by Kage Baker
“More’n we ever was, matey,” the Captain told him. “To the tune of nine hundred fifty thousand pounds!”
“Plus seventeen per cent.”
“Plus seventeen per cent. Smart as paint, my boy!”
Alec’s holidays had been spent at Bournemouth, in one rented villa or another, ever since he’d come to England, after his parents’ divorce. When he’d been small, he built sand castles and told inquiring adults that the Lewins, watchful from their beach chairs, were his grandparents. When he’d outgrown sandcastles he’d gone surfing, or explored Westboume. Here he’d found a public garden planted on the site of a house where Robert Louis Stevenson had once lived. Stevenson was Alec’s favorite author; though he had never read any of his books (only children who were going on to lower-clerical jobs were taught to read nowadays, after all). Alec had assiduously collected every version of Treasure Island ever filmed. Being an exceptionally bright boy, he had been able to spell out enough of the commemorative plaque in thegarden to tell him whose house had once stood there. He had run home in great excitement to tell the Lewins, who smiled and nodded and turned their attention back to their illegal bridge game with another elderly couple.
The last two summers, however, Alec had ventured through the pines and gone over to Lilliput, beyond Canford Cliffs. At Salterns Marina there was a place that rented sailboats, and for an extra fee would provide an instructor in the art of sailing. So quickly had Alec picked it up that in no time at all he’d been able to take his tiny craft out of the harbor and into Poole Bay by himself, working his way between Brownsea Island and Sandbanks like an old sailor.
Tacking back and forth, getting sunburnt and wet with the sea spray, catching the winds and racing sidelong over blue water, squinting against the glitter of high summer: Alec was happy. There was no one to apologize to out on the water, no one who wanted explanations. The global positioning satellites might be tracking his every move, but at least they were far up and unseen. He had at least the illusion of freedom, and really that was all anybody had, these days.
Sometimes he took his boat as far out on the bright horizon as he dared, and stretched out on the tiny deck and lay looking up at the sky, where the high sun swung behind the mast top like a pendulum. Sometimes he thought about never coming in at all.
Today Alec whistled shrilly through ‘Jus teeth as he traveled along Haven Road on his RocketCycle. The idea that it rocketed anywhere was a pathetic joke; it had an antigravity drive and floated, barely able at its best speed to outpace a municipal bus. But the sun was hot on his back and felt good, and the pine woods were aromatic, and he was on his way to have his first-ever real adventure on the high seas!
Arriving at the marina, Alec stored the RocketCycle and strode down the ramp toward his mooring, carrying a small black case. He waved at the attendant as he passed. The attendant smiled and nodded kindly. He was under the impression Alec was the victim of some sort of bone disease that had made him abnormally tall and which would shortly prove fatal, so he was invariably courteous and helpful. It took immanent death to provoke decent customer service nowadays.
“Looks like a great day to be out there!” Alec called, boarding the little Sirene.
“Bright,” agreed the attendant. “Think I’ll stay out all day!”
“Okay,” said the attendant. He watched from his chair as the boy powered up the fusion drive, checked all the instruments, cast off and moved out, running up the little sail. Then he settled back and turnedhis attention to his game unit, feeling pleased with himself for his tolerance and trying once more to recall which holo program it was that had shown a two-minute feature on genetic freaks… Alec, once he’d cleared Sandbanks, moved into the masking wake of the St. Malo ferry and glanced up involuntarily in the direction of the currently orbiting satellite. He opened his black case, which appeared to be a personal music system; slipped on earshells, found the lead and connected it to the Sirene’s guidance and communications console. He gave it a brief and carefully coded command. From that moment onward the satellite received a false image; and somewhere in a dark room of a thousand lit screens, one screen was persuaded to show nothing but images of the Sirene tacking aimlessly and innocently back and forth all day.
The object in the black case—which was not a personal music system—shot out a small antenna. The antenna fanned into a silver flower at one end. From this a cone of light shot forth, faint and nearly transparent in the strong sunlight, and a moment later the Captain materialized.
