Thirty-nine seconds.
What the hell had I been thinking? Of course it was password protected. And the Yavi had had no more clue what code Kit had set when she activated it than I did. And she wasn’t talking.
Howard’s cryptographic nerds taught me that the probability of randomly guessing a five-character letter-number password was less than one in fifty million.
“Fuck!” I pounded the button in frustration.
Thirty-six seconds and counting.
The display kept flashing red, but the message changed. “ENTER CORRECT CODE. ONE TRIAL REMAINING.”
This time when I yelled “Fuck,” I kept my fist off the button. I waved my hand at Gill, “Get away!”
I could run, too. Like a Yavi needler, the booby trap’s violence was probably calculated to incinerate the Scorpion and its contents rather than to create collateral damage. If I ran this instant, thirty seconds might be enough to save my life.
But what life?
My experience with Ya Ya Cohon had taught me that there was no money in betting favorites. You had to bet the underdog to win big enough to make the game worth playing.
Kit had always wanted me to cross more bridges when I came to them, even if they collapsed. But that had been when the probability of Kit and me having a future together was less than one out of fifty million. I had ceased to be in Kit’s plans for us months ago. Maybe.
I bet the fifty million to one ’dog that in Kit’s mind there was still a chance for us together. I stabbed with my index finger at the keypad and entered D-a-1-s-y.
The timer flashed again.
Eleven seconds.
But the number didn’t change.
Then the red light went dark, except for the words “CODE CORRECT. FIRING SEQUENCE ABORTED.”
I released a breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding, sucked in a fresh one.
After that, at our relative leisure Gill and I moved Kit, and then my dad, into the cherry picker’s basket, then secured them like the invaluable cargo they were in the Scorpion’s two side-by-side rear seats.
My mom slipped into the pilot’s seat and began preflighting the Scorpion, humming as she fingered touchscreens, as though she were mixing cookie batter.
It occurred to me that a man of my age, and of sufficient life experience that he and his girlfriend shared what Mort would call a coital password, ought to be embarrassed that his mother had to drive him on a date. I wasn’t.
Ulys Gill and I faced each other in the still-smoking and crackling stack beneath the flying black pumpkinseed that would, perhaps, carry my mother, my father, the love of my life and me safely away from this hell. Or at least carry us as far as a hollow rock that smelled like garbage, where we could wait for a ride home.
I said to Gill, “This may all be hard for you to explain.”
Gill cocked his head, shrugged. “You think so? What we mistook for a booby-trap timer was an autopilot countdown timer. Trueborns are too cheap to blow up an expensive ship. The ship took off like a homing pigeon. The midwife shot Polian. The two of them have a history, you know. She isn’t the first snitch who tried to shoot her case officer, although she may be the first one to get credit for succeeding. Pity all of you got away, and of course you took the weapon that killed Max with you. You’re all still at large. Until some bodies turn up that will be unmatchable in the absence of DNA evidence.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Absence?”
“Don’t Trueborns watch their own police holos? Bleach.” Gill made a smile so small that it emerged a frown. “Captain Parker, Illegals like you and me learn to lie for our lives from the day we’re born. It’s risky business, but it’s the only business we have.”
“It’s a business you’re at ease with. My boss will be disappointed if I don’t ask whether you’ll do ongoing business with us.”
“Me? A Trueborn mole?” Ulys Gill shook his head. “What I do here I do for Yavet. She’s flawed, but she’s my home.”
“I understand being a soldier and a patriot. So am I.”
“You and me? The same?” Gill wrinkled his nose as though something rotten had caught in his gray moustache. “Captain, I’m what we call an old moustache. A vestige of the day on Yavet when a soldier served civilians, rather than kicked them like Polian’s people do now. In those days war was decided between combatants on a battlefield. I’m not fond of war at all. But this pretending? What you and Colonel Born call ‘cold’ war? I’m even less fond of that.” He shook his head. “Treachery. Backstabbing conducted in the shadows.”
