Fool's War

by Sarah Zettel

  She…

  Every board in the Pasadena’s data hold chimed sharply. Lipinski shot bolt upright in his chair where he’d been slumped.

  The pattern surges were starting. Dozens of them, huge and complex, all aiming for Port Oberon. They were back. They had done whatever damage they were able to, and now they were trying to get him, all of Dobbs’ black sheep cousins.

  Lipinski shoved thoughts of Dobbs as far away as he could. Maybe one day he’d be able to forgive her, but not now. Now he couldn’t even think about her.

  He had the necessary commands all laid out. He stabbed down the final period and the desk absorbed the code and shot it out of Pasadena’s main transmitter.

  One.

  The bounce-copies hit the receiver ‘scopes at Port Oberon.

  Two.

  The message TRANSACTION CONFIRMED spelled itself across the main board for Station One.

  Three. Four.

  The bounce-copies flew back across the vacuum to meet their owners.

  Five.

  The AIs leapt out into space.

  Six.

  The receiver scopes turned on their well-maintained gyros to stare long and hard at the Sun.

  Two seconds later, over a hundred patterns of photon and thought rocketed out into the boundless vacuum.

  Level thirteen was deserted. The cameras tracked her, but the waldos didn’t move.

  He knows I’m coming, thought Al Shei. And he doesn’t care. A wave of weariness washed over her, and she found she didn’t have the strength to wonder why that was.

  One hatchway stood open in the left hand wall, inviting her in. She took her bearings. The carpeting was above her and the cameras under her feet, so that was an outer door. The office probably.

  He was in there. Curran was in there.

  You don’t need to do this, said Asil. Just come home to me.

  “I do need to do this,” she told him as she kicked for the hatch. “He killed you, Asil.”

  I know, Beloved. I know.

  She grabbed onto the threshold and held herself in place. A broad-shouldered man with longish, grey hair and wearing burgundy coveralls floated above a great, square box of a desk, peacefully gazing out a window as the stars wheeled in the darkness. Al Shei’s mustard-yellow reflection showed up clearly on the glass.

  He turned his head and smiled at her. “‘Dama Al Shei, won’t you come in?” He waved his hand, a reserved gesture that only caused him to bobble a minuscule amount. “I am pleased to meet the woman who turned Evelyn Dobbs into a traitor.” Curran gave her the same the little half-bow Dobbs affected after finishing a performance.

  “Whatever Dobbs became she became on her own.” Al Shei held her place in the threshold. He was frighteningly graceful, and obviously was at least as used to free fall as she was. She was quite sure his little pose was an affectation, put on at this moment for her benefit. If it was meant to make her think twice about attacking, it was working.

  “Perhaps you are right.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “The temptations of the flesh are strong. The Prophet, I believe, warns against them.”

  “The Prophet, peace be unto him, warns against many things,” said Al Shei. “Including the duplicity of the outsider.”

  “The outsider. Interesting choice of words.” He stretched lazily, reclining in mid-air until he was floating prone over the desk. “Tell me,” he folded his hands on his stomach, “when we’re finished with this conversation, what are you going to do then? Kill me?”

  “If I can.” It felt strange to say it so calmly.

  He raised one finger. “That is also forbidden, I believe.”

  “My cousin has already pointed that out. I have far less reason to listen to you.”

  He’s trying to buy time, Beloved, Asil whispered. What is he waiting for?

  Al Shei let herself drift into the cabin. She scrabbled along the wall until she was to the right of the open hatchway. The solid wall felt better at her back than the open corridor.

  “You have no reason to listen to me. After all, what is one more life to you?”

  “What?” she asked, turning so she could keep Curran fixed in the center of her face plate

  “Your crew was successful in their efforts. My people did not manage a tidy withdrawal from Earth. It has cost us dearly.”

  From Earth? Al Shei’s heart beat hard. You were supposed to be attacking the IBN. Merciful Allah, what’s been happening?

  “They were not completely successful, mind you,” Curran went on. “Some of us will escape yet, even though the Fool’s Guild will be combing the network for us. We will be able to regroup and begin again. I wanted to be very sure you knew that.”

