Wireless

by Charles Stross

  “Indeed, sir.” She nodded as if about to say something else, thought better of it, then held the door open for me. “Good night, sir.”

  THE DANGEROUS DROP CLUB

  I spent the evening at the Dangerous Drop Club, tackling a rather different variety of dangerous drop from the one I’d be confronting on the morrow. I knew perfectly well at the time that this was stupid (not to mention rash to the point of inviting the attention of the Dread Aunts, those intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic), but I confess I was so rattled by the combination of Laura’s departure, my new butler’s arrival, and the presence of the horrible beast that for the life of me I simply couldn’t bring myself to engage in any activity more constructive than killing my own brain cells.

  Boris Kaminski was present, of course, boasting in a low-key manner about how he was going to win the race and buying everyone who mattered—the other competitors, in other words—as many drinks as they would accept. That was his prerogative, for as the ancients would put it, there’s no prize for second place; he wasn’t the only one attempting to seduce his comrades into suicidal self-indulgence. “We fly tomorrow, chaps, and some of us might not be coming back! Crack open the vaults and sample the finest vintages. Otherwise, you may never know . . .” Boris always gets a bit like that before a drop, morbidly maudlin in a gloating kind of way. Besides, it’s a good excuse for draining the cellars, and Boris’s credit is good for it—“Kaminski” is not his real name but the name he uses when he wants to be a fabulously rich playboy with none of the headaches and anxieties that go with his rank. This evening he was attired in an outrageous outfit modeled on something Tsar Putin the First might have worn when presiding over an acid rave in the barbaric dark ages before the reenlightenment. He probably found it in the back of his big brother’s wardrobe.

  “We know you only want to get us drunk so you can take unfair advantage of us,” joshed Tolly Forsyth, raising his glass of Chateau !Kung, “but I say let’s drink a toast to you! Feet cold and bottoms down.”

  “Glug glug,” buzzed Toadsworth, raising a glass with his telescoping sink-plunger thingie. Glasses were ceremoniously drained. (At least, that’s what I think he said—his English is rather sadly deficient, and one of the rules of the club is: no neural prostheses past the door. Which makes it a bit dashed hard when you’re dealing with fellows who can’t tell a fuck from a frappé I can tell you, like some high-bandwidth-clankie heirs, but that’s what you get for missing out on a proper classical education, undead languages and all, say I.) Goblets were ceremonially drained in a libation to the forthcoming toast race.

  “It’s perfectly alright to get me drunk,” said Marmaduke Bott, his monocle flashing with the ruby fire of antique stock-market ticker displays. “I’m sure I won’t win, anyway! I’m sitting this one out in the bleachers.”

  “Drink is good,” agreed Edgestar Wolf black, injecting some kind of hideously fulminating fluorocarbon lubricant into one of his six knees. Most of us in the club are squishies, but Toadsworth and Edgestar are both clankies. However, while the Toadster’s knobbly conical exterior conceals what’s left of his old squisher body, tucked decently away inside his eye-turret, Edgestar has gone the whole hog and uploaded himself into a ceramic exoskeleton with eight or nine highly specialized limbs. He looks like the bastard offspring of a multitool and a mangabot. “Carbon is the new”—his massively armored eyebrows furrowed—“black?” He’s a nice enough chappie, and he went to the right school, but he was definitely at the back of the queue the day they were handing out the cortical upgrades.

  “Another wee dram for me,” I requested, holding out my snifter for a passing bee-bot to vomit the nectar into. “I got a new butler today,” I confided. “Nearly blew it, though. Sis dumped her pet mammoth on me again, and the butler had to clean up before I’d even had time to fool her into swearing the oath of allegiance.”

  “How totally horrible!” Abdul said in a tone that prompted me to glance at him sharply. He smirked. “And how is dear Fiona doing this week? It’s ages since she last came to visit.”

