Children No More-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  Left turned around and faced me. "Mr. Moore?" he said. "Jon?"

  I forced myself to let go of the island and focus on him. "Sorry," I said.

  He smiled again. "It's okay. I understand."

  He didn't. He thought I'd forgotten to go, but I saw no point in correcting him. Instead, I turned and followed a couple of paces behind him.

  We proceeded down the path in that little line, moving together, the way Jennie and I often had, but with no fun in it this time, no laughs, no pointing at the ocean or the clouds, no pausing to sniff any of the small, wild, white and blue-flecked flowers that dotted the hillside grasses here and there, as if someone had thrown blossoms into the air and let the wind carry them where it would. We walked without talking. They didn't seem to notice the beauty around them.

  I thought of her the entire way down. I wanted to believe that they were telling me the truth and soon I'd be with her. I couldn't. Instead, I knew with a stomach-leadening certainty that wherever they were taking me, she would not be there.

  I'd watched the flying ships carry Jennie away, but I'd never come close to one. From the mountainside where I'd spied on them, they'd always appeared perfect: smooth, sleek, silvery ships that pushed on the ground with huge roaring winds, rose into the sky, and shot away. As I approached this one, I saw dents and dings and discolored bits and all sorts of small scars. It was still impressive, but now I understood that the perfection had been only an illusion.

  Two strides from the entrance to the ship, the lead man stopped, turned, and stared at me. I stopped, too. He studied my face for a long time, shook his head, and said, "You look normal enough."

  I had no idea what I was supposed to say, so I stayed quiet.

  "At your size, I'd have expected more facial hair, but other than that . . . ." His voice trailed off, but he kept staring at me.

  Jennie had explained this part to me. "My sister told me it was because I wasn't really a teenager yet."

  "As big as you are? And aren't you sixteen?"

  I nodded. "I am, but that's what she told me, and she always tells me the truth."

  He stepped closer, so close we were almost touching. "Did she explain what's wrong with you?"

  I nodded again. "My brain doesn't work as well as most people's. Because of that, even though my body grew big, I wasn't a teenager yet. She said not to worry about it. She always told me that I had a smart heart, and that was enough." I thought again about letting him know that she had fixed me so I'd have a smart head, too, but I couldn't risk causing her trouble for helping me.

  He signed. "Okay. It's just that you're not like most of them."

  "Who?"

  He smiled, but it was a sad expression, with not a trace of happiness in it. He turned, clapped me on the back, and pushed me toward the ship.

  "Like your sister told you," he said, "don't worry about it."

  He followed me inside. The other man came after him.

  The door shut behind us.

  "It's time for us to leave," Left said.

  Being in the air ship was like being nowhere at all. They made me sit alone in a small room with no windows and no grass to rest on and no one to keep me company, and they left. The door had no handle, so I sat where they told me to sit, and I waited. The floor was metal and hard and even dirt would have been better, but I had no choice, so I tried to stay happy while I waited. I didn't mind being alone—I've always been good at that and have spent most of my life on my own—but I would have enjoyed seeing what Pinkelponker is like from the air. With nothing to do and nothing to look at, I finally decided I might as well nap. I stretched out on the floor, which was even less comfortable for resting than it was for sitting, even worse than the rock floor in Jennie's and my secret cave, and after a while I fell asleep.

  The big man who woke me was someone I hadn't seen before. He stayed in the doorway, pointed a gun at me, and yelled, "Get up, and get out!"

  By habit, I shook my head to clear it. Thinking was always hard for me, and it was particularly difficult after I'd been sleeping. This time, though, I didn't need to do it; I snapped awake to instant awareness. I was more and more convinced that Jennie really had improved my mind.

  I stood. "Is Jennie here?"

  The man stepped back and pointed to his left with the gun. "Out."

  I didn't move. "If Jennie's not here, I don't want to go."

  "Here's how it works," the man said, his voice completely flat, like someone talking about whether the waves were big or small. "You move now, or I shoot you in the leg and drag you. No more talk. Got it?"