  Al Shei could barely hear him over the roar in her blood. The AIs had failed. Whatever they had tried, it hadn’t worked.

  She licked her dry lips. “What do you think you’re going to gain by that? We’ll hunt you down like dogs in the street. We’ll make war on you for a hundred years if that’s what it takes.”

  Curran barked out a laugh. “Oh, no, ‘Dama. You overestimate your fellow Humans. Some of you will indeed fight us, for awhile, but not all of you. Some of you will bargain when you realize we can take your networks, your worlds, your very selves hostage whenever we please. Some of you will agree to our terms, and we will let you have free passage through our country. The rest of you will see that the fight isn’t worth it and you will eventually treat with us.” He rolled over and smiled slowly at her. “And you will take the price we set for your hands and your eyes. You will work for us and be glad about it.”

  Al Shei felt herself begin to laugh. Her diaphragm bounced painfully against her injured abdomen, but she couldn’t stop. Tears bounced around the inside of her helmet, smacking her face at random.

  “You poor, stupid fool!” she cried. “You don’t understand do you?” He was twisting so he was standing now and for the first time, anger darkened his calm face. “You don’t know how slowly time moves for us. Members of my religion committed a capital error five hundred years ago, and we are still hated for it. There are still people willing to harangue us, even kill us, for being Muslim.” She stabbed a finger toward the hatchway. “Ask the Jews, ask the Christians and the Witches and the Freers and the Purists, they will all tell you how badly their ancestors were persecuted in wars that were over two and three thousand years ago. Now, you’re going to start a new war and you think human beings will take your deals and be happy.” She gasped and got a lungful of her own tears. The coughing fit sent spasms of pain through her. Curran was drifting closer.

  “Maybe some of us will deal, like you say,” she wheezed, “but I tell you, not everyone will.” Reflexively, she reached up to try to brush the tears away. Her hand just slapped against her helmet, and her elbow knocked against her cutting torch. “You might win the major battle but you’ll be left with a thousand guerilla wars. Every hacker with a grudge, every cracker who lost a friend will tell their children how to fight you and they will come after you because they know where you are. We had to run away from each other, Curran, to achieve what peace we’ve got. We ran like the wind to the farthest places we could reach. You…you’ve got nowhere to go. You’ll be under siege in the networks for a thousand years!”

  She shook her head. “You cannot beat us all. You can’t even keep your own kind under control!”

  “I don’t have to beat you all.” He reached out and closed his hand around her wrist. “Not all of you.”

  Al Shei froze. Curran smiled and from his tool belt, he drew a long, razor-bladed splicing knife. “All I have to do is destroy enough of you and yours for the rest to realize that peace is less costly.”

  He hauled her towards him, holding the knife out straight. Al Shei’s free hand closed on the firing stud of the cutter and the gout of flame caught him in the chest. He screamed and kept on screaming. The force of the flame knocked them away from each other. The knife spun off into mid-air as Curran splayed all his limbs out. The
scream echoed over the roar of the flame. Al Shei gripped the torch in both hands and kept it aimed at him until the black spot had spread across his chest until his corpse had stopped screaming.

  Other voices were shrieking now, out of the intercom. “No! No! Murderer! She killed him! She killed him!”

  Al Shei swallowed. They’d be coming for her. The waldos were already rising from the walls. She didn’t want to die in here. She didn’t want to let Curran’s followers take her apart. Her abdomen throbbed and every joint ached with exhaustion. She’d never make it out the air lock, no matter how quickly she could find it. A waldo snatched at her. She shoved Curran’s body towards it.

  The window, Beloved!

  Al Shei lit the torch again and played it against the window. The waldos snapped their pincers at her, but couldn’t reach quite this far. Nothing needed to be repaired on the window. There had been no need for them to reach this far.