  “She said something about the Olympic cross-country season, I think. And then she’s got a few ships to launch. Nothing very important aside from that, just the après-ski salon circuit.” I yawned, trying desperately to look unimpressed. Abdul is the only member of the club who genuinely outranks Boris. Boris is constrained to use a nom de guerre because of his position as heir to the throne of all the Russias—at least, all the Russias that lie between Mars and Jupiter—but Abdul doesn’t even bother trying to disguise himself. He’s the younger brother of His Excellency the Most Spectacularly Important Emir of Mars, and when you’ve got that much clout, you get to do whatever you want. Especially if it involves trying to modify the landscape at Mach 20 rather than assassinating your elder siblings, the traditional sport of kings. Abdul is quite possibly cer tifiably insane, having graduated to freestyle orbital-reentry surfing by way of technical diving on Europa and naturist glacier climbing on Pluto—and he doesn’t even have my unfortunate neuroendo crine disorder as an excuse—but he’s a fundamentally sound chap at heart.

  “Hah. Well, we’ll just have to invite her along to the party afterward, won’t we?” He chuckled.

  “Par-ty?” Toadsworth beeped up.

  “Of course. It’ll be my hundredth drop, and I’m having a party.” Abdul smirked some more—he had a very knowing smirk—and sipped his eighty-year Inverteuchtie. “Everyone who survives is invited! Bottoms up, chaps?”

  “Bottoms up,” I echoed, raising my glass. “Tally ho!”

  THE SPORT OF KINGS

  The day of the drop dawned bright and cold—at least it was bright and cold when I went out on the balcony beside the carport to suit up for my ride.

  Somewhat to my surprise, Miss Feng was already up and waiting for me with a hot flask of coffee, a prophylactic sober-up, and a good-luck cigar. “Is this competition entirely safe, sir?” she inquired as I chugged my espresso.

  “Oh, absolutely not,” I reassured her: “but I’ll feel much better afterward! Nothing like realizing you’re millimeters away from flaming meteoritic death to get the old blood pumping, what?”

  “One couldn’t say.” Miss Feng looked doubtful as she accepted the empty flask. “One’s normal response to incendiary situations that get the blood pumping is a wound dressing and an ambulance. Or to keep the employer from walking into the death trap in the first place. Ahem. I assume Sir intends to survive the experience?”

  “That’s the idea!” I grinned like an idiot, feeling the familiar pulse of excitement. It takes a lot to drive off the black dog of depression, but dodging the bullet tends to send it to the kennels for a while. “By the way, if Laura calls, could you tell her I’m dying heroically to defend her virtue or something? I’ll see her after—oh, that reminds me! Abdul al-Matsumoto has invited us—all the survivors, I mean—to a weekend party at his pad on Mars. So if you could see that the gig is ready to leave after my drop as soon as I’ve dressed for dinner, and I don’t suppose you could make sure there’s a supply of food for the little monster, could you? If we leave him locked in the garret dungeon he can’t get into trouble, not beyond eating the curtains—”

  Miss Feng cleared her throat and looked at me reproachfully. “Sir did promise his sister to look after the beast in person, didn’t he?”

  I stared at her, somewhat taken aback. “Dash it all, are you implying . . . ?”

  Miss Feng handed me my preemptive victory cigar. She continued, in a thoughtful tone of voice: “Has Sir considered that it might be in his best interests—should he value the good opinion of his sister—to bring Jeremy along? After all, Lady Fiona’s on Mars, too, even if she’s preoccupied with the après-ski circuit. If by some mischance she were to visit the Emir’s palace and find Sir sans Jeremy, it might be more than trivially embarrassing.”

  “Dash it all, you’re right. I suppose I’ll have to pack the bloody pachyderm, won’t I? What a bore. Will he fit in t
he trunk?”

  Miss Feng sighed, very quietly. “I believe that may be a remote theoretical possibility. I shall endeavor to find out while Sir is enjoying himself not dying.”

  “Try beer,” I called as I picked up my surf board and climbed aboard the orbital delivery jitney. “Jeremy loves beer!” Miss Feng bowed as the door closed.

  I hope she doesn’t give him too much, I thought. Then the gravity squirrelizer chittered to itself angrily, decided it was on the wrong planet, and tried to rectify the situation in its own inimitable way. I lay back and waited for orbit. I wasn’t entirely certain of the wisdom of my proposed course of action—there are few predicaments as grim as facing a mammoth with a hangover across the breakfast table—but Miss Feng seemed like a competent sort, and I supposed I’d just have to trust her judgment. So I took a deep breath, waited another sixty seconds (until the alarm chimed), then opened the door and stepped off the running board over three hundred kilometers of hostile vacuum.

