers are all in one fat-ass room in the Ring, looking at fat-ass radar displays.”

  “Your task is harder, then.”

  “No, my task is easier.” Kit spoke aloud. “Evasive action.”

  Kit’s view again shifted to black, then gray, then back, faster than a nectar sucker’s wings beat. “A scorpion’s not as straight-line fast as a cruiser, or durable enough to jump reliably. But it’s got the same gravity cocoon, so it can juke right angles at Mach 6 without squishing its payload.”

  Mort stared at the landscape ahead of him to relieve the disorientation he felt from the flickering view through Kit’s eyes.

  “Even if a radar in a brilliant moment sees me, the radar’s brain doesn’t register what its eye sees. An object moving nonconformably to Newtonian physics doesn’t exist to it. The Yavi can’t remodel their computer algorithms to match C-drive fighters, because they’re just guessing what C-drive fighters can really do. An unalerted centrally directed fighter is no fighter at all.”

  Mort shook his head to clear it. Too many concepts. He referred to a simpler hunting technique that grezzen and humans shared. “But the pilots might see you. You can see them.”

  “They won’t see me if I go where they don’t want to go. Cancel evasive action. Resume manual.”

  Mort peered again through Kit’s eyes. Her view ahead was again gray, and the wispy silver thread now floated so close that he saw it was an angular human shell, immensely vaster even than the cruisers like the Gateway. Within the great shell, he felt too many human intellects to count. “There are many humans inside the great thread. If you continue, you will butt it.”

  “I won’t butt it. Not exactly. You see that brown haze floating beneath the Greatest Manmade Wonder of the Universe?”

  “What is it?”

  “Mort, what do one hundred million humans make more of than noise?”

  “You mean—”

  “The Yavi don’t mention that in the tourism holos. The Ring vents its solid waste to vacuum, into a designated lower orbit. It freezes, then its orbit decays, and it burns up on atmospheric entry. Except for maybe a few million tons.”

  “Ingenious. Eventually it fertilizes the surface.”

  “Makes you want to go sing in the rain, doesn’t it?”

  Already Kit had slowed the Scorpion so that it drifted below the great shell’s belly scarcely faster than a gliding gort.

  Whump. Whump.

  Through Kit’s ears, Mort heard objects strike the Scorpion’s skin. Kit’s view was of dark and irregular objects ranging from smaller than a human head to larger than the Scorpion itself, tumbling as the Scorpion itself now tumbled.

  “Your shell has been damaged!”

  “At this speed, all that’s damaged is her dignity. The pilots are up in the umbrella patrol at orbital speed because they have to cover a whole planet from equator to poles. Their hard deck’s miles above the Ring because jettisoned debris smaller than a lug nut could hole their ships. Besides, what fighter jock wants to fly his shiny baby through a shitstorm? That’s the beauty. A Scorpion can’t just go fast, it can go slow. It can yaw and roll like a hunk of frozen shit, unnoticed among a billion other hunks. I’m working my way down gradually. Once I’m through this, it’s clear sailing to the surface for a ship as stealthy as she is.”

  As the Scorpion drifted, Kit asked, “Find him yet?”

  Mort paused, sought a better response, found none. “It is hopeless.”

  He felt anger flash in her. “It can’t be hopeless! Mort, I’ve come too far. And the hardest part’s still ahead. A stack city like Yaven’s a hundred-level-tall pyramid, twenty miles wide where the base meets the surface. And another hundred downlevels beneath the surface. And the whole hive’s crawling with armored-up Yavi cops who shoot on sight. I’ve got to know where I’m going.”

  “Please! I am looking for one needle in a hay storm.”

  He felt Kit’s body sag along with her spirit. “I know. There’s three billion of them, and only one of him.”

  The Scorpion continued drifting, the silence broken only by the thump of frozen ex
crement against its flanks.

  He felt adrenaline surge through Kit, saw her view shift as she came upright.

  “Mort, I said there was only one of him. Would it help if there were more than one? I mean, not multiple Jazens. Somebody near him genetically similar?”

  “Oh, immeasurably. Of course, the signature of a woog herd is vastly stronger than a lone woog. But within the herd a cow with her calf is distinct. If the sire bull remains nearby the calf, the signature is strongest of all.”