“You don’t like the way we do things.”
“I don’t like that you have to do them. Or that I do.”
“It keeps mankind at a balance point. We both just saw how easily the balance can tip.”
Gill stared up the stack, into the darkness. “Perhaps. Perhaps we can make it better.”
I shook Gill’s hand. “If Howard Hibble doesn’t have a new mole here on Yavet, will you tell me whether he has a mole problem of his own back home?”
Gill looked down at the smoldering debris that dotted the stack floor, crossed his arms. “I told you I’m a patriot. So, no, I won’t tell you anything like that. I should be insulted that you’d ask. But I will tell you this, only because it’s in Yavet’s self interest. This business was an aberration, not a military or intelligence operation conducted by Yavet. Please assure your boss, and his boss, of that. Max was a cop, not a soldier, and a cop whose sense of duty and of right and wrong was crippled by the loss of his son. He was taken advantage of by a man who was neither a soldier nor a spy of Yavet. In fact, Max got your personnel file, and the concept of this plot, from a Trueborn. An industrialist. The fellow wanted a free hand on DE 476, of all peculiar things, out of the deal.”
My jaw dropped. “Rat bastard Cutler?”
“You know the man.”
“I do. So does an eleven-ton monster who wants to meet him in a dark alley.”
“I wish you both luck with that. And luck to us all for the future.”
Ulys Gill saluted and spun an about-face, and I rode the cherry picker back up to the Scorpion one more time. My mother closed the canopy and rotated the Scorpion’s nose up as easily as if she had backed out of the garage, then the Scorpion hovered motionless there, pointed up toward the pitch-black sky beyond the stack.
She tapped her fingernails on the universal joystick, looked around at the pretty green lights on the canopy.
Whooom!
The Scorpion shuddered as the stack restarted. Red flame and smoke began roaring around us, and the outside air temperature and windspeed indicators on the console changed from green to yellow to red.
A Scorpion’s built to withstand vastly worse conditions, but even so . . .
Still my mother sat, oblivious. Sometimes I accompanied Kit when she stood in for Edwin and visited assisted living facilities, where elderly human shells sat vacant-eyed and oblivious.
My heart skipped. Then sank.
My mother looked and acted just young enough to be trouble. But in straight-line time, she may have been pushing one hundred years old. She had certainly known how to build a starship. Once. Maybe even fly a Scorpion. Once.
But now? Had we nearly gone to nuclear war, and spilled my father’s and my lover’s blood, to prevent an old lady from being asked questions to which the Yavi could force her to respond, but to which she had forgotten the answers?
The irony of it was bad. The reality of it made it worse.
Now the four of us were stuck hanging here in hell’s basement. Sooner or later the Yavi would pick us up, and all our sacrifices would have been for naught.
But it wasn’t her fault. And she was my mother.
I reached across the console, patted her hand gently, and whispered, “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?”
“Why, no, dear. I believe you have. And you’ve done this before, which makes it more disappointing.”
I opened my mouth, shook my head in tiny stro
kes. “What?”
“I can wait as long as you can. Your father forgets, too. And I wait for him.”
“Mom?”
“Big spy. Big general. That doesn’t impress an Admiral, you know. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots.” She reached to the canopy, touched a row of overhead keys with her index finger, her lips moving as she counted each one. “But this pilot doesn’t cut corners. Dear, this ship doesn’t budge until you fasten your seat harness.”
I buckled up, and my mother blew the paint off that sucker.
FORTY-THREE
One year to the day after my mother flew my father, Kit and myself off Yavet, Kit and I “walked together on a lawn,” which was another way of describing what golf was when unspoilt. The lawn was at a place located outside the Trueborn American puzzle factory called Washington, D.C. The place was called Walter Reed Military Convalescent Center.
