The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

by Walter Jon Williams

  During dinner those whose parents permitted it were allowed two measured doses of liquor to toast Fahd—something called Ring Ice, brewed locally. I think it gave my esophagus blisters.

  After the Ring Ice, things got louder and more lively. There was a lot more noise and hilarity when the resort crew discovered that several of the cadre had slipped off to a back room to find out what sex was like, now they had real bodies. It was when I was laughing over this that I looked at Janis and saw that she was quiet, her body motionless. She's normally louder and more demonstrative than anyone else, so I knew something was badly wrong. I sent her a private query through my implant. She sent a single-word reply.

  Mom . . .

  I sent her a glyph of sympathy while I wondered how Janis' mom had found out about our little adventure so quickly. There was barely time for a lightspeed signal to bounce to Ceres and back.

  Ground Control must have really been annoyed. Or maybe she, like Janis' mom, was a Constant Soldier in the Five Principles Movement and was busy spying on everyone else—all for the greater good, of course.

  Whatever the message was, Janis bounced back pretty quickly. Next thing I knew she was sidling up to me saying, "Look, you can loan me your vac suit, right?"

  Something about the glint in her huge platter eyes made me cautious.

  "Why would I want to do that?" I asked.

  "Mom says I'm grounded. I'm not allowed to go skating with the rest of you. But nobody can tell these bodies apart—I figured if we switched places we could show her who's boss."

  "And leave me stuck here by myself?"

  "You'll be with the waiters—and some of them are kinda cute, if you like them hairy." Her tone turned serious. "It's solidarity time, Alison. We can't let Mom win this one."

  I thought about it for a moment, then said, "Maybe you'd better ask someone else."

  Anger flashed in her huge eyes. "I knew you'd say that! You've always been afraid to stand up to the grownups!"

  "Janis," I sighed. "Think about it. Do you think your mom was the only one that got a signal from Ground Control? My parents are going to be looking into the records of this event very closely. So I think you should talk someone else into your scheme—and not Parminder or Andy, either."

  Her whole hairy body sulked. I almost laughed.

  "I guess you're right," she conceded.

  "You know your mom is going to give you a big lecture when we get back."

  "Oh yeah. I'm sure she's writing her speech right now, making sure she doesn't miss a single point."

  "Maybe you'd better let me eavesdrop," I said. "Make sure you don't lose your cool."

  She looked even more sulky. "Maybe you'd better."

  We do this because we're cadre. Back in the old days, when the first poor kids were being raised in virtual, a lot of them cracked up once they got incarnated. They went crazy, or developed a lot of weird obsessions, or tried to kill themselves, or turned out to have a kind of autism where they could only relate to things through a computer interface.

  So now parents don't raise their children by themselves. Most kids still have two parents, because it takes two to pay the citizenship points and taxes it takes to raise a kid, and sometimes if there aren't enough points to go around there are three parents, or four or five. Once the points are paid the poor moms and dads have to wait until there are enough applicants to fill a cadre. A whole bunch of virtual children are raised in one group, sharing their upbringing with their parents and crèche staff. Older cadres often join their juniors and take part in their education, also.

  The main point of the cadre is for us all to keep an eye on each other. Nobody's allowed to withdraw into their own little world. If anyone shows sign of going around the bend, we unite in our efforts to retrieve them.

  Our parents created the little hell that we live in. It's our job to help each other survive it.

  A person used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.

  Certainly Janis isn't, though despite cadre solidarity she never managed to talk anyone else into changing places with her. I felt only moderately sorry for her—she'd already had her triumph, after all—and I forgot all about her problems once I got back into my pressure suit and out onto the ice.

  Skating isn't as thrilling as skiing, I suppose, but we still had fun. Playing crack-the-whip in the light gravity, the person on the end of the line could be fired a couple kilometers over the smooth methane ice.

  After which it was time to return to the resort. We all showered while the resort crew cleaned and did maintenance on our suits, and then we got back in the suits so that the next set of tourists would find their rental bodies already armored up and ready for sport.

  We popped open our helmets so that the scanners could be put on our heads. Quantum superconducting devices tickled our brain cells and recovered everything they found, and then our brains—our essences—were dumped into a buffer, then fired by communication laser back to Ceres and the sim in which we all lived.

  The simulation seemed inadequate compared to the reality of Titan. But I didn't have time to work out the degree of difference, because I had to save Janis' butt.

  That's us. That's the cadre. All for one and one for all.

  And besides, Janis has been my best friend for practically ever.

  Anna-Lee, Janis' mom, was of course waiting for her, sitting in the little common room outside Janis' bedroom. (Did I mention that we sleep, Doctor Sam? We don't sleep as long as incarnated people do, just a few hours, but our parents want us to get used to the idea so that when we're incarnated we know to sleep when we get tired instead of ignoring it and then passing out while doing something dangerous or important.

  (The only difference between our sleep and yours is that we don't dream. I mean, what's the point, we're stuck in our parents' dream anyway.)

  So I've no sooner arrived in my own simulated body in my own simulated bedroom when Janis is screaming on the private channel.

