by John Barnes
“Well,” I said, smiling because I realized that I was going to like her just as much as Azalais had thought I would, “when you put it that way, why doesn’t everyone flee the box?”
She shrugged. “I’m not going back in to ask them.”
“I am instructed that both of you have some emotional attachment to the subject,” the robot said. It looked like a garbage can on tank treads, or an assault vacuum cleaner. “I was therefore requested to request of you that we be allowed to brain monitor you while you talk with the subject. We would like to study how a chimera was able to win the friendship and loyalty of two human beings, and it will be useful if we can compare a running brain-read from you with the communications of the subject.”
“She did it the same way that any human being does,” I said. “She was warm and personable and someone I wanted to know.”
“That’s exactly what I would say,” Tamianne added.
“Interesting,” the robot said, meaning it wasn’t. “May we install the brain monitors on you?”
I shrugged. They use the same sockets that are used for psypyx recordings, and you don’t feel it at all; it’s just a tiny chip on the back of your head, under your hair. I’d been brainmonitored during many ops. “Go right ahead,” I said.
“I am interested,” the robot added.
“I assumed you weren’t lying,” I said.
“Thank you, sir. I do have choices about telling the truth—those are essential for my occupation—and it is pleasant to be trusted.”
“You must have a highly specialized emotional configuration, considering that more often you’re ripping up aintellects rather than humans. You would need empathy but not sympathy, I suppose.”
“Just so, sir. I do feel their pain, with the highest degree of imagination with which a machine can be equipped. But I feel it as pleasure; only the repudiation of a lie is more exquisite to my emotions and sensory system.”
Tamianne looked sick and I felt worse than she looked.
In the workroom, they seated us into comfortable chairs, inserted monitors into the sockets in our heads, and ran a signal check. The small delivery springer on the table glowed gray, and a psypyx case, about as big as a flashlight, came through. The robot extended an arm with a forceps grip, opened the psypyx case, and put the psypyx into a player.
What causes that strange hum that all machinery seems to make when it is just about to do something?
I had a shaved moment to realize that the hum was not coming from the psypyx reader, and to look to my left. The emergency exit springer had begun to glow. The robot pivoted and said, “What—” before a projectile put a big hole through its center.
When I looked back, Ebles Ribaterra was standing in front of the springer, in a plain black uniform, pointing a maser at me. Men in the same uniform rushed through into the workroom behind him. Before I could quite draw breath, one of them had sealed the door with spray plastic, and another had grabbed the little supply springer, through which Azalais’s psypyx had just come, from the desk and clamped a reader to its control box.
“The male is trained,” Ebles said.
Two of his commandos stepped forward and took up positions, each on either side of me, not symmetrical and clearly waiting for me to move so that they could bash me. “I’ll be good,” I said.
“Of course you will. Armed, trained men are standing over you.”
Another commando looked up from the supply springer. “Got the address, sir. Loading to the floor springer—it’s in.”
The two commandos guarding me stayed where they were; everyone else dove back through the emergency springer again. I wanted to ask questions but it didn’t seem like the time. I guessed that the home team was not winning.
After a very long pause, Ribaterra and his team returned through the springer. “Recheck. Compare to inventory, are we just missing the one copy?” he said, out loud.
An aintellect voice said, “That is correct, and it should be in the room where you are now.”
I’m not sure how many times in a long life I have found myself reflecting, for years after some brief incident, how much changes in a few seconds. The opponent you almost beat to the punch, who lands a good one; the moment when a possible lover asks an innocent question that is actually utterly putting you to the test; the second when everything depends on your nerve, and you do it or you don’t. I am more aware of such moments than most people, perhaps because I have had so many; or maybe I remember so many because I am unusually aware of them.
This was one.
Ebles looked at the empty psypyx case on the table. Then he glanced at me—probably only looking to see if I might have the psypyx on my lap or in my hand.
I deliberately looked at the loading door on the psypyx reader, nodded at it firmly, and made eye contact with Ebles. He looked astonished, of course; then he smiled and pushed the emergency eject. Azalais’s psypyx popped out into his hand, and he dropped it back into its case.
“Mission accomplished, evacuating,” he said. “Go.”
His commandos tumbled through the springer, back to wherever they had come from, with speed and efficiency that would have gratified me if I had seen it in my team.
Ebles went last—the commander’s privilege. “Tell your Section Chief that she’s a great kisser. And you and she both ought to think about joining us. We never leave an agent behind.”
He stepped into the sheet of glowing gray and was gone.
Margaret was holding her expression flat, and it wasn’t being easy. “Giraut, before we even begin to talk, let me point out that you were being brain-recorded, so there’s no point in lying or shading the truth; we know what you were thinking and feeling at every point. Is that clear?”
“It’s clear.”