“Haar!” He made a rude gesture at the sky. “Kiss my arse, GPS! They won’t suspect a thing, now. Oh, son, what a lucky day it was for me when I shipped out with a bloody little genius like you.”
“Not so little any more,” Alec reminded him, taking the tiller and turning the Sirene a point into the wind.
“To be sure.” The Captain turned to regard Alec fondly. “My boy’s growing up. His first smuggling run! Faking out a whole satellite system all by himself. Ain’t nobody else in the world but my Alec can do that.” “I wonder why they can’t?” Alec speculated, peering back at the rapidly dwindling mainland. “It seems really easy. Am I that different from them?”
“Different is as different does, matey,” said the Captain smoothly, adjusting his lapels. He wasn’t about to explain just how different Alec was, especially at this time of adolescent anxiety. To be truthful, the Captain himself wasn’t sure of the extent of Alec’s abilities, or even why he had them. He knew enough to hide Alec’s genetic anomalies on routine medical scans. He’d done enough stealthy searching to discover that Alec’s DNA type made it extremely unlikely that he was a member of the human race as it presently existed, let alone the son of either Lord Fins-bury or the Right Honourable Cecilia Ashcroft, as his birth certificate stated. But why upset the boy?
“I’ve been thinking,” said Alec, “That as long as I can do stuff the rest of ‘em can’t, I ought to do some good for everybody. Don’t you think? I’ll bet a lot of people would like to have some privacy for achange. We could set up a consulting firm or something that would show people how easy it was to get around Big Brother up there.”
“Aw, now, son, that’s a right noble plan,” the Captain agreed. “Only problem with it is, we don’t want to lose our advantage, do we? As long as it’s just you and me has the weather gauge of them satellites, why, there ain’t no way they’ll ever know we’re getting around ‘em. But if you was to let other folks in on the secret… well, sooner or later there’d be trouble, see?”
“I guess so.” Alec frowned toward the Isle of Wight. “We’d draw attention to ourselves.”
“And we got to avoid that like it was the Goodwin Sands, son, or it’d be Hospital for you and a diagnostic disassembly for me, and farewell to freedom! Plenty of time for do-gooding once we’ve got you stinking rich, says I; you can give millions to charity then, eh?” proposed the Captain. Alec, thinking uneasily of a life immured in a padded cell in Hospital, nodded. He squared his shoulders and said, “Aye aye, Captain sir. So, when do we rendezvous with the Long John?”
“Let’s take her farther out into the channel first, boy. Two points south-southeast.” Mr. Learn had an office in the Isle of Wight, but he was seldom there. His job kept him out at sea most days and many nights, for he was the Channel Patrol.
Up until a week earlier he had enjoyed the title exclusively, but the Trade Council had decreed that he train an assistant. Mr. Learn was secure enough in his self-esteem to take this as a compliment; he knew his job was vital to the well-being of the nation. He simply wished they’d hired him someone English.
“Not that I hold your ancestry against you in any way,” he told Reilly, “Of course. But it’s a tough job, you see. Requires deep personal commitment. Clear understanding of the dangers involved. Constant vigilance.”
“I thought it was just cruising around trying to catch the Euros slipping us their national product and all and messing up our economy,” said Reilly. “Where’s the danger in t
hat?” Mr. Learn grimaced, then assumed his most patient expression. “Coming, as you do, from a, hem, more permissive culture, you mightn’t understand. As a member of the Channel Patrol, you have a sacred duty to prevent murder.”
“Murder?” Reilly cried. “Nobody at the Council interview said anything about murder!”
“I’ll try to put this in your terms. Your ethnic affiliation have a lot of,er, children. Now, suppose one day you were minding someone’s baby, and saw a vicious criminal sneaking up on the innocent thing, offering it a shiny bottle of poison!” Mr. Learn hissed, pacing the wheelhouse of the Patrol cutter. He peered keenly out at the horizon, dotted with skimming sails, and went on:
“Well, Reilly, what would you do? Would you let the little creature drink the poison down? They have no sense, you see, they’ll ingest any kind of toxic substance if it tastes nice. No; as a moral human being, you’d see it was your duty to snatch the nasty stuff away before harm was done.”