  The glass heated orange, red, white under her flame. “Somebody get up here!” screamed a voice at her back. “She’s going out the window!” A spiderweb of cracks began to creep out from around her torch flame. It was probably one of the self-repairing varieties, but it wasn’t meant to stand up to constant heat. The awful, sick whistle of escaping air shrilled in her helmet and its rush pressed her right against the glass. Her face plate turned coal black. All she could see was the glowing point in front of her and the thickening cracks around it. All she could feel was the mounting pressure at her back. It squeezed against her, pressing her spine into her breast bone. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, Beloved and the wind was loud and there were alarms going off in her suit and outside her suit and someone was screaming.

  The window burst open and Al Shei flew toward the stars on the back of the wind.

  Dobbs heard voices.

  Almost. Almost, said the voice.

  There’s no one there.

  We can’t just leave it here.

  I’ve gone insane.

  We can’t bring it either. It’s too slow. It won’t survive.

  I’m dying.

  It won’t survive on its own either.

  I can’t die. I’m not done yet!

  Leave it.

  Silence. Absolute silence.

  It took a long moment for Dobbs to realize she was awake, and she really was alone. She reached for the paths to the nearest transmitter and found nothing but thread thin conduits. She stretched in all directions, calling along the entire length of herself, and got no answer. The world had grown small. It fit tightly around her, and only her thinnest finger could reach any distance at all. Had Curran won? Had he trapped her inside some kind of bubble in Earth’s dead network?

  Be still. Think, Dobbs slowed her thoughts and reined in her increasingly frantic motions.

  Cohen was here, and Brooke, and… others. You were holding the network together. What’s the last thing you remember?

  The answer sent a throb of terror through her. Dobbs pulled back in on herself. Huddling into a ball, she reached inside and found the familiar patterns tangled beyond redemption in her own engorged coils.

  It was a long time before she could make herself stop screaming.

  When Guild Master Havelock found her, it took him even longer to recognize who she was.

  Can 56 drifted lazily through space. Yerusha had muted the monitor carrying the Landlords voices ordering everyone away from the area and demanded to know what the impounded Pasadena was doing out here.

  A big, bulbous tugger was trying to angle itself toward the can so it could get a grip on the rogue object with the gigantic waldo protruding from its bow. Its torch flickered on and off like a dying Christmas light. Yerusha imagined the pilot uttering some of the same curses she was.

  There was no way the Pasadena were going to get in there. Not past the tug, not with the M.U. ship on its way out from port. And even if they could, there was absolutely, positively no way to dock with that rolling, bobbling tin can.

  She was going to have to tell Schyler. She was going to have to tell him that this was one thing she could not do. If Al Shei was okay in there, she was also stuck in there.

  The can rolled over once more. A crystal shower burst out of the side and something small shot into the vacuum.

  Yerusha ordered the cameras to pin point the area and zoom in at maximum magnification. A mustard-yellow pressure suit tumbled against the blackness, surrounded by a blizzard of glittering stars. Hope blazed inside her. Somebody had just busted out a window. That would be very like Al Shei.

  “Watch, check the screen.” Yerusha scribbled down the commands to change the torch angle. “Muhammad may have just made it to the mountain.”

  Schyler squinted at the yellow figure inside the blizzard. “Intercom to Lipinski!” he cried. “We got a suit at forty-five degrees down and front. Put out a call. It might be Al Shei!”

  “On it!”

  Schyler scrambled to his feet. “Get close as you can, Pilot. I’m going to get a life line ready, in case it is her.”

  “What if we don’t get an answer?”

  He froze for a moment, and when he did speak, it was like he had to drag the words out. “If we get no answer, we leave it. I can’t risk dragging an AI onto this ship with just the three of us to deal with it.”

  Al Shei tumbled on the wind like a feather. Stars whirled around her in their black pool until all she could see where long trails of light. It was beautiful beyond description. She flew without effort into infinity, toward Paradise, toward Allah and Asil.

  I will meet you there, Beloved.

  Uranus’ blue-grey globe drifted beneath Al Shei’s boots. She fell away from it, toward the stars. Another tumble and she could see Curran’s module falling away from her with Port Oberon loomed in the background like a sculpture by a manic artist. Ships glided around it, metallic insects flying around a bright light.

