The Cunning Blood

by Jeff Duntemann

  They use something called 'carbon paper'. The pressure of the stylus causes a duplicate image on a second piece of paper beneath the first, by rubbing a dark ink—often based on carbon black—on the lower sheet. It was widely used before the invention of xerography circa 1960.

  |Wow! Cleverness still means something here!|

  Without electronics, it had better.

  "You go through the door with the purple keystone. They'll be glad to see you, that's for sure. Next!"

  Geyl was grilled much as Peter was. Her story gave her a degree in sociology, but no work experience in that field. Both were surprised but relieved to see Geyl get a purple sticker as well.

  Peter and Geyl drifted toward the far end of the hall, papers in hand. Five wide arched doors opened in the rear wall, each with a pair of guards to either side. Each of the five doorways had a keystone of a different color. Most of the transportees were entering the door in the center, with a green keystone, and smaller numbers were going through the doors on either side, with red and yellow keystones. The doors on the extremes, with purple and orange keystones, were empty.

  Peter edged close to the red portal and peered inside. Another long, narrow hall stretched into the distance. Tables on either side of the hall held displays of some sort, and black-clad men were speaking animatedly to the crowds of transportees. The hubbub of voices was punctuated by high notes from an unseen saxophone band. There was much waving of clipboards, and Peter saw people sitting at tables, filling out papers.

  "It looks like some kind of trade show," Peter whispered to Geyl.

  A guard to the right of the red entrance frowned at them. "You two is purple. Purple's that way." He pointed with a knobby finger.

  The hall beyond the purple entrance was much smaller. Perhaps thirty tables were spaced around the periphery of a semicircular space. At one end a chamber string quartet played nondescript classical music, and at several places around the room were small carts heaped with fresh fruit and pastries. At each table sat two or three men, all dressed in crisp black trousers and hooded jackets, also black, cinched within broad leather belts. They had been laughing and speaking to one another and sipping from coffee cups, but once Peter and Geyl entered, the hall grew quiet, and all eyes were on them.

  There were only two other transportees in the hall, their orange jumpsuits as obvious as airstrip marker strobes.

  Peter walked boldly to the center of the room, Geyl a half step behind but still holding his arm. Above each table was a banner or some other display dominated by sequences of Greek characters, as though the hall were a gathering of college fraternities. Some of the tables and displays were considerably larger than the others. Three of the displays, in fact, dwarfed the rest completely.

  "Time to break the ice, folks!" called a rotund man leaning on one of smaller tables, dominated by the letters AΣ. "We're all anxious to meet you both. What are you?"

  "A bad liar!" Peter replied, to general chuckles around the tables.

  "An engineer! Bravo! And you, ma'am?"

  "I'm a good liar," Geyl said with a grin.

  "A statistician, then."

  "Actually, a sociologist."

  The fat man cut her off with a wave of his hand. "Good, good. Everybody needs SI's—but we'll be happy to explain that over coffee. Welcome to Professional Reception. I'd be happy to..."

  "Slow down, Ian," said a tall man with a deep, resonant voice, seated at one of the three large tables. "What kind of engineer are you, sir?"

  "Aerospace."

  Instantly, all four men at that table stood, as did the full complement at another large table on the opposite side of the hall. The man who had spoken was walking briskly toward them, as was a representative from the other table.

  The tall speaker reached Peter a half-step ahead of the other. "Duncan Eukamp, Rho Alpha Delta." He was dark-skinned with African features, and slightly gaunt. He grasped Peter's right hand in both of his but did not shake it.

  "Peter Novilio."

  Eukamp's obvious rival, shorter and quite bald, was ready with both his hands when Eukamp released Peter's. "Welcome, Peter! Ara Kreschunas, Alpha Mu Tau. We design our own aircraft!"

  Duncan Eukamp made a dismissive gesture. "And we design almost everybody else's aircraft. We'd like to speak with you...”

  Kreschunas crossed his arms. "So would we! Aircraft is all we do. We're Air Motor Transport! Duncan won't broadcast it but he designs toilet bowls as much as he designs aircraft!"

  A voice with an Australian drawl rose from somewhere at the edge of the hall. "You two better roll for him before somebody takes a slug!"

  Eukamp nodded solemnly. "Roll, Ara. I'd trust your dice before you'd trust mine."

