The Stone Dogs

by S. M. Stirling

  "Ahhh—" the exec began. The electrowafers were excellent, and had opened up a whole new range of near-space applications, not to mention the eventual civilian uses. "Well, we're havin' real quality problems. Seventy percent rejection rate, even on our best fabricators, an' we needs those wafers." He caught himself just in time, not mentioning the use to which the sensor-effector systems would be put. The American—the ex-American, he reminded himself—-was a defector, after all, and quite startlingly naive politically, but it was better not to remind him of certain things without need.

  Ekstein frowned, took the data cartridge from the man and slipped it into the table unit. His hands skittered over the keyboard and the ball-shaped directional control; Bennington noted how their clumsiness vanished, turning to fluid skill. "Hey, no problem," he said after a minute. "It's the amorphous layer that's causing it. You're getting uneven deposition. How do you—"

  Tetrarch Bennington tuned out the technical discussion and stared moodily out the mullioned windows of the salon. It was a cold bright morning outside; the courtyard's brick pavement was new-swept, white snow in the mortar-grooves between herringbone red brick. Gardens laced with white-ice hoarfrost, fairy-silver grass, and black treetrunks beneath hammered-metal branches, flowerbeds pruned back and dormant beneath their coats of mulch-straw. The edge of the forest was a black wall, and the surface of the moat clear gray ice. It would be warming soon, though. She. was a bananalander from Natealia, born in Virconium, and the clear freshness of the Northern spring never failed to enthrall.

  "Oh," the exec was saying. She glanced up with a start. Her coffee had gone cold, and she signed for the serf to bring another.

  "Oh, well… Why didn't we think of that?" He looked down at the screen, rubbing his brow in puzzlement.

  The American grinned. "Hey, man, it always looks that way. That should get you down to, hmmm, fifteen percent rejections, easy. Null-G applications of amorphous silicon deposition are tricky; it's not my specialty, you know, but I think that's the way to go. Especially with EV channels and particle-stream etching, you know."

  "Many thanks, suh," the exec continued, as the terminal downloaded the details into his attach case and clicked completion. He shook hands with the ex-American. "Service to the State."

  "Have a nice d—h, Glory to the Race," Ekstein replied.

  The room fell silent as the exec left. There was a crackle from the big fireplace, a glimmer of flamelight, and pale winter sun on polished stone and wood. Ekstein sighed, shifting restlessly and then moodily taking another croissant. The serf moved in deftly to sweep up the crumbs around his plates. She was a pert little thing, in a uniform of short skirt and white cap and bib-apron that had been another of Ekstein's eccentricities. He ran a hand up her thigh, but half-heartedly, even when she leaned into the clumsy caress and smiled.

  That's a bad sign, Bennington thought. He's not screwing anything that moves, anymore.

  "What's the matter, Dave?" she said quietly as the serfs left.

  He slumped in the chair, hands resting loosely between his knees.

  "Oh, I don't know," he said, frowning. "I… I feel lonely, I guess."

  "Hmmm, I thought yo' were lonely befo'," she replied. Every word and gesture was going down on record for the SD psychs to mull over, but you had to get a personal gestalt to really know an individual. Besides, he was like a puppy; you wanted to see him wag his tail. "Yo' girls not givin' satisfaction?"

  "No, no, they're great!" he said. "Meiling and Bemadette especially." His face puckered a little. "Yeah, I was real lonely. Only… Well, sometimes Bernie and Izzy and Pedro would come over, and we'd have beer and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and play Knights and Sorcerers on my old Pacifica. I sort of miss it, I guess. I can play against myself here, but it's not the same."

  He looked up, and his eyes were misty. "Say, Cathy, maybe you could get me an online terminal, and I could patch into Pan Net? Then I could play them remote."

  Bennington sighed inwardly; you had to swat a puppy if it piddled on the rug, but it wasn't pleasant. She forced a warm smile. "Mmmm, Dave, I don't think we could do that. I mean, the other end wouldn't allow it." Probably true, and no way the SD would let an OSS op get a line on this prize.

  He blinked. "Look," she continued, "yo've been workin' too hard, Dave. What say, in a month o' two, we fly down to Nova Cartago or Alexandria. We'll go out to some of the nightspots, meet a few "carefully selected—"people, relax, hey?"

