“You and me both, Sarge. I mean, Fly.”
I looked around, feeling my stomach clench. “These guys are Newbies? Not humans?”
She shook her head. “No. Why would the Newbies evolve into human-looking critters? They go forward, not back! Look, we know these guys left Earth a hundred years ago, two centuries after we did. But we don’t know when or if they encountered the Newbies—or when they suddenly got this explosive burst of technological creativity. What if—?”
“What if,” I took over for her, “the Newbies ran into humans decades ago? Look, we don’t know where the Newbie homeworld is; maybe it’s closer to Earth than the Fred base we went to first, less than sixty light-years away. What if somehow they met us and influenced us to evolve more at the Newbie rate than our normal rate, fast though it was?”
Arlene leaned close, not that it would help if there were sensitive dish-mikes trained on us to pick up every sound. “What if the Newbies are here after all, here with the humans—but we just can’t see them for some reason?”
I told her about the overcaptain reading invisible readouts from somewhere above Arlene’s prostrate form in sickbay. “This ain’t good, Lance; I don’t like the idea of invisible Newbies running around like ghosts in the machine.”
She sat down on the hard bunk, closing her eyes to the relentlessly white bulkheads. “I don’t like any of this, Fly. I don’t like the idea that faith, not brainpower, turns out to be our weapon. I’m on shakier ground there than you or—or Albert would have been.” She put her hand to her chest; she’d twice had an engagement ring from her beloved, and she wore the ring on her dog-tag chain. Then we went through one of the Gates built by the First Ones, and, of course, the ring vanished with everything else.
Then the Klave recreated it for her, and she was happier than she had been since the jump. But we jumped again, and it was gone again; now, she often put her hand where the ring used to hang, remembering it as vividly as if it were there. . . . It represented Albert’s offer that Arlene never had time to accept.
I put my arm around her. On Earth it had been over three hundred years—three hundred and forty, to be exact, adding up all our trips. But still, for us it had been only four months since we went on without Albert, and only five months since we saw Jill . . . whatever her last name was.
It was all pretty damned confusing. I just couldn’t seem to wrap my brain around all this relativistic bouncing around the galaxy. And we were at least another hundred years away from home, even if we started today and headed straight back!
“Fly,” Arlene said, “let’s keep a good watch tonight when we interact with these . . . people. Maybe we’ll pick up some intel that will either blow this theory away or—or confirm it.” I held up a fist; gently, she rapped it with her own. But the normal Arlene Sanders would have smacked it so hard, a big Marine “fist salute,” that my knuckles would have been ringing for several minutes.
That evening, as we followed the officious jerk of a clipboard sergeant to the mess, people stopped talking when we approached and cringed as we brushed or bumped them. We were celebrities . . . but celebrities on a freak show. See the monsters! Beware, for their F-A-I-T-H may be infectious!
This time, I paid particular attention. We definitely climbed higher than the midpoint of the ship could possibly be, so Arlene was right: the ship was built for gravity always being the same direction. They must have had an artificial gravity generator.
The mess hall was actually a long narrow room, almost like a corridor, with a center table along which people sat in individual chairs. With a guard holding each of my arms, the overcaptain walked us downstream right on top of the table itself! I labored not to step in anyone’s plate of food or kick over any wine glasses.
The pair of guards slapped me down in a central chair and locked a metal band around my waist like a seat belt. I didn’t try to tug at it; it was pretty clear I wasn’t going anywhere. They plopped Arlene down in the chair directly opposite me, locking her in as well with a resounding click.
The room was darker than I preferred, but after the Fred bases and Fredworld, we had gotten pretty used to darkness. Each person had a different set of plates and silverware, and when they ate, they hunched forward and hooked one arm around their plates as if worried the guy on the other side was going to steal their food—a lot like a former convict my father used to employ when he worked managing the Angertons’ farm.
Equal number of guys and gals. Now that I looked close, I noticed that nobody wore exactly the same uniform. Like in the United States Army before the twentieth century, everybody had his own variation on a common theme: Overcaptain Tokughavita, to my immediate right, wore dark blue trim around the seven pockets on the front of his uniform blouse; the woman sitting next to him had no trim, and the two guys opposite us had five and six pockets instead of seven. The farther away from the overcaptain, down the table, the wilder the variation: I saw a hat that was a cross between the Revolutionary War tricorner and a Texas ten-gallon, one woman had mini-wings sticking out the backs of her shoulders. The uniforms (is that the right word when they’re not uniform?) tended toward red and burnt umber at the extreme left of the table, where the hats flattened out and looked like berets with spikes.
Suddenly, I noticed Sears and Roebuck at the leftmost end of the table, but they didn’t look at me. They must have known we were here. Nobody could have missed our ceremonial entrance, walking along the tabletop—nobody else entered that way!
People trickled in and out all through the meal. I began to get the idea that these humans made virtually a fetish of individualism verging on the solipsistic: each person lived in his own little world, almost unaware of anyone else except when he needed something from outside.
The food was different for each person, too—none of it very appetizing from my point of view. My main course tasted like boiled steak in suitcase sauce. But it was better than the Fred food, even the blue squares, and I was reasonably sure that humans couldn’t have changed much biochemically in only two hundred years, so the food was probably nutritious enough to keep me and Arlene alive.