  The drop went smoothly—as I suppose you guessed, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to bend your ear with the story, what? The adrenaline rush of standing astride a ten-centimeter-thick surfboard as it bumps and vibrates furiously in the hypersonic airflow, trying to throw you off into the blast-furnace tornado winds of reentry, is absolutely indescribable. So is the sight of the circular horizon flattening and growing, coming up to batter at your feet with angry fists of plasma. Ah, what rhapsody! What delight! I haven’t got a poetic bone in my body, but when you tap into Toadsworth outside of the clubhouse’s suppressor field, that’s the kind of narcotic drivel he’ll feed you. I think he’s a jolly good poet, for an obsessive-compulsive clankie with a staircase phobia and knobbly protrusions; but at any rate, a more accurate description of competitive orbital-reentry diving I haven’t heard from anyone recently.

  A drop doesn’t take long. The dangerous stage lasts less than twenty minutes from start to finish, and only the last five minutes is hot. Then you slow to subsonic velocity, let go of your smoldering surfboard, and pray to your ancestors that your parachute is folded smartly, because it would be mortifying to have to be rescued by the referee’s skiff. Especially if they don’t get to you until after you complete your informal inquiry into lithobraking, eh?

  There was a high overcast as I came hurtling in across Utah, and I think I might have accidentally zigged instead of zagging a little too vigorously as I tried to see past a wall of cloud ahead and below me, because when my fireball finally dissipated, I found myself skidding across the sky about fifty kilometers off course. This would be embarrassing enough on its own, but then my helmet helpfully highlighted three other competitors—Abdul among them!—who were much closer to the target zone. I will confess I muttered an unsport ingly rude word at that juncture, but the game’s the thing, and it isn’t over ’til it’s over.

  In the end I touched down a mere thirty-three thousand meters off course, and a couple of minutes later the referees ruled I was third on target. Perry O’Peary—who had been leading me—managed to make himself the toast of the match before he reached the tropo pause by way of a dodgy ring seal on his left knee. Dashed bad play, that, but at least he died with his boots on—glowing red-hot and welded to his ankles.

  I caught a lift the rest of the way to the drop base from one of the referee skiffs. As I tramped across the dusty desert floor in my smoldering armor, feeling fully alive for the first time in weeks, I found the party already in full swing. Abdul’s entourage, all wearing traditional kimonos and burnooses, had brought along a modified camel that widdled champagne in copious quantities. He held up a huge platinum pitcher. “Drinks are on me!” he yodeled as Tolly Forsyth and some rum cove of a Grand Vizier—Toshiro Ibn Cut-Throat, I think—hoisted him atop their shoulders and danced a victory mazurka.

  “Jolly good show, old son!” I called, ditching my helmet and gloves gratefully and pouring a beaker of bubbly over my steaming head. “Bottoms up!”

  “B’m’s up undeed!” Abdul sprayed camel flux everywhere in salute. He was well into the spirit of things, I could tell; indeed, the spirit of things was well into him.

  Ibn Cut-Throat’s kid brother sidled up behind me. “If Ralphie sama would care to accompany me to His Majesty’s Brother’s pleasure barge, we will be departing for Mars as soon as the rest of the guests arrive,” he intimated.

  “Rest of the guests? Capital, capital!” I glanced round in search of my clankie doxy, but there was no sign of Laura. Which was dashed strange, for she’d normally be all over me by this point in the proceedings: my nearly being turned off in front of an audience usually turned her on like a knife switch. “Who else is coming?”

  “Lots of people.” Ibn Cut-Throat Junior looked furtive. “It’s a very big party, as befits the prince’s birthday. Did you know it was his birthday . . . ? It’s a theme party, of course, in honor of the adoptive ancestors of his ancient line, the house of Saud.”