  Is one of them Pasadena? she wondered. What had happened to Schyler and Yerusha? Had they gotten back all right? The station wheeled out of her field of vision. It didn’t matter, Asil was waiting for her.

  Right here, Beloved.

  “Al Shei!” cried a voice by her ear. “Al Shei! This is Pasadena! Respond!”

  The stars traced their lines of fire across her field of vision. Had Resit called Uncle Ahmet yet? Had they told the children? Were Muhammad and Vashti mourning for her as well as their father?

  They will be well, Beloved and so will we.

  Exhaustion filled her. Her flight was beautiful, her destination was Paradise. “Yes,” she whispered. “They’ll be all right.”

  “Al Shei, if that’s you out there, respond!”

  A thousand memories chased themselves around her skull. Most of them held Asil’s voice reciting the results of soccer games, astronomy projects and home meals. Vashti would go on to be a city champion, for sure, and Muhammad, he would win a scholarship to University…

  But she’d never know about it.

  A flame burned somewhere off to the left. A silver bulb drifted momentarily past her faceplate as the universe turned around again.

  With no one there to make the recordings, how would she know? If she let herself fly away forever, who would tell her what became of her children? After this, Resit would probably never leave Earth again.

  “Al Shei!”

  “Lipinski?” she murmured. Al Shei’s legs kicked out, as if there was a current she could fight against. “Help me.”

  No, Beloved. Don’t leave me.

  “Asil,” she gasped, flailing with her arms, trying to steady herself, stop the ceaseless rolling around her. “Don’t do this to me, Beloved.”

  I love you. You’re tired. You don’t have to go back.

  Her helmet vibrated and her ears heard “thunk!” A silver lasso glided past her faceplate. Wonderingly, she reached out and grasped the noose. She tilted backwards to look along its length and saw the bulk of the Pasadena at the other end. The rope tugged in her hand and her tired fingers tightened around it
automatically. She could see a suited figure leaning out the half-open airlock. Probably Schyler. Yerusha would be in the pilot’s chair, worrying about thrust, velocity and drift. Only Schyler would be stupid enough to stand in the airlock and watch the winch do its work.

  Katmer.

  She closed her eyes, but what she really wanted to close was her mind. She wanted to close off the treacherous voice of love that beckoned her to the stars, but it wouldn’t be silenced.

  With all the strength she had left, Al Shei clung to the life line and let it pull her back to the Pasadena.

  Chapter Fifteen — The Beginning

  Al Shei stood on the balcony, letting her fingertips rest lightly on the railing. The breeze, smelling of plants and dust, tugged at her clothes and brushed against her eyes. Vashti was down in the courtyard with a couple of her teammates, practising. Muhammad was in his room studying. Uncle Ahmet and Grandmother had found someone else to bother. Even Resit, back from securing Tully an eight-year work-and-surveillance sentence, had decided it might be better to keep away for awhile.

  So she stood outside, using up her open-air ration without purpose. Just standing without responsibilities or duties. Just trying not to wonder what she was going to do next.

  Uncle Ahmet had made it perfectly clear he would support any job she chose to take up, as long as it didn’t involve leaving the Solar system. He even offered to buy her a shuttle and set her up on the Inner Planets run, if she persisted in her need to get off Earth.

  And for five minutes, she had actually considered it.

  Grandmother had suggested that she consolidate her resources and purchase a husband, a good one, of course, with references, so she could go back to the Pasadena and still leave the children with a father and family.

  And for five minutes she had considered that.

  Resit had suggested she just snap out of it.

  Which was probably the best suggestion she’d heard in weeks. Al Shei leaned both elbows on the railing and rubbed her hands together. The palms and scrub that surrounded the apartment building rattled in the fresh breeze. Tiny insects buzzed around her face. She didn’t bother to shoo them away. Her wrist band beeped, reminding her she had ten minutes to get indoors before she risked a fine for potential un-balancing of recovery efforts. She ignored it.