  He nodded, halfway between interest and listlessness. She crossed around the desk, put an arm about his shoulders. "An' in the meantime, we'll have cook make us up some peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches,"—Mother Freya, the things I do for the Race—"an' yo' can teach me how to play Knights and Sorcerers, Meiling and Bemadette will sit in."

  OSS STATEHOUSE

  STATE OF VIRGINIA

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICAJANUARY, 1973

  "Goddammit, my brains are going to run out my nose!" Marya said, and grunted as she bench-pressed the weights again. "Ninety-nine, one hundred." The link-rod fell back into its rest with a clang. She took a deep breath; the room smelled of sweat, hers and others, of oil and machinery and the straw matting on the floor. The lights were sunlamps, to give them the appropriate tan, and the walls were lined with mirrors.

  "That's, 'Gods curse it, mah brains is goin' run out mah nose,' " the instructor said. "Repeat it, Lefarge."

  She lay back on the padded exercise bench and repeated the sentence in Draka dialect, turning her head to watch the instructor. He was a defector from the Domination, about twice her age: an unremarkable man, medium-brown hair and eyes and an outdoorsman's weathered face. He was doing one-handed chinups while he listened with a slight frown of concentration on his face.

  "Bettah," he said. "But remembah, don't drawl too much. Brains is buh'rains, not braaains. The dialect has roots hereabouts, but it's changed in different directions since the 1780s. Over to the cycle."

  She groaned and swung herself up, walking over to the fixed exercise cycle. Her sweatsuit was soaked and chafing; she wiped her face on the corner of the towel around her neck. Her brother was using the Unitorso machine beside it, with his forearms against the vertical spring-loaded bars, pressing them in to his chest, holding, then slowly out again. The muscles of his chest and stomach stood out, moving fluidly beneath the fair skin. Marya felt a sudden sharp stab of affection, oddly mixed with the sort of aesthetic admiration you might feel for a statue or a sunset.

  Damnation, she thought dismally. The number of eligible males around was small, and seemed either gentlemanly or disinterested. A man could marry outside the field, as long as the wife didn't mind not being told a lot of things. For a female agent, another agent was about the only game in town. It's like being tall, she thought. You have to go for the tall boys, but the short girls poach on them, too.

  Of course, she could start asking them herself… Her mouth twisted wryly. Sex was a tool of the trade, and she was sure enough she could do anything required in that line, but somehow it was different in a social setting. Benefits of a Catholic upbringing. Shit.

  The instructor had finished his second sequence of fifty and dropped lightly to the ground, landing silently on the balls of his feet. He was dressed as they were, in loose felted cotton exercise clothing and soft shoes, but he seemed to flow as he walked.

  "Get to it," the Draka said. "Yo' wind needs it." He stopped by Fred, looked him up and down appraisingly. Then he seemed to blur, and his fist struck the man low in the belly. Marya winced at the hard smack, and her brother doubled over with a grunt. His hand had come down to block and stayed suspended three-quarters of the way to completion.

  "Better," the Draka said, then chuckled. "Back home, they'd envy me mah chances, gettin' to beat up on Yankees fo' a livin'."

  Marya pedaled grimly. "If yo' loves us so much, why're yo' heah?" she enunciated carefully.

  The Draka looked at her. "Good. Treatin' yo'r's' right, now."

  It
isn't a lack of expression, she thought, puzzled. Like most Draka she had seen, the instructor somehow gave an impression of stillness even when he was moving. Ah. No unintentional gestures, she decided. The hands moved only when he wanted them to, and the body stayed rock-still unless ordered to move. No twitches, jerks, shifts.

  "It was a mattah of circumstances, luck an' opportunity," he continued. "I's an only chile, and mah mothah died early. Pa away most all the time, no relatives near. Raised by serfs mo' than most, didn't fit in well at school. Eventually realized that all the people I really cared about had numbahs on they necks, and that I was spendin' my life grindin' them down." He grinned, a gaunt expression. "Had an opportunity to get out, took it. Doesn't mean I've got any particular affection fo' Yankees or Yankeeland. The air stinks, everythin's ugly, there's no decent huntin', and the people are soft an' contemptible."