  The shorter man dug in a leather pouch hung from his belt and produced a 12-sided die the size of an ice cube in some cream-colored material. Without further comment he grasped the die between thumb and forefinger, flipped it into the air so that it spun furiously, then let it fall to the floor.

  "Even," Eukamp said before it struck the dark gray tiles. The die bounced several times but settled without rolling far. "Six. Yield, Ara."

  "Witness!" yelled Kreschunas, craning his neck toward the other side of the room.

  "Too late, Ara! Shoulda called when he said roll!"

  "Witness anyway!"

  A gray-haired man with thick glasses limped from behind one of the fruit carts. On his breast pocket was a single golden triangle, perhaps the Greek letter Delta. He stood with the die between the toes of his boots. "Looks like a goddam six to me."

  "And the Moomoos told me mastodon tusk was lucky," Kreschunas muttered as he scooped up the die and stalked indignantly back to his table.

  "Peter, please come sit with us for awhile. Ara will be waiting impatiently for his turn. Rho Alpha Delta's business is research and development. Most people call us the Ralpha Dogs. I'd guess you have no idea what's going on here."

  Peter nodded. "That's for sure. I thought this was a prison camp."

  "I'll give you the short form back at our table. When you have to process five thousand drops in the space of perhaps three days, there's little time for explanations. In the Green Room they basically say, 'It's a job or a cell. Your choice.' Ma'am, please excuse us."

  Geyl looked quizzically at Peter, who shrugged and followed the taller man. Geyl drifted toward the other side of the hall.

  "A white-knuckle romance?" Duncan Eukamp asked while pulling a chair out for Peter. He rolled his dark brown eyes back toward Geyl, who was now sitting at the Alpha Sigma table.

  "A what?"

  "You held her hand on the lander and now she thinks you're her boyfriend. Protection. A bad idea—you probably don't yet realize just how bad an idea it is.”

  Peter settled into the chair. "No. She's my wife. We got sentenced together."

  Eukamp's eyebrows rose. "Mmph. That's rare. And it complicates things."

  "You never asked what Gina and I got sent up for. Nobody has."

  Eukamp pushed a plain china cup in front of Peter, and another one of the black-clad men filled it from a silver pot. "You can tell us if you like, but according to superstition it's bad luck. Truthfully, none of us wants to know."

  "But what if I'm a murderer?"

  Eukamp’s lips rose in a thin smile. "Where all are murderers, none are murderers. Have you ever heard of the Heinlein Effect?" Peter shook his head.

  The Sangruse Device had. A twentieth century writer/philosopher named Robert Heinlein claimed that an armed society is a polite society.

  |I don't know if I'll buy that. |

  He didn't say it was a nonviolent society.

  "Peter, let me tell you a little bit about Hell."

  Duncan Eukamp spoke quickly and without a wasted word. Hell's society was organized around vertically integrated corporate bodies called "orders" that specialized in a particular service or product. These had grown up out of the OVODS departments that 1Earth had set up before abandoning Hell in 2147. The Agr
icultural Department, charged with growing food for OVODS' population, became Alpha Gamma, colloquially known as the Aggies. The Health Care Department, which operated Hell's hospitals and clinics, became Beta Nu Zeta, (the Bones) and so on with all the other departments. Over the years, orders split and specialized, and new orders emerged out of new needs and the new freedom that came of 1Earth's withdrawal. The Ground Motor Transport department became Gamma Mu Tau, which in turn spawned Alpha Mu Tau once Hell realized that diesel-powered aircraft could be designed without any dependence on electricity.

  As Eukamp explained them, the orders came across as part corporation, part fraternity house, and part street gang. Lack of any strong central authority had forced the orders to become highly independent, each suspicious of all the others and fully capable of waging war. Hell's early lack of women had prevented any sort of family structure from forming, and instead the orders became families for their members, providing housing, food, clothing, education, recreation, social identity, and protection from the other orders. Early orderhouses were virtual fortresses, with their own wells and airstrips on their roofs, complete with artillery to protect against airborne attackers.

  In the early years, numerous warlords tried and failed to gather the orders under their power, and over time Hell had evolved a republican system of government, in which each order contributed representatives to a deliberative chamber called the Mootpolitik. Occasional violence would break out between orders, but once the value of cooperation plainly outweighed the value of sheer force of arms, such conflicts became increasingly rare.

  "Furthermore," Eukamp concluded, "we have a common enemy—Earth— against whom our newest citizens are almost insanely eager to enlist."