  Mort felt Kit strike the Scorpion’s inner skin so hard that her palm registered pain. “Sure! Your ancestors that could spot a cow and calf ate better, survived better. If they also knew how to avoid calves protected by bulls, better still. Natural selection.”

  Too many concepts. “Perhaps.”

  “Mort, stop looking just for Jazen. Look for two Jazens in relative proximity.”

  “I will if you ask. But as you have said, there are not multiple Jazens.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “How will I recognize this other Jazen?”

  “Find a stubborn dickhead with a heart of gold. Just like his son.”

  The view before Kit cleared to gray clouds, across the bulbous, churning tops of which night began to fall.

  Kit again touched the metal that accelerated the Scorpion. “Work fast, Mort. It’s about to get real warm for me down there.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Mort scooped larvae from the heart of a fallen tree, swallowed them, wood fiber and all, without even savoring the taste, and returned to his work.

  He sifted human intellects he encountered within the distant hive called Yaven as rapidly and dispassionately as if they had been larvae. He discarded each when it did not resemble Jazen, then probed the next. The great mass within which he felt Jazen, and the other who was like Jazen nearby, shrank with each discard, but Jazen remained too distant and indistinct.

  As he worked, he watched through Kit’s eyes as the Scorpion overflew a rolling and seemingly endless nightscape, rendered oddly luminous by peculiar eyelids that Kit called “Snoops.” The Scorpion flew so close to the barren soil that had he been beneath it he could have risen on two and swatted the Scorpion’s belly. The sensation of velocity was profound, but Kit’s actual progress toward the hive called Yaven seemed nonexistent.

  Ahead, a round hill loomed. The Scorpion, without a touch by Kit, rose abruptly, passed barely above the obstacle, then dropped back with scant change in velocity.

  Aloud Kit said, “Hooah!”

  “Kit, I recognize that hill! You are traveling in circles!”

  “Not exactly circles, but good point.” She spoke aloud, not to him. “Reset random loiter. Reset speed four nine zero.”

  “When you evaded the killing machines and the fighter jocks you flew much faster.”

  Kit said, “In vacuum no one can hear you speed. I’ve gotten this far unseen. Staying subsonic keeps me unheard.” Then she thought, “Besides, the autopilot’s governed. It only flies nap-of-the-planet below five hundred miles an hour.”

  “You urge me to work faster. But you meander like a blind woog.”

  “It’s early. The best time to sneak past humans is when most of them are asleep and the ones who aren’t wish they were. And I’m waiting on weather.”

  “The weather there seems clear.”

  “Exactly.”

  Mort peered again across the bleakness, animated only by wind-beaten scrub. Hunting there without cover would be difficult. Since he began the search for Jazen, food, or the lack thereof, was constantly on his mind. “This is prairie. Where are the herds?”

  “Bad air, bad water, bad agricultural and wildlife management . . . Yavet’s non-cultured megafaunal population became unmeasurable a long time ago. No cows. No cow-feed farms. But no cowboys or farmers outdoors to look up and see me fly past out here, either. Mort, you’re ninety years late for the last round-up.”

  With his forepaw Mort slapped a glider that passed near enough, swallowed it whole, but still felt weakness in the forelimb with which he had swatted the morsel.

  No grezzen had the means or the vanity to count calories, but grezzen knew that, as in humans, the organs that consumed the greatest proportion, fully twenty percent, of the energy they produced were their disproportionately large brains. Thirty million years of grezzen evolution had sharpened the balance point between metabolism and a predator’s measured violence to a knife edge unrivalled in the universe.

  Grezzen, above all other species, had to hunt constantly to live. By his disproportionate mental activity in his search for Jazen, Mort was slowly starving himself to death.

  “Why have the Yavi not starved, then, Kit?”

  “Spoken like a carnivore. The upper classes get their meat from tank-raised livestock. The rest buy shaped vegetable protein grown in tray farms. Jazen said it tastes like crap.”

  “How did the Yavi come to such a dreadful system?”

  “Hard to say. My poli-sci profs got in a fist fight once over whether Yavi society was analogous to democratic capitalism run amok or totalitarian socialism run amok.”

  “Human politics seem to be a waste of perfectly good violence.”