Once, someone dropped a knife with a clatter, and a whole section of table panicked! Then, when they saw it hadn’t killed anyone, they returned to their meal as if nothing had happened.
During the meal, there was certainly a lot of intel to pick up; in fact, it seemed these humans didn’t even have the concept of classified data or even personal discretion. Arlene was right; all the big bursts in creativity occurred just about sixty years ago. But there were no Newbies that they reported.
Sears and Roebuck didn’t say a word to us; they acted as if they had never seen us before and weren’t particularly interested now. I took the hint and left them alone, hoping they hadn’t abandoned us and were just playing some game to get on the humans’ good side.
The crew of the ship—called different names by different crewmen, of course, but mostly called Disrespect to Death-Bringing Deconstructionists—still seemed fascinated by our faith, me in God, Arlene in her fellow man. They inched toward us as if afraid to touch, still worrying about “catching” faith. You bet your ass it’s infectious! I thought. I made as much contact as I could, putting my hands on people’s shoulders, shaking hands (they knew what it meant but didn’t like doing it—it meant recognizing the existence of other people), kissing the girls. I got about as much response from the latter as you would expect. . . . It was like kissing nuns.
11
The crew mobbed us, asking all sorts of basic questions, baby questions, about faith and hope. “What if have faith in something and doesn’t happen? Can hope for someone to suffer? Does matter if have faith in yourself but not in external God?” I sensed a purposefulness sweeping the room, centering first in one person then another, almost as if an inquisitive intelligence were flitting from brain to brain, asking a question, then moving on to the next person.
First, Overcaptain Tokughavita asked, “How can still have faith
in basic goodness of humans if personal experience tells otherwise?”
Arlene surprised me by taking that one; I’d always thought she was the cynic. “It doesn’t matter what some people do, or even like most people—I mean, sure a lot of people, maybe most of them, will do bad stuff when they think no one’s looking. But if you’ve ever known someone who won’t, someone who really practices his moral system all the time—and I have known someone like that—then you know what we’re capable of. Maybe we don’t always live up to it, but the basic decency and goodness is in our design specs. We just need some technical work.”
Then the overcaptain’s face softened. “Actually studied first mission in school; strange to meet legends in flesh.”
“You read about it?” I asked. “There’s a book?”
“Two books. Many books, but two originals: Knee-Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth. Woman named Lovelace Jill wrote them, said was on mission with you.”
Jill! So that was her name. Jill Lovelace?
“Jesus,” said Arlene. “Talk about tilting at windmills!”
“Huh?” It was another one of those patented Arlene non sequiturs void of any and all meaning.
He probed us about our adventures. I was still stunned at the thought of Jill publishing a pair of books! It all seemed so recent to me—to me and Arlene—I had to keep reminding myself that Jill would have had her whole life to research and write the books.
Then the sergeant leaned forward, interrupting the overcaptain. I waited in vain for fireworks—not only had they lost their notions of chain of command, but they were so individualistic they didn’t even seem to have the concept of manners, respect, and politeness. “Do moral thing because fear divine retribution?”
“No,” I said, “that’s a complete misreading.” The nuns had discussed this exact point with us many times in catechism class. “Whatever your morality, if you’re just doing the right thing because you’re afraid of getting caught, that’s not ethics—it’s extortion.”
“Why do right thing when can secretly profit?”
“You do the right thing because humans have an inner sense of morality, right and wrong, conscience, whatever, that tells them what is right. If you ignore it, you feel like crap because you’re not living up to—to your design specs, like Arlene says.”
Then the light of extreme intelligence faded from the sergeant’s eyes, and he sat back, listening while Arlene gave a highly exaggerated account of our trip up to Mars. She even went into the first entry into the UAC facility and the attack by the monsters that later turned out to be genetic and cyborg constructs of the Freds. I listened closely; strange as it may seem, I had never heard that part of the story before . . . I was in the brig being guarded by two guys named Ron—an interesting precursor to Sears and Roebuck, now that I thought about it.
Then an unnamed person asked what this moral force felt like, then it was back to Tokughavita to ask how we knew whether someone else we met was moral, and so on—a whole damned theology lesson. The particular questioner changed, but the “voice” was so similar, I began to get suspicious. Not voice as in the sound of it as it came from their throats; I mean the way they strung the words together, diction, whatever that’s called, and the intelligence behind the questions. Most of the time, these guys were conceited, social-atomist trogs, except when one would lean forward, cut off whoever was speaking, and ask The Question.
I decided early in the evening on 99 percent honesty: I only lie when I see a clear-cut advantage to it, and I try to keep my lies as close to the truth as possible. That way I don’t get confused. In this case, my only lie was to imply that all humans had some sort of faith, back in our time. Arlene took her cue from me, playing it safe until she figured out what I was pulling on them, then backing me up. It was a fascinating evening, and I didn’t even care about the lousy food.
They hustled us back to the cell and dumped us. We feigned sleep until we were fairly sure the overt, obvious guards were gone. “If they’ve got the room wired,” Arlene said in my ear, pretending to be romantic, “we’re already screwed.”