  He checked the medical readouts built into the cycle: heartbeat, respiration, neurological profile. "Good enough. Two of you are gettin' as near passable as yo' ever will in the time available; toward the top of the bottom one-fifth of Citizens. Pity, yo've both got good potential. Bettah than average."

  Fred was using the Unitorso again, the mark of knuckles a fading red mark on his stomach below the solar plexus. "If… that's… so… why're we… so… godsdamned… rotten?" he asked, careful to keep his tone neutral.

  The Draka looked up at him. "Time," he said. "Y'all didn't start early enough; that affects y' whole system. Bone-density, fo' example, basic body-fat ratios, metabolic rate an' so forth. Mah genes is no more than middlin', athletics-wise, but y'all will never catch up. If yo'd been in the agoge from age five, yo'd be notable excellent."

  ABOARD AIRSHIP DOULOS

  APPROACHING NANTES AIRHAVENLOIRE DISTRICT, TOURAINE PROVINCEDOMINATION OF THE DRAKAAPRIL, 1973

  Frederick Lefarge had not flown by airship since he was a child; in the Alliance countries lighter-than-air was used mainly for freight, these days. The Domination had its own turbojets and scramjets, but simply attached less importance to haste, and neither of the Powers allowed overflights by aircraft of the other. London-Nantes was the sole passenger link between the Alliance and Europe, maintained by the Transportation Directorate; the Alliance had accepted the arrangement, but insisted that only slow and easy-to-monitor dirigibles be used.

  "Welcome home, Mastah, Mistis," the serf customs clerk said, handing him and Marya the forms.

  The ferry dirigible was still at five thousand feet, time enough to complete the paperwork and to spare, but the American agents had come early to the lounge. That was in character for their personas, Draka eager to be home.

  It is a comfortable way to travel, he mused. But it gives you too much time to think. He had been learning something of the nature of fear, this trip. Swift flashes, like the moment they passed the barricades in London and stepped onto territory that was Draka by treaty. The first green Security Directorate uniform, with the skull patches on the collar. Watching the Channel dwindling away below. A slow gnawing; every moment increased the danger, and there were a lot of moments to come.

  Still, dirigibles are comfortable. Particularly compared with being strapped into a windowless hypersonic tin can, boring through the stratosphere at Mach 12 with the leading edges cherry-red. The Doulos was a teardrop of fiber-matrix composite five hundred meters long; near the bow a semicircular strip of the lower hull had been made transparent, as windows for the main lounge. The clear synthetic curved sharply outward for nearly two stories above his head, and from his seat at the edge of the deck he had a view that would have made an agroaphobe cringe, straight down. Countryside for the last few hours, and now the broad greenbelt that always surrounded a major Draka city. There were a quarter million people in Nantes.

  None of the jumbled mixed-use fringe you saw in the Alliance; plantation fields, then parks and public gardens and manicured forest. Transport-corridors, more rail and less highway than he was used to. The industrial sector was to the east, along a section of the river that had been dredged for shipping. Anonymous factories with their labor-compounds of three-story flats grouped around paved courts. Shipyards bristling with overhead cranes, warehouses, all along an orderly gridwork of paved streets and rail sidings. Some of the streets were tree-lined; that grew more numerous towards the west, in residential districts reserved for the serf elite of technicians and bureaucrats. Then the Citizen quarter, a cluster of public buildings and a scatter of homes wide-spaced amid gardens.

  He turned his attention to the paper:

  Name. Antony Verman

  Place and Date of Birth. Archona, 1947: a Citizen population of over two million, which cut down the chance of meeting someone who should know a personality that existed solely as pits and spots in a read-only optical memory bank. Quite a good cover; they had worked hard to slip it into the files.

  "Flagged," the instructor had said. "If the Security Directorate checks it, they'll get a warning you're War Directorate Military Intelligence; the War Directorate will be told you're a krypteia hotshot."

  The Domination's two armed services liked each other only marginally more than either loved the Alliance, and talked no more than they had to. Of course, the cover would still not stand up to detailed investigation; there were too many records, in too many separate files.

