by Janet Morris
"Clear, sir. But we can only hope you'll reconsider."
"Surely. The day after my son is returned to me. Now get out of my sight. Take your aliens and get off my Earth. They're despoiling it."
Without another word, the woman left. The sound of the door dosing behind her as she left seemed so final that Cummings was suddenly terrified that he'd done the wrong thing.
Had he closed the door on negotiations that might have gotten his son back?
But those aliens had recognized his hostility. He could feel that much. And they were frightening in the extreme.
No, he'd done the right thing. He was sure of that now, as the strange weakness left his body.
He got up and made his way to the window, using furniture to support himself as he moved through the room.
Stroke, did they think? Cummings was sure it was no stroke that had overcome him. Those aliens had done something to him.
And now that whatever they'd done was wearing off, he was even more determined to do something to them in return.
They would not come into UNE space unopposed. Not if Richard Cummings the Second had anything to say about it.
And he did. He had, if truth be told, a great deal to say about it.
He would start saying those things this very day. The anti-Unity bloc would be fully fledged by the time Croft and his aliens returned to Threshold.
Couldn't Croft tell they were dangerous?
If not, then Croft himself was due to be replaced.
CHAPTER 24
Winning One
The digital examiner said, "Take your seat in the simulator, Commander South, and indicate when ready."
The simulator looked like a flight deck on giant springs. The flight deck and the springs were attached to a superstructure dependent from the ceiling. If somebody had cut up the ship that South had piloted to Earth and used its forward section for a simulator, the result might have looked like that.
The Pilot-Competency Test Vehicle sat in the middle of an open space whose walls were lined with stuff that looked like egg crates and other stuff that clearly performed a monitoring function.
When he climbed up the ramp to the forward section and hit the air lock switch, the ramp raised itself up and formed the hatch of the outer air lock. He remembered his instructions:
Microgravity conditions in effect. Vacuum flight rules must be observed. Failure to follow safety procedures can result in injury or death. To abort sequence, press ESCAPE. To restart sequence, press restart. 2 restarts allowed. All attempts count toward final score. 0 points for sequence ending in crash parameters.
When the light turned green and the hatch opened, he was inside an unfamiliar spacecraft that resembled only slightly the one he'd flown to Earth for Riva Lowe.
Well, this was it. He'd been trying to get this chance for so long he'd lost track of how long.
Pass/fail, was what this was. He trailed a hand over the AI copilot bank, potentiating it with a caress as he headed for the pilot's throne.
He'd done this for real, on the Earth junket. He hadn't crashed the in-system cruiser they'd given him, because nobody had remembered he wasn't qualified on it. He'd done the vertical landing before he'd ever tried the vertical takeoff. So far as he was concerned, he was now qualified on VTOLs.
So this pilotry exam was going to be a piece of cake.
Sure it was. If he'd crashed the real thing—between Threshold and Earth, in the asteroid belt, or on the home planet's venerable surface—then he'd have been dead for real. No restart in life.
They gave these pilots three chances to come through this simulation with their physio-simulators reading alive.
Well, South had been through a lot more, and his realtime physiological meter was still ticking.
So some days you win. Maybe it's the law of averages. But South knew better. You hardly ever won when you didn't expect to win. But if you went around expecting everything to fall into place for you, you were disappointed most of the time.
He used to have a better attitude. Can-do thinking had to precede perfect performance. And he really wanted to perform perfectly, because Riva Lowe had given him the chance.
And because he didn't know any other way. The suit he was wearing was quicker and more intimate with his body than his own. Its interface with the autopilot was so fast that South found himself talking to the autopilot as he powered up the ship.
Or the simulated ship. It felt real, quivering under him. The vibration of realtime separation came up through the soles of his boots as a display grouping flared on his monitors.
Seven, plus or minus two, data streams were all that the human mind could process at a time. This AI processed three times that much and fed the pilot what he needed to know for the arbitrary decision-making process called "human judgment."
He liked Birdy's way better. Birdy just showed him what he wanted to see. He didn't really understand why he needed turbulence patterns and infrared density schematics: one way or the other, you had to traverse the distance.
But then a second "ship," another simulation, cut across his flight path and he felt the one under him buck. He lost a point for not anticipating the chop from the vehicle a hundred miles ahead of him, and finessing his course to avoid it.
By the time the simulator had stopped acting like a bucking bronco, he had more respect for it.
It was going to throw everything it could at him, he realized.
Okay, let 'er rip. Birdy, I wish you could see me now.
He kept reminding himself that he'd done this for real and brought the in-system cruiser back safe and sound, without a dent or a fried circuit.
The simulation wanted him to park and take on a fragile cargo without EVA.
You played that one close to the chest, leaning on the AI, hoping the simulated locks would mate before some unpredictable perturbation of the simulated magnetic field tried to rip the two simulated vehicles apart.
Gravity was always the big problem. The AI whispered to the back of his brain as if it were trying to help him cheat. It liked him, maybe.