  I shrugged; how could I not understand? I walked where he pointed. I'd known from the start that they were lying to me, but part of me had kept hoping they were taking me to Jennie. They weren't, and there was nothing I could do about it. I had never had a lot of choices, though, so that was fine. On Pinecone, each morning I got up and worked where they told me, planting and harvesting and clearing. When I had time to myself, I swam or sat on the mountain and always hoped for those hours when Jennie could be with me and we could again be our own little family, brother and sister, all either of us really had. It wasn't bad, living like that, not really, and I was good at it. Maybe whatever this was wouldn't be so bad, either—though the fact that the man used a gun to force me obey him made me think that wherever I was going was not good, not good at all.

  He directed me down a short hall and to the doorway through which I had entered the ship. It slid open as I stood in front of it.

  "Out," he said.

  "Where are we?" All I could see was dirt and small bushes and the side of a mountain. It didn't look like Pinecone, so I figured we were on another island, but I had no idea which one.

  The man chuckled briefly. "Dump," he said. "We call it Dump. Now, get out. Move away from the ship quickly, because we won't wait to take off."

  I was afraid and very much didn't want to go. I didn't know anyone here. Jennie wasn't here. I didn't know who would take care of me.

  I turned my head to say something else. Before I could speak, a hand pushed me in the center of my back, and I stumbled onto the ground.

  "Run," the man said as the ship sealed itself.

  Wind rushed downward from the ship's wings, and it roared. Dust swirled all around me. I stood, took two steps, and the ship began to rise. I ran a few more strides, tripped on something—I couldn't see the ground through the dust—and fell hard. I tasted blood and put my hands over my ears to protect them from the huge noise.

  As the sound faded and the dust began to settle, I rolled onto my back and wiped the grime from my eyes and face. Small streaks of blood stained my hands; I'd split my lip in the fall.

  I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where I was. I was alone.

  I started crying, at first a few tears and then hard sobs, my chest tight from the effort. My heart hurt because I finally had to accept, really accept, that Jennie wasn't here, that I was alone, that nothing was right, nothing was the way it had been.

  "Is that the biggest baby you've ever seen, Bob?"

  I sat at the sound of the voice and stopped sobbing, though tears still mixed with the sand on my cheeks and my eyes burned. I wasn't alone!

  Ten strides in front of me stood the tallest, thinnest man I'd ever seen. At least a head taller than I was, maybe more, he looked about as thick as one of my legs. His body appeared even thinner because his arms were barely bigger than twigs.

  "I think it is, Benny," the tall man, Bob, said.

  For a moment, I couldn't spot the other person, the one who'd spoken first. Then I looked down and saw him. He was on a small, rough cart with a dark wooden platform and wheels that looked like someone had carved them from hunks of rock. His body and head were normal, and he looked about my age, maybe a bit younger, definitely a whole lot smaller. Where he should have had hands and feet, though, were things that looked like thick bird wings or flippers. He used them to push on the ground and roll the cart closer.

  "
Welcome to Dump," he said. His voice was very deep, deeper than that of most grown-ups. "It's obvious why they put us here, but you look fine. What's your story?"

  Before I could respond, he added, "Don't bother answering now. You'll have to explain it again to the others, and I don't want to hear it twice. Follow us."

  As he rolled off, his flippers slapping the ground in unison to propel him forward, he added, "And cut that crying crap right now. Soldiers don't cry, and we're at war." He glanced back at me. "You just don't know it yet."

  Chapter 9

  Just outside the jump gate station, planet Macken

  Lobo opened a front-facing display so I could watch as we passed through the jump gate aperture and emerged in space behind Trethen, Macken's smaller moon. Normally, I enjoy the process of jumping and discover in each leap through space a kind of wonder I rarely feel. Today, though, I couldn't fully appreciate the experience.

  "Take us closer to the planet," I said, "but don't leave the gate's area of influence."

  "Executing," Lobo said.