“So… the Euros have a secret plot going to poison babies?” Reilly inquired cautiously, wondering if Mr. Learn were crazy as well as bigoted.
“In effect, yes, they do,” said Mr. Learn. “Think about this for a moment. Consumers are like babies, aren’t they? You can’t trust them to know any better than to indulge themselves in what’s bad for them. That’s why we made moral, sensible prohibitions to protect them all! The strong-willed must protect the weak against the profiteers who would entice them with their impurities.”
“Okay,” said Reilly, “But how’s a bottle of pouilly fuiss é that nobody but rich people can afford anyway going to do harm?”
Mr. Leam shook his head sadly.
“If it were only as simple as that,” he said. “They deal in far worse than wine. Think of the hideous immorality involved in the mere production of cheese, man! The enslavement of animals. The forced extrusion of foul stinking moldy curds of stuff so full of grease and bacteria it runs on the plate and plays havoc with the intestines! What civilized country would allow something like that on the market?
“And coffee! Horrible little black beans like cockroaches, just full of toxins. You wouldn’t enjoy being a caffeine addict, I can tell you. Fingers trembling, teeth stained and chattering, heart pounding, eyes popping, arteries worn right through from the strain, aneurysm striking any time and exploding your brain!” Mr. Leam smote the navigation console with his fist. “Bam! Like that. And tea just as bad, even more insidious because the fool Consumers get sentimental about it.
“And cocoa’s bad enough, with all those exotic alkaloids to stimulate unnatural desires (can you imagine there was a time when people fed it to their children?)—but chocolate! Dreadful oily voluptuous insinuating filth just full of addictive chemicals, and loaded with refined sugar, eating away at your teeth with its acids until they’re worn down to broken suppurating snags. Peanuts bloating you with calories and swelling you with toxic gases and salts, bleached flour to load yoursystem with invisible toxins, ghastly black messes of fish roe—think of the outrage done to the harmless sturgeon!”
“I never realized!” gasped Reilly, who had gone green as an organic pistachio. Mr. Leam wiped foam from the corner of his mouth and looked stern. “And this, man, is why we live. Only we can preserve the General Prohibition, for without our ceaseless care, the nation’s borders will be overrun with peddlers of pollution.”
“Yes, sir,” said Reilly, and with new eyes peered fearfully across at the lowering darkness of Armorica.
“I’m picking up the Long John, matey,” the Captain informed Alec. “Two kilometers west-southwest and closing fast.”
“Cool!” Alec turned expectantly and watched the horizon, and presently saw the tiny foaming wake making straight for the Sirene, for all the world as though a torpedo had been launched at her. Within a few yards of her hull, it bobbed to the surface and halted, then came slowly forward with a distinct paddling motion.
“Who’s my smart little Long John, then?” crooned Alec. Grinning, he bent over the gunwale and lifted from the water something that looked like a cross between a toy submarine and a mechanical dog. Alec had created it over the previous week, using odds and ends he had in his room and employing principles that seemed fairly basic to him but which no human presently living could have grasped. He had launched it on the previous evening, dropping it quietly off the end of Bournemouth Municipal Pier. “Been out nosing around like I programmed you? What’d you find? Let’s see, yeah?” The Long John drew in its paddles and sat motionless as Alec connected a lead from the console to a port in its nose.
The Captain crouched down and regarded it, scowling with concentration. “All systems still operational,” he confirmed. “Data’s coming in now. Looks like it done the job, by thunder! Here’s them coordinates… ” He lifted his head and looked out into the distance to the bleak hulk of the old Sealand platform. “The cargo’s there, all right; smack on the sea bottom, thirty meters off the northwest pylon. I’m setting a course now. Bring her around, son!”
“Aye aye, Captain sir!”
In the early part of the twenty-first century there had been a brief fad for civil liberty that had taken the form of establishing tiny independent countries in international waters, built on floating platforms or abandoned oil rigs. This had given rise to a loosely organized federation collectively known as Sealand. Eventually, as the Second Age of Saildawned and people realized it was much more convenient simply to live aboard megaclippers, the cramped Sealand outposts themselves were abandoned. Rusting, hoary now with guano they stood, and sea birds nested in their blind windows and gaping doors. Dark birds of another kind entirely used the platforms as landmarks and places to rendezvous, which was why a hundred and twenty kilos of refined sugar—one of the most expensive of controlled substances, in this day and age—lay scattered in its vacuum-sealed crates on the seabed nearby.