  “Fair point. The Unified Republics of Yavet is a worldwide totalitarian police state. So they haven’t wasted any violence on nation-to-nation politics in two hundred years. The Yavi think nothing’s amok. At least the upper classes think so.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I dunno. When the few make every decision for the many, the many eat mung-bean bars, the few eat steak, and a society can rain shit on itself from outer space and think nothing’s amok.”

  “Understanding humans is painfully difficult.”

  “We’re really not that bad. But overthinking us’ll kill you.”

  Two crawlers scurried through the moss alongside Mort. He stabbed sluggishly with his left midlimb and impaled one. Normally he would have gotten both. He returned to sifting intellects, aware that Jazen’s and probably Kit’s lives depended on it. But overthinking was, indeed, killing him.

  “Ping. Weather advisory.”

  Mort’s head snapped up.

  Time had passed. His mental acuity had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer discern precisely how much time had passed. But he knew that he had made many failed probings since his last conversation with Kit, before the metallic tone and voice broke Kit’s concentration.

  Her eyes scanned a moving pattern of multicolored light on one of the leaves in front of her, then she said aloud. “Control to manual. RWR to max.”

  Mort felt her increase the Scorpion’s velocity as she turned it sharply.

  “Kit, what are you doing?”

  “Relax. Nothing bad. The weatherman’s getting friendly, the sentries are getting sleepy, and I’ve turned to a heading into Yaven.”

  “Now the Yavi will hunt you?”

  “Not yet. The Radar Emissions Warning Receiver’s just a good habit. Yaven’s got radar to watch weather and airliners, but not air-defense radar to detect hostile bombers. The Unified Republics haven’t bombed their own capital in two hundred years.”

  Kit’s consciousness focused on flying. Mort resumed his work, made steady progress.

  “Wow.” Kit whispered aloud. “That is some big pyramid.”

  In the Scorpion’s eye a mountain grew out of the darkness ahead of Kit. As the Scorpion’s eye grew clearer, Mort saw the mountain’s flanks were smooth and angular, and shimmered, in the way of most human constructs. The reason that the mountain’s flanks were visible through the darkness was that they were studded with great jets of dull flame. The jets tapered into curls of smoke as black as the roiling clouds that scudded so low above the mountain’s peak that they seemed to scrape it.

  Kit was counting aloud, softly. “Thirteen . . . fourteen. Fourteen stacks a side. That’s Yaven, alright.”

  Kit slowed the Scorpion, inching it forward, narrowing the distance between it and the great fiery moun
tain.

  Jagged lightning ripped the sky between the clouds and the peak.

  Boom!

  Mort felt Kit stiffen. “Shit!”

  He drew back from Kit’s consciousness, blinked all three eyes. Around him daylight dappled the familiar forest with light and shadow. Insects buzzed and the breeze blew gently.

  Nonetheless, his heart pounded. Fire. Why did there have to be fire?

  Unbidden, Kit whispered, “Crap, that was close,” and her voice drew him back in to her consciousness.

  Mort heard in her ears a steady rumble, looked through her eyes and saw black rain sheet across the Scorpion’s eye, smearing the great mountain’s image into smudges of bronze and gold and shimmering, flaming orange.

  “That cannot be Yaven. If Jazen were within that place he would have perished.”

  “Easy, Mort! I’m not crazy about fire myself. But I’m the one who’s here, and I’m a big girl. I need your help now more than ever.”

  He drew a deep breath. “You may rely on me.”

  “The pyramid’s not an enclosed bonfire. It just looks that way at night. They don’t call these places stack cities just because the people live on top of each other. Those stacks exhaust airborne waste from the industrial levels underground.”

  Again lightning flashed, then boomed. The rain beat harder against the Scorpion’s skin, as it now hovered close enough to the flaming pyramid that he could have run to the thing in three bounds. Though he would not have.

  “Mort, time to get specific. You know where I am. How close is Jazen to me? A cruiser’s a mile long. How many cruisers?”

  Mort concentrated on Kit’s location, then on the larger spherical volume to which he had reduced Jazen’s location, then felt his heart sink. “He is nine cruisers distant. But he is deep within the mountain. As many Yavi surround him as prey animals surround me here. Many of those Yavi are without doubt hostile to Jazen and to you. They may already be restraining him.”

  “I know.”

  “You and Howard told me you were going to pursue Jazen and assist him. Neither you nor Howard revealed to me that you would have to dig away a mountain filled with evil humans to do so. You deceived me.”