  As we turned, I stared at the gate in the display. Like all of them, it resembled a giant pretzel and was a single uniform color. Most were bright, but this one was a very pale green that reminded me of both the oceans and the forests below. Another trait it shared with all gates was its complete lack of tolerance for violence within a sphere with it as the center and a radius of a light-second. Should any ship within that area launch a weapon or be about to collide with anything else, a blast of highly coherent energy would burst from the gate and remove the offender as if it had never been there; the beam left no trace of the offending ship. No one understood how or why gates could do this, but the behavior never varied. In my last visit here, it had saved my life. Until I had spoken to Lim, I was staying inside this safe area in case her message was a trap.

  The gates were in all ways mysterious. No one knew how or why they let us instantaneously move between planets many, many light years apart, or what created them, or the reason that not one gate has ever had a single scratch or imperfection, or why every time a new aperture opens we can count on a human-habitable planet being on the other side. As with so many other mysteries humanity has encountered, we simply adapted to their presence and used them to our advantage; because of them, we've been able to colonize worlds all over the universe.

  Lobo interrupted my reverie. "I've scanned the local data drops and found an update from Lim with her contact info. She's in Glen's Garden."

  The name stirred more three-year-old memories. When I'd last visited Macken, Glen's Garden, though the planet's capital, had been a sleepy oceanfront town desperate enough for my help that it paid me with a then not fully functional Lobo. The jump gate had possessed only three apertures, but the growing fourth had led to conflict between two of the region's largest megacorporations. The entire world had been a beautiful and largely unsettled member of the Frontier Coalition. I'd left before progress could spoil it.

  "Call her," I said. "Also, who's running this planet now?"

  "Executing the first," he said. "From my analysis of the data stream, Lim's company still has the security contract, the FC's local government is still officially in power, and the same two corporations as before, Xychek and Kelco, actually dominate the economy." He paused for a second. "I have Alissa. Please recall that she rescued you from torture not so many years ago, and do try to be nice."

  I remembered, but the last thing I wanted was social coaching from a killing machine. If I ignored him, though, he might never shut up. "I'll be as nice as the situation permits. Now, please connect us. Full display."

  Her head appeared where the jump gate had been in the front of Lobo. She was still lovely, but her hair was shorter than I'd ever seen it, just a dark coating on her skull. Veins stood out on her neck and her shoulders and her arms and even across the top of her chest, all visible courtesy of the tight black tank top she was wearing. She'd cut a lot of weight since our last meeting, even since the recording she'd sent me.

  She had the hard, lean, distant look of someone ready to go to war.

  She nodded. "Moore."

  "Lim."

  "Thanks for coming."

  "You knew I would."

  She nodded again. "Yes."

  "The fact that I'm here doesn't mean I'm committing to anything. I want the whole story."

  "Now?"

  "No," I said, shaking my head. "I need to know there's no coercion in any of this."

  For the first time, she smiled. "Some things don't change," she said. "Like your paranoia."

  "Some things shouldn't change. I'm still alive."

  "So what proof would you like?"

  "Come to the jump gate," I said. "Take a commercial shuttle. Call me when you're in the station, and we'll dock for just long enough to pick you up. We'll talk when you're here."

  "Okay," she said, "but you need to understand this: I'll do what you want for now, but if you sign up, you agree to operate under my command. A whole lot of children don't have the time for us to bring you up to speed and let you design your own attack and run it with different people than the ones I've already recruited. Deal?"

  Lim was more than a little crazy, but she was a topnotch soldier and an excellent planner—and it was, after all, her show. "Deal. If I can't accept your setup, I won't join."

  "See you later today," she said. Her image winked out.

  "Oh, boy!" Lobo said. "A chance to entertain! Whatever shall we serve?"