“Good then. We know you pointed out the location, to Ebles Ribaterra, of the very last copy of that chimera—don’t try to make me use its name—and we are of course aware that they might have found it and gotten away anyway; you may have only made a difference of a few seconds, but in those few seconds a CSP team was getting ready and we were about to retake command of that springer. We might have captured a half dozen extraterritorials—who very probably knew a great deal of value about their military and security systems—and retained one copy, which would be all we needed, of that chimera. You turned the possibility of a stunning victory into utter defeat, you did it deliberately, and now I would like to know why.”
“The brain recording ought to show that I didn’t premeditate it,” I said. “It was the OSP, not me, that decided I needed to be there to talk with a good friend while you tortured and destroyed her. It was the OSP’s, not my, security breach that let them find out the exact second at which to strike. It was—”
“I really ought to order the Ix Cycle suppressed, all copies destroyed, and you confined. For good.”
A long awkward silence. I just stared at her, trying to make her words fit with the Margaret I knew.
There’s an old saying in negotiations; after the deal is on the table, the first one to talk loses. After a few long seconds, Margaret drew a breath, looked down, and said, “That was anger talking. I won’t. Yes, we know the lapse was momentary. We also know you don’t have any regret for having had it. You really do see that thing in the psypyx as a person.”
“Yes.”
“And you acted to save what you thought of as an innocent person. We know that too.”
“Yes.”
“Will you consent to another brain-read, so we can find out what your loyalties are?”
Something about her posture, or her expression, or her tone—I can’t really say, but it seemed nearly like telepathy—screamed say yes. So I did.
They found me “loyal with reservations”—the category they use for Quakers, Gandhists, Reconstructed Vegans, and so forth, who are allowed to work for the OSP but only in capacities where their moral objections don’t pose a problem.
It was a pretty strange thing to discover th
at at fifty I was a conscientious objector, but “at least you know you have a conscience,” Raimbaut said to me, as we watched the bloody period of Arcturus sink into Totzmare, and the black rocks around us fade into the darkness. “That’s more than a lot of us know.”
2
Dad and I chatted about everything and nothing all through dinner, but at last when coffee was served, I sat back and said, “Uh, Dad. Margaret says that you’re leaving the team?”
“Actually, Giraut, I’ve gone on indefinite leave without pay.”
I nodded; it was effectively a resignation that he could take back at any time in the next few years. “So you’re tired of the service?”
“Oh, not yet, not at all,” Dad said. “It’s a purely personal matter.”
“Mother.”
“Well, you know, technically speaking, we are still married. And realistically speaking, we are still in love. It’s just the right thing to do for these next few years of my life—which might be the last few of hers.” He sat back in his chair; his scrawny eight-year-old’s legs wouldn’t quite touch the floor. “Of course there’s also the fun of upsetting the sort of nosy old lady who can’t get used to the way things are with the psypyx, and feels compelled to walk up and say, ‘Oh aren’t you the cutest thing and don’t you make your granny proud.’”
Something about the way he said that told me that “you’re quoting somebody.”
“Well, yes.” He laughed, a surprisingly droll and dignified sound for his high treble. “Yes, unfortunately. Naturally I reared back and sternly informed her that I was a retired professor, and your mother added that there was still no man she’d rather be seen at the opera with. And of course the poor dreadful old bat made a production of being upset because Life Nowadays Was Just All So Confusing, and tizzied hastily away, no doubt to share the whole dreadful experience with both her friends. Or at least the live one.” He sighed. “Giraut, it’s just that no one can know whether your mother will eventually go into the psypyx for three extra years, till they figure out what has to be done to bring her out, or for five full generations. And I haven’t had quite enough time with her yet. That’s all. If I could think of anything more complicated, I’d tell you that story instead.”
“I rather like this one, Dad.”
He shrugged and smiled. “And too, she is getting less energetic and less able to keep up with her work, and there are so many projects she wants to finish—and who has more energy than a small boy, eh? Of course she has to train me but supposedly learning new things is one of the best possible ways to help your psypyx merge into your clone brain more quickly. So, to sum up, and assessing it all—”
“Dad, despite your appearance, I am finding it fairly easy to believe that you were a professor. I’ll miss you.”
He gave me an impish grin and looked eight years old as he mimed taking an arrow through the heart. “I’ll miss you too, Giraut, but you know … I only promised to be around till you grew up, and I think you did that a while ago, and a good job of it too. I promised to be with your mother till death do us part … and you know, so far, one of us has died, but it hasn’t done us part. And if these next years are the last ones she gets, or the last ones she gets for centuries … well, I just wouldn’t want to miss them. Time enough for adventure and other nonsense later on, eh? Never miss time with anyone you love.”
I very nearly burst into tears at that, and I’m sure he thought I was just being sentimental about my parents, and I let him think that.
So we clinked glasses, and drank to fathers and sons, and to the way memory grows on you, to love and loyalty, to another round for humanity and one more for the good guys, and got sloppy in an utterly clichéd way, and agreed that I could have been a more courteous son and he could have been a more understanding father but on the whole we’d done a very good job with each other and turned out pretty goddam fine. (Such conclusions are generally available near the bottom of a second bottle of Hedon Gore, if you want to go looking for them).