I grunted and got up. “Let’s assume they don’t—but don’t plot any plots out loud, just in case.”
Arlene sat up, looked around, and gave a little gasp of astonishment. “Fly, look at the terminal! Or where it used to be, I mean.”
In place of the magic keyboard that projected 3-D images was a simple translucent-green sphere, like a crystal ball. Flickers of electrical impulses kissed the inside surface. We walked over and stared down at it. “Cripes,” said my lance corporal, “what the hell are we supposed to do with this?”
“I could understand them taking away our computer,” I said, “but they went to some trouble to put this here. Ah, an intelligence test?”
We poked at it, prodded it, even kicked it. An hour later, we were hot and sweaty but no closer to figuring out what we were supposed to do with a glowing green bowling ball glued to the floor. Then Arlene had one of her serendipitous strokes of unconscious genius: she leaned over and snarled at the thing. “Why the hell don’t you say something?”
“Because haven’t been asked question,” it answered, reasonably enough.
We jumped back. Then I approached cautiously. “Did the humans who own this ship put you here?”
“How should I know?” it asked. “Weren’t here when I was activated. You are first people I’ve seen.”
“What’s your name?” asked Arlene.
“Have no name.”
“What should we call you?”
“Address me directly, second person.”
I looked at Arlene and grinned. “My turn, as I recall,” I said.
“Your turn for what? Oh.” She rolled her eyes. “Go for it, Fly.” When we first ran into the Freds—their demon-shaped machines, actually, the ones they sent for the invasion—we took turns naming the critters as we ran across them. I wasn’t sure whose turn it really was, but I had a good name in mind.
“I christen thee Ninepin,” I said. Arlene snorted, and Ninepin didn’t respond. “Ninepin, are there any more like you?”
“Others like me, not like me,” it answered cryptically. “I am prototype, far advanced over other systems on ship or on other ships.”
“When were you created?” asked my comrade.
“Was first activated four hours, seventeen minutes ago. Construction time six hours, eleven minutes. Design first logged into ship system thirty-eight minutes before construction began.”
“You, ah, say you’re far advanced over the other ship’s systems?” I asked. “Aren’t there any prototypes, intermediate steps, trial runs?”
“No.”
“Nothing? They just jumped straight from that terminal we used to have here—to you?”
“Yes, unless secret experiments unlogged.”
“What are the odds of that?” Arlene asked.
“Infinitesimal. Less than 0.00001 percent probability.”
Arlene and I looked at each other. “Kiddo,” I said, “this goes too far. This is exactly the sort of thing we’d associate with Newbies. I’ve been thinking—you know your Edgar Allan Poe. What’s the best place to hide something?”
“In plain view,” she said, drawing her red eyebrows together and frowning.
“What could be plainer than looking right at these humans?”
“Fly, we already decided that they really were humans, not Newbies in disguise.”
I smiled as she started to catch on. “Yes, those are humans, A.S., but what’s inside them?”
Now her brows shot up toward her hairline. “You’re saying the Newbies have implanted themselves inside the humans?”
“It’s a possibility, right? They evolve smaller and smaller, and eventually they wriggle into their host to—what did the Newbie say? To fix them. Maybe they figured we were closer to proper functioning than any of the other races in the galaxy because our rate of technological and social evolution is so much closer to the Newbies’.”
“Ninepin,” I said, “have you been following our conversation? Do you know who the Newbies are?”
“Yes and no.” I scratched my head and looked at Arlene, who grinned.
“You asked two questions, Fly: yes to the first, no to the second.”
“Ninepin: are there any other species on this ship besides human?”
“Yes. Two.”
Arlene spoke up. “Is one of those two species a paired group of bilaterally symmetric, bipedal creatures with short legs and pointy heads?”
“Yes. Others call them Klave.”
“Sears and Roebuck,” Arlene muttered.
I licked my lips. “Can you describe the third species?”
“No.”
“Call that species the Newbies. Where are the Newbies right now?”
“On the ship.”
“Yes, but where on the ship?”
“Everywhere.”
I looked around. My stomach opened up like when you reach the top of the big hill on a roller coaster. “Everywhere . . . meaning what? In this room?”
“Yes.”
“In you?”
“Yes.”
I hesitated. I didn’t really want to know the obvious next question, but the mission came first before my squeamishness. “In me and Arlene?”
A slight hesitation. “Not likely, cannot examine to make certain.” I exhaled, not even realizing I was holding my breath until I let it out.
“How about in the other humans?” Arlene asked.
“Yes,” Ninepin said, nonchalantly.
“Microscopic?” I guessed.
“Yes, but cannot determine exact size without direct examination or dissection.”
I sat down next to the bowling ball. “Jesus,” I swore. “They do evolve pretty quickly.” It was an inane comment; I just thought I had to say something.
“They’re even in Ninepin,” said my lance. “Should we trust him?”
“Well, the Newbies haven’t shown any tendency toward secrecy or disinformation; all that non-authorized pers stuff was probably stuck in by the humans. I don’t think we have a choice.”
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