  I don't mind waiting. Staying alert while watching time pass has been a key requirement of many of the jobs I've had. I was, though, now buzzing with energy from the combination of what I'd seen in the Tumani holos, my memories of Pinkelponker, and all the sleep I'd had. To work off some of it, I had Lobo withdraw the pilot couches and started doing cycles of simple body-weight exercises: squats, push-ups, dips on a ledge Lobo extruded, and pull-ups. I pushed the pace until I was pouring sweat and my body ached from the exertion. The nanomachines that lace all my cells would heal the torn muscles and remove the waste quickly enough that in short order I would be back to normal, but for that brief time I was deliciously exhausted and hurting.

  "Do you have any idea how much extra air filtration work your exercises cost me?" Lobo said.

  "Like you have something better to do," I said as I stretched out on the floor to relax.

  "In fact," he said, "I do. For example, right now I've hacked into the jump gate traffic computers and am checking the reservations of all the commercial shuttles headed this way. Lim is not yet on any of them, though to be fair to her, she wouldn't have had the time to catch one unless she'd been ready to roll the moment she disconnected from you."

  "As you so often remind me," I said, "your enormous intelligence can do so many things at once that hacking into a single system cannot possibly tax all of it."

  "Good point," he said, "I certainly can and do routinely execute more simultaneous projects than your human brain could ever hope to handle."

  Lying on the floor, the fatigue washing over me, I smiled at Lobo's needling and for a few moments was calm. I closed my eyes as unbidden memories claimed me and destroyed that peace.

  Chapter 10

  Dump Island, planet Pinkelponker - 139 years earlier

  I followed Benny and Bob to a path that hugged the side of the mountain and walked along it with them for a long time as its winding course took us higher. We stopped in front of a huge, thick green bush that they moved to the right to reveal a cave three meters wide and so deep that even though some torches burned at a few points on its walls, I couldn't see its rear. I studied the bush, which proved to be not a plant at all but rather a lot of branches woven together.

  When I looked away from it, Benny was staring at me. "Never seen camouflage?"

  "I don't think so," I said. "But I'm not sure. What is it?"

  Benny looked harder at me. "It's when you use something that blends into its surroundings to cover something that doesn't belong there."<
br />
  "So why do you cover a cave with camouflage?" I expected to have trouble saying the big word, but I didn't; it was easy. Maybe big words would all be easier now that Jennie had fixed my head.

  "To stop them from seeing what we're doing?"

  I looked around. "Who?"

  "The government."

  "But the soldiers left, and I didn't see anyone else on the walk here."

  Benny pointed upward with his chin. "At any time they want to, they can watch us from above, with satellites left over from when the generation ship was still launching them."

  I didn't understand any of what he said, but I didn't suppose that mattered. What bothered me was why they had to hide. "Is it bad if they see you?"

  "Yes," Benny said, "because they're the ones we're fighting, and you always want your enemies to have as little data as possible about you."

  I was amazed at how many words he knew. "You're really smart," I said.

  "Yes, but not smart enough that they were willing to keep me around when I have these" he raised his arm and leg flippers a few inches "instead of proper hands and feet."

  "So they brought you here, too?"

  "They dumped me here, just like you, just like all the others."

  Twelve more people appeared in the cave entrance—I was surprised by how quickly, almost instantly I could count them—and stared at me. Each one was clearly not normal. One's head was way too big. Another had skin that was rough and scaly and eyes that didn't blink. I felt bad staring at them, even though they seemed to be comfortable looking right at me, so I faced Benny again.

  "Why did the government leave all of us here? I wasn't doing anything bad."

  Benny shook his head. "How you were behaving has nothing to do with what they did. The background radiation here on Pinkelponker is high, higher than humans had to face back on Earth. It causes a great many mutations. Most people with them die before or during birth. Some survive. Of those that do, a few end up having valuable special abilities. The rest," he paused and looked at the others, "the rest are like us, people no one wants to be around. Freaks. They dump us here and check on us every now and then, just in case someone develops a useful ability. It's happened, but not often. For most of us, once you're here, you're stuck." After a long pause, he added, "Or worse, because sometimes they take the weakest of us for no good reason, and those people never return. I don't like thinking about what may have happened to them."