  "Mom is here! I need you now!"

  So I press a few switches in my brain and there I am, right in Janis' head, getting much of the same sensor feed that she's receiving herself. And I look at her and I say, "Hey, you can't talk to Anna-Lee looking like this."

  Janis is wearing her current avatar, which is something like a crazy person might draw with crayons. Stick-figure body, huge yellow shoes, round bobble head with crinkly red hair like wires.

  "Get your quadbod on!" I tell her. "Now!"

  So she switches, and now her avatar has four arms, two in the shoulders, two in the hip sockets. The hair is still bright red. Whatever her avatar looks like, Janis always keeps the red hair.

  "Good," I say. "That's normal."

  Which it is, for Ceres. Which is an asteroid without much gravity, so there really isn't a lot of point in having legs. In microgravity legs just drag around behind you and bump into things and get bruises and cuts. Whereas everyone can use an extra pair of arms, right? So most people who live in low- or zero-gravity environments use quadbods, which are more practical than the two-legged model.

  So Janis pushes off with her left set of arms and floats through the door into the lounge where her mom awaits. Anna-Lee wears a quadbod, too, except that hers isn't an avatar, but a three-dimensional holographic scan of her real body. And you can tell that she's really pissed—she's got tight lips and tight eyelids and a tight face, and both sets of arms are folded across her midsection with her fingers digging into her forearms as if she's repressing the urge to grab Janis and shake her.

  "Hi, Mom," Janis said.

  "You not only endangered yourself," Anna-Lee said, "but you chose to endanger others, too."

  "Sit down before you answer," I murmured in Janis' inward ear. "Take your time."

  I was faintly surprised that Janis actually followed my advice. She drifted into a chair, used her lower limbs to settle herself into it, and then spoke.

  "Nobody was endangered," she said, quite reasonably.

  Anna-Lee's
nostrils narrowed.

  "You diverted from the flight plan that was devised for your safety," she said.

  "I made a new flight plan," Janis pointed out. "Ground Control accepted it. If it was dangerous, she wouldn't have done that."

  Anna-Lee's voice got that flat quality that it gets when she's following her own internal logic. Sometimes I think she's the program, not us.

  "You are not authorized to file flight plans!" she snapped.

  "Ground Control accepted it," Janis repeated. Her voice had grown a little sharp, and I whispered at her to keep cool.

  "And Ground Control immediately informed me! They were right on the edge of calling out a rescue shuttle!"

  "But they didn't, because there was no problem!" Janis snapped out, and then there was a pause while I told her to lower her voice.

  "Ground Control accepted my revised plan," she said. "I landed according to the plan, and nobody was hurt."

  "You planned this from the beginning!" All in that flat voice of hers. "This was a deliberate act of defiance!"

  Which was true, of course.

  "What harm did I do?" Janis asked.

  ("Look," I told Janis. "Just tell her that she's right and you were wrong and you'll never do it again."

  ("I'm not going to lie!" Janis sent back on our private channel. "Whatever Mom does, she's never going to make me lie!")

  All this while Anna-Lee was saying, "We must all work together for the greater good! Your act of defiance did nothing but divert people from their proper tasks! Titan Ground Control has better things to do than worry about you!"

  There was no holding Janis back now. "You wanted me to learn navigation! So I learned it—because you wanted it! And now that I've proved that I can use it, and you're angry about it!" She was waving her arms so furiously that she bounced up from her chair and began to sort of jerk around the room.

  "And do you know why that is, Mom?" she demanded.

  "For God's sake shut up!" I shouted at her. I knew where this was leading, but Janis was too far gone in her rage to listen to me now.

  "It's because you're second-rate!" Janis shouted at her mother. "Dad went off to Barnard's Star, but you didn't make the cut! And I can do all the things you wanted to do, and do them better, and you can't stand it!"

  "Will you be quiet!" I tell Janis. "Remember that she owns you!"

  "I accepted the decision of the committee!" Anna-Lee was shouting. "I am a Constant Soldier and I live a productive life, and I will not be responsible for producing a child who is a burden and a drain on resources!"

  "Who says I'm going to be a burden?" Janis demanded. "You're the only person who says that! If I incarnated tomorrow I could get a good job in ten minutes!"

  "Not if you get a reputation for disobedience and anarchy!"

  By this point it was clear that since Janis wasn't listening to me, and Anna-Lee couldn't listen, there was no longer any point in my involving myself in what had become a very predictable argument. So I closed the link and prepared my own excuses for my own inevitable meeting with my parents.

  I changed from Picasso Woman to my own quadbod, which is what I use when I talk to my parents, at least when I want something from them. My quadbod avatar is a girl just a couple years younger than my actual age, wearing a school uniform with a Peter Pan collar and a white bow in her—my—hair. And my beautiful brown eyes are just slightly larger than eyes are in reality, because that's something called "neoteny," which means you look more like a baby and babies are designed to be irresistible to grownups.

  Let me tell you that it works. Sometimes I can blink those big eyes and get away with anything.

  And at that point my father called, and told me that he and my mom wanted to talk to me about my adventures on Titan, so I popped over to my parents' place, where I appeared in holographic form in their living room.