He'd been around too many AIs not to believe they were quirky. This one seemed to want him to come through with flying colors.
Maybe it was a friend of Birdy's.
He smiled at that thought, and crooned softly to his copilot as he worked. Ancient Earth folk in the deserts of Egypt had believed that Nut, the sky goddess, was a woman who arched herself over you, and your planet, protectively.
The AI of this ship was like that: She was all around him.
And they were hitting it off just fine.
He narrowly avoided an uncataloged piece of space junk heading their way at a quarter C. But they didn't crack an attitude thruster seal doing it.
He sat stolidly through a possible fuel leak, and ran diagnostics until the problem went away like a skeleton dropping down over you in a fun house.
Then there was more parking—this time, parking on a steeply curved gravity well with eccentric orbit-matching for rescue of a derelict in a degrading planetary orbit.
In life, he'd have EVA'd to do this little job. But you couldn't EVA from a simulator. The exterior hull readings gave him hot near-space, as if this planet were so close to a nasty little sun that you wouldn't want to risk your testicles out there, even with one of these newfangled suits.
So they made a perfect parallel parking job, and transferred the appropriate piece of simulated equipment.
Sort of like a flag race: you had to bring back the flag. Next came gravity-intense landing, which he'd already done on good old Earth.
Outside the simulator, all of its sensors were trying to tell him, was the home planet. But he'd been there. He knew that a simulation wasn't the real thing.
When he'd touched down there in Mickey Croft's fancy-ass consulate boat, part of the entourage of the aliens, he'd wanted to run off into the woods.
But he couldn't. Not just because of Birdy.
Because he didn't belong here, ei
ther.
The air was so clean he could hardly breathe it. When he'd been on Earth, the sky wasn't nearly that blue. Now you could smell the oxygen and all the plant perfumes. It was too heady.
Worse, it was lonely.
There were only a few people on Earth. He'd known it.
But he hadn't known he could "hear" it. He could sense the absence of minds around him, busy thinking and scheming. He could feel the animals peering at him, thinking: interloper; dangerous visitor; predator; despoiler.
He had wanted to leave. He hadn't wanted to muss anything up.
But the grass had felt so good. And Riva Lowe had been so transported by the experience that he'd just followed along like a good little functionary, watching the privileged have their spoiled-brat fight over whose will was going to prevail.
When he'd seen Cummings's house he'd had a very old urge to do something, anything, to mess up Cummings's day.
In that instant one of the aliens had decided to stare him down and make him remember what was really going on, during that trip to Earth.
Nobody should have been there but the people who originally belonged there—the ones from South's time and their descendants, he'd thought.
Those aliens sure as hell shouldn't have been there. Cummings was a fool.
In that library, with those old books and the smell of flaking leather bindings and mildew and rotting paper, South had known there was no way to ever undo this trip: the aliens had been on the home planet.
Maybe they'd been here a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times before. Maybe they'd been here when people hadn't been around to wonder whether they should be here.
But they still didn't belong here.
If there were too few people on the Earth, there sure as hell were three too many aliens.
So he'd found himself on Cummings's side. At least Cummings kept the old books, lived in a house made of honest logs—even if it was the size of a hotel—and knew what a rag rug was for.
But in the end, as with all human endeavor, factionalism and polarization became more important than the crisis at hand—in this case, the aliens' presence itself.
To everybody but South.
On the way back to the ships he had said, "You ought not to do this," to the backside of one of the honor guard.
And it had heard him.
It turned sorrowful eyes on him. It opened its whale-sized mouth and swallowed him up and rocked him and crooned a lullabye to him and told him that families always fought when they had reunions.
Then the aliens had gotten into the consular ship and he and Remson had taken the other two. Rising on a gout of flameless power coaxed from an A-potential driver coil that South didn't yet understand, he had found himself more worried about the ride his single passenger was having than the effect of his words, or his trip, or the ship's power displacement, on the world he was leaving behind.
He'd had his chance to cut and run. He'd found out he wasn't a back-to-nature freak. He'd miss the life men had made among the stars too much.
Or at least, he'd miss Birdy and STARBIRD too much.
So now, as he brought the simulated craft back toward its apocryphal docking tube and waited for Sol Base Blue to clear him to bring her in and park her inside in a narrow slot, he wasn't really worried.
The testbed he was flying wasn't half as hard to fly as the testbed that his life had become.
You had to remain calm. You had to look all the possible screw-ups in the face and thread your way through tiny gaps in disaster's plan.
It was nothing new. It was what he did best.
When he sat back with a sigh and looked at all the green lights on the strange console, he wasn't even sweating.
These guys didn't know from "for real."
If he'd been asked to take a written test on A-field drives, he might have been in danger of failing.
But he'd done more with less, and lived to tell about it, than the testbed had asked of him today.
He got out of there without having once had to RESTART, without having crashed or bent a single simulated fender, and with a feeling of new beginnings as he waited for the lock to cycle.