  Military Service. Infantry, XXI Airmobile; as close to anonymous as you could get.

  Occupation. Ceramic design consultant; luxury manufactures like that were generally handled by small businesses, not the omnipresent Combines. A designer was doubly independent, was more free to be a rolling stone with no connections. Better still to have no occupation, but without a good excuse a person who just lived on their Citizen stipend was a figure of some suspicion and contempt, and would attract attention when traveling.

  Purpose of visit abroad. Reviewing samples of American ceramics, of course. There was an interesting collection in the memory of the impeccably Draka Helot-IV analogue/ digital personal comp in his attache case, and anyone making inquiries would find a string of design studios and shops with perfectly genuine memories of the two young Draka. That had been the beginning of their assignment, seeing if they could fool Americans first. And pass the critical gaze of the Draka defectors who had been their final instructors, in everything from etiquette and gossip to fighting-style and sexual technique.

  He glanced aside at his sister. Tradecraft's good enough to fool me, he thought. They had both had minor cosmetic implants to make their faces unrecognizable to anyone who knew their genuine identities, hormone treatments to change their body-fat ratios, but it was more than that. Most of all the look, the hard-edged glossy feel of one of the Domination's elite. Not even just Draka; looking at her with his persona's eyes he could place her, city-born, probably from the southern provinces.

  He finished the form and snapped his fingers for the serf. The lounge was growing a little crowded. Two hundred or more; thirty or so Draka, settling in around them, and the rest from the Alliance, mostly Americans and English. Some on business, others well-heeled tourists prepared to pay highly for sights and experiences only the Domination could offer; Fred looked at them with a distaste most of the Citizens around him seemed to share. The Domination allowed a trickle of closely-supervised visitors, as much for the Intelligence opportunities as for the Alliance dollars they brought.

  There was a subliminal change in the vibration of the hull; he looked back and saw the big turbocompound engine-pods swiveling. Distant pumps went chunk-whir, compressing hydrogen to liquid and draining it into the insulated tanks along the keel. Fred's mouth was dry as he felt the slight falling-elevator sensation of descent; he sipped at his glass of sparkling mineral water. They were over the airhaven now, passing rows of dirigibles in their cradles, acres of concrete and rail. The tall cylinder of the docking tower was ahead of them, and the Doulos slid toward it with the calm precision of computer piloting.

  Contact, and a dying of machine-noise that had been imperceptib
le before. More movement but with a different feel, heavier than the cushiony grace of lighter-than-air, as the airship established negative buoyancy and sank into its cradle; more chunking noises, as the fuel and gas lines connected. The scene outside sank to four stories above ground level, then pivoted slowly as the cradle turned the airship and drew it toward the waiting terminal. There were three others with their noses locked into the huge cone-shaped depressions in the giant building's wall. The Doulos glided into the fourth docking bay and halted; there was a whine as a ten meter broad section of the forward window slid up.

  "Let's go," he said.

  Home—In a way, Marya thought, as they walked through the gate into the terminal. France. The country where we were conceived.

  Although this terminal was post-War, pure Domination. Probably built in the early '50s to a standard pattern. A huge barrel-vaulted passenger terminal, the coffered ceiling in pale blue and silvergilt tiles; the walls were murals, landscapes, the floor streaked gray marble. Pillars around the walls, trained over with climbing plants. The Citizens' section of the great building was relatively small; most of the traffic was over the other side of the low stone balustrade. There it was busy, swarming even. Most of the serfs there were in overalls of varying cut, livery, color-coded Combine suits with identifying logos on the backs. Or uniform, green for SD internal-security, dove-gray for the serf component of the Directorate of War. Management level, authorized to travel alone.

  And a coffle, forty or fifty people crouched within a rope barrier. Young adults with children, and a few ranging up to middle age, in cheap cotton overalls or blouses and skirts. They were mostly dark, with high cheeks and slant eyes:

  Asians, brought in from the main resevoir of surplus labor in the Far East. Nantes was a shipbuilding center, and Intelligence said that the submarine yards were being adapted to produce components for the second generation of Draka pulsedrive spaceships. the nuclear-powered deepspace vessels were more like ships than aircraft, no need to shave ounces when total payloads were well over five thousand tonnes.