Walter Reed was a Trueborn American army surgeon who noticed in 1896 that GIs who marched around in swamps caught yellow fever, while their officers, who sat on their asses back in camp, didn’t. Reed theorized that this was because swamp mosquitoes carried the disease. Reed’s insight eventually saved millions of GIs, and even more millions of civilians, from death by yellow fever. So, ever since, there has always been a military medical facility in the Washington area named after Walter Reed. If Dr. Reed had also invented a way to prevent officers from sitting on their asses, GIs would’ve named Washington after him, too.
As Kit and I walked on the soft grass, me in civvies, Kit still in convalescent whites, I gently squeezed the fingers of her new hand.
She smiled and squeezed back.
I said, “Stronger today.”
She smiled again. “Stronger every day the therapy gorilla lets you sleep over.”
The therapy gorilla said Kit’s new arm would eventually be indistinguishable from the one she lost. But it would be awhile before she would squeeze a trigger again. If I had my way, it would be forever.
The sleepovers were less about what Mort called coitus, though that was coming back nicely, and more about giving her an anchor when the dreams woke her, and about helping her through the other pathologies of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which the gorilla said in Kit’s case were “exacerbated.” Although from what I had learned by hanging out at Big Walt, unexacerbated PTSD was the kind that happened to somebody else.
The strip of lawn that Kit and I were crossing separated the rear of the hospital’s eight-story main building from its parking lot. In front of the acres of spaces filled by the Chyotas of the people who did Big Walt’s actual work were three VIP spaces, each occupied by a spook-black limo.
As we walked, the main building’s rear glass doors hushed open and a squad-sized gaggle of briefcase-toting, gray-suited men and women bustled in front of us like ducks crossing a highway. The frowning ducks mounted their blacked-out limos, then sped away.
Kit raised her eyebrows. “Howard’s legal eagles are flying the coop early today.”
I nodded. “Then let’s go upstairs and say hello.”
Various legal eagles spoiled most of Howard’s days lately, because while Kit, my parents and I were returning from Yavet, an anonymous source leaked to the Trueborn American media a report about how the Pseudocephalopod War had really ended. This report provoked outrage and widespread panic across the American Trueborn population.
It also provoked an alleged heart attack in the alleged anonymous source, who had since that time holed his allegedly lying ass up on Walter Reed’s top floor like a reclusive billionaire. The best argument that the source was not Howard Hibble was that the report told the truth, a commodity unfamiliar to him.
Actually, what provoked the outrage and widespread panic wasn’t so much the truth, but the Trueborn American media, which was as unfamiliar with the truth as Howard was. Outrage and widespread panic were the media’s stock in trade, in the way that carrots and bananas are a grocer’s stock in trade.
However, for Trueborn Americans, for whom the future always works out, outrage and widespread panic have the shelf life of grocery-store produce. After a couple of news cycles, the bananas turned brown. The outcome of a war that ended decades before, in a vacuum at the end of the universe, got replaced on media shelves by fresh and fragrant crises.
Not a few pundits reflected that the revealed truth reflected better on mankind as a species than the long-told lie did.
One suspects that the anonymous source knew all of that when he reportedly leaked his unconfirmed report.
More importantly, he also realized that the immediate relatives of the sixty million war dead, who would at the War’s end have been rightly and egregiously offended for innocents and heroes unavenged, were now largely dead themselves, and so didn’t care.
The dead themselves, who had the most skin in the game, had been dead a long time, would stay dead even longer, and so didn’t care.
And mankind cared, and should care, more about preventing the likes of once and future yellow fevers than about dissipating its limited capacity for good by fearing and containing boogeymen who had long since left the closet.
So even though it turned out that mankind hadn’t killed the Slugs after all, Trueborn America, and so the universe that followed its lead, went on about its business.
Well, almost all of it did.
When Kit and I disembarked the elevator on Walter Reed’s top floor, a female nurse behind a desk that blocked access to the floor glanced up from her handheld. The printed sign on her desk read:
MATERIAL WITNESS SEQUESTRATION FACILITY
ACCESS LIMITED TO WITNESS’ COUNSEL, JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL
AND COMMITTEE STAFF, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT COUNSEL,
AND AUTHORIZED GUESTS.