“We’re over ‘em now, son,” the Captain announced with satisfaction. “Let’s see if the tiny bugger’s up to his programming.”
“Of course he is,” said Alec, disconnecting the Long John and lifting it over the side. The moment it touched the surface, its little paddles deployed, and it trod water patiently while Alec attached a length of cable to its stern. When the cable was in place, the Long John dove down, vanishing swiftly in the green water, the cable unspooling behind until it popped off the reel and floated down out of sight. Alec smirked and gave the Captain two thumbs-up.
“Telemetry coming back now,” growled the Captain, staring at the horizon in a preoccupied kind of way. “There’s the loot. Initiating recovery mission.”
“Brilliant,” said Alec, and leaned back at the tiller. Far below the Sirene’s keel, the Long John settled on the nearest of the sugar crates and extended a pair of manipulative members. It set about reeving one end of the cable through the crate’s carry-handle, and when it had tied the cable off securely, the Long John rose and paddled off to the next crate, towing the cable after it.
“Yes, the old Sealand stations,” said Mr. Learn, shaking his head. “You’d think they were something innocent, wouldn’t you? Lovely spot for terns and whatnot to nest, oh yes. But they’ve still got the stink of civil disobedience about them.”
“Nobody could live there anymore,” said Reilly. He squinted through the scopex at the platform near which the Sirene was currently busy. “I can’t even see a fusion generator. Ooh, ugh! There’s a bird doing something nasty to another bird. I thought only people—”
“It’s a nasty world, Reilly,” said Mr. Leam. “Where criminals grab every chance to carry out their wicked trade. They’ve been using that very platform as one of their meeting places, you know. I’ve been watching it for some time now. Last month I nearly had them! The Lisiane out of Wexford, registered to the Federation Celtique as usual, always hanging about here. What’s a sport vessel want with all thatcargo space, I ask you? Probably engaged in fishing too, the murdering bastards.”
“What happened?” inquired Reilly, a little
testy over the slur on the Celtic Federation.
“I caught them in the act,” Mr. Leam gloated. “Taking something from the Tin tin out of St. Malo. Bore down on them both with my siren roaring and they dropped everything and fled over the horizon!
But the Lisiane will be back. Sooner or later they’ll think I’ve forgotten them, sooner or later they’ll think it’s safe to sneak back and recover whatever it was they had to sink. I’ll be here waiting when they do, and I’ll have a little surprise for them.”
“Er—there’s somebody out there now, you know,” said Reilly, tapping the scopex to closer focus.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mr. Leam, not lifting his eyes from the console screen. “The satellite readout’s perfectly clear. There are no vessels within a five-kilometer radius of the platform. It says so right here.”
“I guess I’m seeing a mirage or something then,” said Reilly, lowering the scopex. And there the matter might have rested; but Mr. Leam, with a sudden flash of the intuition that made him such a successful opponent of evildoers, recalled that his enemies were after all fiendishly clever. He grabbed the scopex from Reilly and trained it again on the distant station.
“There is a boat!” he yelled. “But it’s not the Lisiane… what do they think they’re playing at? Well, they won’t fool ME!”
He dropped the scopex and hauled on the wheel, bringing his cutter about sharply and making for the platform under full power. Reilly yelped as cold spray hit him, and he grabbed at the rail.
“Are we going to scare them off?” he shouted.
“No,” replied Mr. Leam. Grinning through clenched teeth, he reached over and squeezed in a command on the console. Reilly gaped as a panel opened in the forward deck and a laser cannon rose into bow-chaser position.
“Jesus!” Reilly screamed. “Those are illegal!”
“So is smuggling,” replied Mr. Leam. “We’ll board and search, and if we meet the least resistance we’ll sink them. Such is justice on the high seas, Reilly.”