  Abdul al-Matsumoto is as much an authentic prince of Araby as I am a scion of the MacGregor, but that’s the price we all pay for being descended from the nouveau riche who survived the Great Downsizing hundreds of years ago. Our ancestors bought the newly vacated titles of nobility, and consequently we descendants are forced to learn the bally traditions that go with them. I spent years enduring lessons in dwarf-tossing and caber-dancing, not to mention damaging my hearing by learning to play the electric bagpipes, but Abdul has it worse: he’s required by law to go around everywhere with a tea towel on his head and to refrain from drinking fermented grape juice unless it’s been cycled through the kidneys of an overengi neered dromedary. This aristocracy lark has its downside, you mark my words.

  “A theme party,” I mused, removing my face from my cup. “That sounds like fun. But I was planning on taking my gig. Is that okey-dokey, as they say? Is there room in the imperial marina?”

  “Of course,” said the vizier, leering slightly as a shapely femme wearing a belly dancer’s costume sashayed past. I noticed with distaste his hairless face and the pair of wizened testicles on a leather cord around his neck: some people think testosterone makes a cove stupid, but there’s such a thing as going too far, what? “Just remember, it’s a fancy-dress party. The theme is the thousand nights and one night, in honor of and for the selection of His Excellency’s newest concuboid. His Excellency says you should feel free to bring a guest or two if you like. If you need an outfit—”

  “I’m sure my household wardrobe will be able to see to my needs,” I said, perhaps a trifle sharply. “See you there!”

  Ibn Cut-Throat bowed and scraped furiously as he backed away from me.

  Something odd ’s going on here, I realized, but before I could put my finger on it, there was a whoosh, and I saw the familiar sight of my gig—well, actually it’s Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s, but as he’s not due back for six years, I don’t think that matters too much—descending to a perfect three-point landing.

  I walked over to it slowly, lost in thought, only to meet Miss Feng marching down the ramp. “I didn’t know you could fly,” I said.

  “My usual employer requires a full pilot’s qualification, sir. Military unrestricted license with interstellar wings and combat certification.” She cleared her throat. “Among other skills.” She took in my appearance, from scorched ablative boots to champagne hairstyle. “I’ve taken the liberty of laying out Sir’s smoking jacket in the master stateroom. Can I suggest a quick shower might refresh the parts that Sir’s friends’ high spirits have already reached?”

  “You may suggest anything you like, Miss Feng, I have complete confidence in your professional discretion. I should warn you I will have a guest tagging along, but he won’t be any trouble. If you show him to the lounge while I change, we shall be able to depart promptly. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything from Laura?”

  She shook her head minutely. “Not so much as a peep, sir.” She stepped aside. “So, I’m to set course for Mars as soon as the guest is aboard? Very good, sir. I shall be
on the flight deck if you need me.”

  It appeared that Miss Feng was not only an accomplished butler, but a dashed fine pilot as well. Would miracles never cease?

  MISS FENG SERVES THE WRONG BEER

  Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s boat is furnished in white oak panels with brass trim, ocher crushed-velvet curtains, and gently hissing gas lamps. A curving sofa extends around the circumference of the lounge, and for those tiresome long voyages to the outer system there are cozy staterooms accessible through hidden sliding panels in the walls. It is a model of understated classical luxury in which a cove and his fellows can get discreetly bladdered while watching the glorious relativistic fireworks in the crystal screen that forms the ceiling. However, for the journey to Abdul’s pleasure dome on Mars, it suffered from three major drawbacks. For one thing, in a fit of misplaced bonhomie I’d offered Edgestar Wolfblack a lift, and old Edgy wasn’t the best company for a postdrop preprandial, on account of his preferred tipples being corrosive or hypergolic, or both. Secondly, Laura was still making her absence felt. And finally, as the icing on the cake, Miss Feng had locked Jeremy in the luggage compartment. He was kicking up a racket such as only a dwarf mammoth with a hangover can, and I could barely hear myself think over the din.

  “Dash it all, how much beer did you give him?” I asked my butler.

  “Two liters, sir,” Miss Feng replied. “Of the rather elderly Bragote from the back of your uncle’s laboratory. I judged it the least likely to be missed.”

  “Oh dear God!” I cried.

  “Bragh-ought?” echoed Edgy, as a plaintive squeal and a loud thud echoed from the underfloor bay. By the sound of things, Jeremy was trying to dash his brains out on the undercarriage. (Unfortunately, a dwarf mammoth’s skull is thick enough to repel meteors and small antimatter weapons.)