  My parents are pretty reasonable people. Of course I take care to keep them reasonable, insofar as I can. Let me smile with the wise, as Doctor Sam says, and feed with the rich. I will keep my opinions to myself, and try my best to avoid upsetting the people who have power over me.

  Why did I soar off with Janis on her flight plan? my father wanted to know.

  "Because I didn't think she should go alone," I said.

  Didn't you try to talk her out of it? my mother asked.

  "You can't talk Janis out of anything," I replied. Which, my parents knowing Janis, was an answer they understood.

  So my parents told me to be careful, and that was more or less the whole conversation.

  Which shows you that not all parents up here are crazy.

  Mine are more sensible than most. I don't think many parents would think much of my ambition to get involved in the fine arts. That's just not done up here, let alone the sort of thing I want to do, which is to incarnate on Earth and apprentice myself to an actual painter, or maybe a sculptor. Up here they just use cameras, and their idea of original art is to take camera pictures or alter camera pictures or combine camera pictures with one another or process the camera pictures in some way.

  I want to do it from scratch, with paint on canvas. And not with a computer-programmed spray gun either, but with a real brush and blobs of paint. Because if you ask me the texture of the thing is important, which is why I like oils. Or rather the idea of oils, because I've never actually had a chance to work with the real thing.

  And besides, as Doctor Sam says, A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what is expected a man should see. The grand object of traveling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.

  So when I told my parents what I wanted to do, they just sort of shrugged and made me promise to learn another skill as well, one just a little bit more practical. So while I minor in art I'm majoring in computer design and function and programming, which is pretty interesting because all our really complex programs are written by artificial intelligences who are smarter than we are, so getting them to do what you want is as much like voodoo as science.

  So my parents and I worked out a compromise that suited everybody, which is why I think my parents are pretty neat actually.

  About twenty minutes after my talk with my parents, Janis knocked on my door, and I made the door go away, and she walked in, and then I put the door back. (Handy things, sims.)

  "Guess that didn't work out so good, huh?" she said.

  "On your family's civility scale," I said, "I think that was about average."

  Her eyes narrowed (she was so upset that she forgot to change out of her quadbod, which is why she had the sort of eyes that could narrow).

  "I'm going to get her," she said.

  "I don't think that's very smart," I said.

  Janis was smacking her fists into my walls, floor, and ceiling and shooting around the room, which was annoying even though the walls were virtual and she couldn't damage them or get fingerprints on them.

  "Listen," I said. "All you have to do is keep the peace with your mom until you've finished your thesis, and then you'll be incarnated and she can't touch you. It's just months, Janis."

  "My thesis!" A glorious grin of discovery spread across Janis' face. "I'm going to use my thesis! I'm going to stick it to Mom right where it hurts!"

  I reached out and grabbed her and steadied her in front of me with all four arms.

  "Look," I said. "You can't keep calling her bluff."

  Her voice rang with triumph. "Just watch me."

  "Please," I said. "I'm begging you. Don't do anything till you're incarnated!"

  I could see the visions of glory dancing before her eyes. She wasn't seeing or hearing me at all.

  "She's going to have to admit that I am right and that she is wrong," she said. "I'm going to nail my thesis to her forehead like Karl Marx on the church door."

  "That was Martin Luther actually." (Sometimes I can't help these things.)

  She snorted. "Who cares?"

  "I do." Changing the subject.
"Because I don't want you to die."

  Janis snorted. "I'm not going to bow to her. I'm going to crush her. I'm going to show her how stupid and futile and second-rate she is."

  And at that moment there was a signal at my door. I ignored it.

  "The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute," I said.

  Her face wrinkled as if she'd bit into something sour. "I can't believe you're quoting that old dead guy again."

  I have found you an argument, I wanted to say with Doctor Sam, but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

  The signal at my door repeated, and this time it was attached to an electronic signal that meant Emergency! Out of sheer surprise I dissolved the door.

  Mei was there in her quadbod, an expression of anger on her face.

  "If you two are finished congratulating each other on your brilliant little prank," she said, "you might take time to notice that Fritz is missing."

  "Missing?" I didn't understand how someone could be missing. "Didn't his program come back from Titan?"

  If something happened to the transmission, they could reload Fritz from a backup.

  Mei's expression was unreadable. "He never went. He met the Blue Lady."

  And then she pushed off with two of her hands and drifted away, leaving us in a sudden, vast, terrible silence.

  We didn't speak, but followed Mei into the common room. The other cadre members were all there, and they all watched us as we floated in.

  When you're little, you first hear about the Blue Lady from the other kids in your cadre. Nobody knows for sure how we all find out about the Blue Lady—not just the cadres on Ceres, but the ones on Vesta, and Ganymede, and everywhere.

  And we all know that sometimes you might see her, a kind smiling woman in a blue robe, and she'll reach out to you, and she seems so nice you'll let her take your hand.

  Only then, when it's too late, you'll see that she has no eyes, but only an empty blackness filled with stars.

  She'll take you away and your friends will never see you again.