As a frequent authorized guest, I said to the nurse, “How’s the material witness doing today?”
She shrugged. “Dying as usual.” She pointed a stylus down the hall. “Go see for yourself.”
Howard Hibble, the floor’s sole patient, sat propped up in his bed, wearing a hospital gown. Tubes and wires sprouted from his shriveled body like those little rootlets that erupt on past-date carrots.
“Jazen! Kit!” Howard looked up from his handheld and smiled, looking surprisingly chipper for a man who had been dying regularly for the best part of a year.
I asked, “Did the lawyers leave because you’re finally well enough to testify about the cover-up and the leak?”
Although the media’s business was outrage and panic, and the general populace’s business was business, Washington’s business was, first, to be shocked—shocked!—about things that it had no ability to remedy, and, second, to find somebody besides itself to blame for them.
Therefore, for the best part of a year, Congress, the Justice Department, the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the Sierra Club, Amnesty Interplanetary, and, probably, the Chancellor of the Exchequer if America had one, wanted a piece of Howard Hibble. Of course, all those entities had wanted a piece of Howard for decades, and so far none of them had gotten one.
Howard coughed like the smoker he had once been, maybe one cough more than necessary to be convincing. “Regrettably, I’m not going to be able to testify yet. Actually, my cardiologists are talking replacement heart.”
I rolled my eyes. The legal eagles had finally caught Howard Hibble in a lie. “That implies you had one in the first place, Howard.”
Kit asked, “Do you buy your cardiologists the same place Bart Cutler buys his anonymity and his pardons?”
Actually, although Cutler had gone to ground as a fugitive somewhere among five hundred twelve planets, his anonymity was about to spoil like warm rutabagas.
Now that Mort had honed his ability to locate a single human being in the vastness of the cosmos by chasing me, he was spending his mental spare time hunting for the man who killed his mother. Cutler had been convicted and sentenced in absentia of treason. Cutler probably would still find a politician corrupt enough to sell him a pard
on, as long as it became effective after Cutler was hanged.
But money could still buy anonymity for some.
Three months after Kit, my parents and I returned to Earth, news accounts of a Sotheby’s auction reported that “the sole surviving authenticated original from the series of sixteen oils by C.M. Coolidge, circa 1903 A.D., frequently reproduced in schlock pop culture and collectively known as ‘dogs playing poker,’ sold for a record price to a well qualified buyer.”
The accounts noted that “well qualified” meant an anonymous buyer with net worth in excess of ten billion. I’m no gambler, but I’d bet I knew the buyer, and knew how he became well qualified.
The same accounts also reported that at the same auction “a one-hundred-six-carat perfect blue-white Weichselan diamond, the largest such piece ever offered for sale, fetched a record price for undisclosed sellers.”
By happy coincidence, my parents shortly thereafter purchased a retirement home on Florida’s platinum coast, where my father is recuperating well from a procedure medically similar to Kit’s.
My parents’ little shack is just a yacht’s throw down the beach from Edwin Trentin-Born’s compound. I don’t know whether Edwin’s the kind of guy who loves his neighbors, but he seems to accept his neighbors’ son better since my parents moved in. Or maybe I just accept being their son better now.
Howard grunted at his handheld as he got a report of something new from somewhere. He was still King of the Spooks, running his show from his hospital bed, despite dodging Washington flak. I suspect he kept his job, as he always had, because his hunches had so often wound up saving mankind’s produce from the disposal.
Howard said, “We just got product back from Utility 5. Ulys Gill was elected to the Central Committee. Now that’s a change that stabilizes the balance point.”
I rolled my eyes again. “Change? Really? The Yavi still have nukes. So do we. The people in charge on Yavet are still repressive, genocidal environmental rapists. We’re still over-privileged hedonists who waste our time and our money betting on bloodsports. While our politicians waste their time and our money arguing about nothing. Howard, do you really believe we’re gonna make it?”
Balance Point Page 27