On the way out of the restaurant, the man at the door said something nice about my “grandson,” and without missing a beat, my father said that that was right, it was high time I found a nice girl and gave him one.
“You know,” I said, as I walked him to the public springer station, “I’m glad you’re my father, and I’m glad you’re still planning to be an OSP agent again at some time in the future, but I’ll be just as glad if you don’t go back on active duty for a while, because I’m not sure I’m going to be able to cope with it when you’re a teenager.”
We were a rump team; officially I needed to find a partner for myself and another pair of partners. But Margaret told us that she could carry us as a rump for a few stanmonths while we sorted out feelings and decided what we wanted to do. Perhaps the time had finally come for me to retire to a desk job, and for Raimbaut and Laprada to launch a team of their own—certainly they’d have their pick of the newly trained agents. So the last thing any of us expected was to be called into the office within a week for a meeting with Margaret.
We had barely sat down when she asked, “Do you suppose you might be up for a good old-fashioned bust-down-the-door raid?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I said, and Raimbaut and Laprada were nodding.
“Well, we were able to put together some lucky bits of information from their raid on the Advanced Labs, with some information that the aintellects teased out of all the recordings of my conversations with Ebles Ribaterra.”
“So what did you get?” Laprada asked.
“We found a location that we think is Bad Guy Staging Area Number One on Wilson—a warehouse not far from Palace Square. The basic plan is smash and grab, of course; we can’t do anything about finding out what’s in there first without running the risk of alerting them, so we’ll have to just get as much as we can in the few seconds it takes them to realize they’re under attack. But we can at least make a mess of their operations on Wilson, and judging from the size of that warehouse and the power demands it makes, there’s a good chance that it’s their main base within the Thousand Cultures. And with any luck, we’ll know a million times more about them than we knew before. The biggest complication is that passive monitoring clearly shows they’ve got at least one springer in there. And since it’s not drawing power off the grid, and it doesn’t match up in a simultaneity check with any springer on Wilson, it’s mainly or entirely handling extrasystem traffic.”
With luck, we would be able to burst in, seize their springer, throw suppressor nets over the people there to prevent the detonation of brain bombs, and eventually convince them, gently or not, to answer a few questions.
Everything depended on speed and precision. There would be a lot of crazy wild violence, a good chance that I would only be out of the tank for a few days before going onto the psypyx, and an equally good chance of seeing good friends die. The raid might bring pain, violence, grief, and the sort of despair you get from looking at the sheer waste of it all; or, more likely, glory and pride and a sense of accomplishment. In any case I could get the living shit scared out of me.
For the rest of the day I was madly cheerful, and had started humming “Never Again Till the Next Time.”
“You are fresh out of the tank,” Raimbaut pointed out, “and aches and pains are perfectly normal.” He sat down beside me, his teenaged athlete’s body moving as easily as thought, and joined me in the hurdler’s stretches I was doing, probably just to be sociable. He was stretching farther than I could, with less effort. I told myself to stop noticing that at once, and to avoid glancing toward Laprada, who was alternating putting her legs behind her head.
Had I always spent the last minutes at the failsafe point thinking of every possible disaster? It seemed to me that when I was younger, I had not.
It also seemed to me that when I was younger I had rarely thought about how old I was.
We were in a warehouse space that the OSP had quietly acquired access to less than an hour
before, crouched by the door. We had cut its latches and hinges and rigged it with a device to flip it up against the upper wall and hold it there. The plan for Team Three was:
Door flies up.
Laprada covers door.
Giraut rolls through, ducks right behind trash springer, covers opposite wall and door.
Raimbaut to left side of opposite door.
Raimbaut uses claphammer to take it down.
Raimbaut and Giraut cover Laprada as she goes through to right side of opposite door.
Laprada takes up position and covers Raimbaut and Giraut, as they go through claphammered door and rush left down hallway (right is blank wall).
Claphammer all doors on way.
Raimbaut takes position at end of hall, covers next hallway.
Giraut and Laprada investigate all the claphammered doors and look for stuff.
While looking for stuff: throw a suppressor net over anything that moves and doesn’t draw an OSP paycheck.
spritz everything in a suppressor net with sedative.
put out fires.
suppress bombs.
keep helmet and backpack cameras running.
tag anything that seems at all interesting and nonexplosive for the springer robots to collect afterward.
Continue until all you can find are other OSP agents.
I hated being Team Three on our own case, but I had to agree with Margaret that it was the right thing: we were just too far below full strength. Still, having other teams take over at the close was the fast way to a tumble in prestige.
This position behind the door was our failsafe point, the last place on our route where we could just walk away without compromising the operation. If we got no orders, we would not move, and our presence would hopefully remain unknown to the other side.
The lead team had a fail-go position, on the sidewalk at the front of the building, which they were to advance to and then strike from as soon as they arrived, unless they were countermanded; once they reached fail-go, we were rolling.