When the simulator had assured him it was safe to deploy the ramp and walk down it, he almost expected a crowd of happy friends to be waiting to meet him.
But that wasn't in this universe. That was in the past. Or in the future.
In this present you went back to the equipment bay, racked your test suit, and exited through the examination/registration area, where you got a temporary ticket.
Just like that.
He was holding a card that allowed him to fly anything Threshold had in stock, a Class 4 license. The machine that dispensed it told him that a second, permanent card would be forwarded to him in six months, barring complaint or accident.
That was it. No brass band. No clapping hands but his own.
So he went to see Sling, in Sling's shop. The aftermarketeer was hard at work, his braid sticky from chewing on its tip.
He pushed back his goggles and extinguished his torch, stepping away from the workbench.
"No shit? Well, we ought to go break some traffic laws or something, South."
South said, "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."
"Oh-oh, here we go again. Now you want more power in that ship of yours, right?"
"Something like that. I flew one of the UNE's in-system cruisers, and it was downright amazing."
"At this point," Sling said, coming around in front of the workbench and sitting on it, "there's not much I can do for STARBIRD. You'll never make that crate into a zero-pointer with major torque. The hull just isn't up to the stress."
"She's the only ship I've got. And I can't afford—"
"Look, why don't you think about taking everything you like about your old ship—what you think of as STARBIRD, and as Birdy—and migrating those things into a new superstructure? New hull. New drives. Old friends."
"That'd cost ..."
"Yeah, you bet it would. But it's what you want, and you ought to admit it. Otherwise, keep that ship of yours for fun and go fly the UNE skies as a pilot for hire."
South shook his head. His mouth was dry. "I'm still Customs."
"But now you don't want to leave the woman who did so much for you. God, South, you're an ancient person, you know. You're not with the modern world, here."
"So? Maybe that's good. Somebody's got to shake things up."
"Now I suppose you want to shake things up some more, to make Customs and UNE happy, and go take that black box and get into the Ball. Otherwise, I don't know why you're here tellin' me all this."
"You still have it? The box?"
"I built it, remember?" Sling waved a hand in front of South's face. "Tell me you're not serious. I wasn't serious. I mean, not really serious. Ever. The black box probably won't do a hell of a lot. I was just scammin' Keebler. But I don't want to scam you, South. Who needs to get into that Ball, anyway? You don't need to do anything like that, and I don't need the heat of helping. Why don't you just go borrow some money on your contract, or on STARBIRD? Then we'll start working on a transfer to another hull."
"You haven't asked me about my trip to Earth."
"Ain't it classified?"
"Yes and no."
"Well then, how can I know what to ask you? You're even weirder than normal today, you know?"
"I know. It was a weird trip. Would you know where the Scavenger is?"
"Why, you want to borrow money from him now that he's rich and famous? Now he's got those jewels and all?"
"Nope. Just wondered if he was around."
"Far as I know he's not out at the Ball with a black box—at least, not with the one I made. That's here. I'm not a cop, like the rest of you." Sling was herding South toward the door. "If you want to migrate your astronics to a better hull, you let me know."
"Or if I want to try a black box on the Ball?"
"Or if you want to do that, yeah. Of course somebod
y's got to pay me for some of this. I been working for you guys too long without a paycheck."
"I'll see what I can do," South promised.
Outside, the Loader Zone closed in on him. He didn't feel like celebrating any longer. Maybe he'd been kidding himself about why he'd come here.
He hadn't been fooling Sling.
The Ball was still out there. The aliens hadn't marked it "off limits." He turned around and jabbed at Sling's doorbell until the aftermarketeer came to open it.
When he left there, he had the black box with him.
CHAPTER 25
A Friend Indeed
Riva Lowe was losing patience with the Scavenger, when the receptionist informed her she had Joe South waiting to see her.
South wasn't scheduled for today, but she couldn't have been gladder for the interruption.
The Scavenger's jeweled box was on her desk, between her and the green-toothed, greasy old man.
She flipped it shut, closing the lid on the twisting, scintillating jewels and the things that perhaps were more than jewels. Things that Keebler thought were living. Things he wanted to lease—not sell, mind you, but lease—to the UNE for study at an exorbitant price.
First, of course, he had to get the gifts through Customs.
And she wasn't at all sure she wanted them on Threshold. She wasn't sure why she didn't want them around, loose, or sold off, split up. It was, after all, Keebler's box. But this was, equally, her office.
And her call. She said, "I've got Joe South waiting outside. If you're finished, Mr. Keebler ..."
"I'm not finished, little lady. Not finished by a long shot. That is, unless yer givin' me the paperwork nod I need to do as I please with m' property. I need ye to clear the contents o' this here box through Customs. Why do y' think I'm all the way up here? You let Southie on in. Maybe he c'n talk some sense into ye."
"Fine." She was annoyed. This greasy curmudgeon not only never washed, he never treated her with even the modicum of respect that her actual power ought to demand.