  "Hence the job fair here."

  "Exactly."

  Eukamp pulled his chair alongside Peter's and narrated a thick album of photographs taken of Rho Alpha Delta's facilities and products. Peter expected labs full of wooden lashups and men like Nicola Tesla. Instead he saw gleaming facilities that equaled the best at Northwestern University—or even the Special Implementer Service. The labs themselves seemed slightly odd, and it took Peter a moment to realize that they were empty of the jungles of electrical cables and tombstone monitors that half-filled every research lab he had ever seen. In their places were men with clipboards, and men typing into mechanical keyboards attached to mechanical calculators, from which long curls of white paper crept.

  Large, high-ceilinged rooms divided by rows of men sitting in front of broad tilted tables puzzled him, until Eukamp explained. Engineers and designers drew on large sheets of paper, with carbon-tipped styluses called pencils. Drawings were changed by rubbing away a thin layer of the paper's surface, including earlier carbon marks.

  "Must take forever to do a design that way," Peter said, thinking back to the multitude of times he had hammered at the Undo key with a simulation on the stone.

  "Hardly," Eukamp said, with perhaps a hint of pride. "We do it right the first time."

  Peter felt his heart pound as Eukamp flipped past page after page of sleek aircraft and streamlined locomotives. Helicopters, hydroplane seacraft, farm machinery, all in gleaming buffed silver-gray. The last few pages seemed nothing short of unbelievable: Jet aircraft, from small fighter-sized craft to monstrous cargo planes larger than the Vultee Ptero.

  "Thirty years ago we learned how to make jet engines without electricity," Eukamp said as he slammed the album shut. "We sold the technology to the Airhogs. Fifteen years ago we created a supersonic airframe. That one stays ours. Keep that in mind when you talk to Ara." Duncan Eukamp stood. "Here's our offer, Peter: The most interesting engineering work you'll ever find, secure for the rest of your life, on aerospace or any technology you ever get a nose for. The best food, the best libraries, the best…" Eukamp's voice hesitated for the slightest moment. "...amenities anywhere on Hell. You've seen the book, and that's only the things we're willing to go public with. My time's up now—Ara's about to quote recruitment law to me—but my last word will be this: The stuff you'll really want to work on is stuff we can only show you after you swear in."

  Peter stood. "Better than a supersonic airframe?"

  Eukamp only smiled. "Go talk to Ara. And remember that the best of what they have they bought from us."

  Alpha Mu Tau's photo album was much the same, if more focused and on a slightly less grand scale. The Airhogs had impressive labs and assembly plants, and automatic machine tools that Ara Kreschunas explained were operated by fluidic analog computers.

  I have never heard of fluidic computers.

  |Are they impossible?|

  Hardly. But they were invented here. There is nothing in Earth's technical literature beyond some laboratory tinkering with simple fluidic logic in the 1950's. This is likely to be a fascinating and peculiar society.

  Once Peter got free of Ara's excitable sales pitch, he stopped briefly at the other tables around the room. Each of the orders had an official name, tied (often in clever fashion) to its product. Alpha Sigma was Analog Systems, the creators of fluidic computation. Peter lingered there, speaking with hopeful men who showed him photos of microscopic fluid hoses and fluid labyrinths created by punching tiny, precisely shaped holes in sheets of thin plastic, and then cementing the layers of plastic together under pressure.

  Iota Beta Mu created all-mechanical calculators, as well as typewriters, tabulators, and systems that stored data in submillimeter holes punched in thin sheets of stiff plastic. Lambda Iota Tau had solved the problem Peter had long wondered about: Chemical lighting created by "charging" a fluid with chemical energy and then releasing the energy by immersing a catalyst matrix into the chemical bath. Outdoor lighting was still mostly natural gas, as in Victorian times on Earth, but indoor lighting seemed indistinguishable in its output from Earth's ubiquitous LLED tubes.

  Other orders designed and manufactured trucks, cars, and other self-propelled machinery; submarines; heavy equipment like cranes and earthmovers, and other things Peter had not expected to encounter on Hell.

  As the announcement was made that the hall was closing for the night, both Duncan Eukamp and Ara Kreschunas approached him and asked for a decision.

  "I always sleep on things like this," was Peter's only response.

  In truth, his head was spinning, and he wanted to consult with Geyl. Transportees who had not yet signed on with an order were herded into an adjacent building and locked into cells. Peter had feared that Geyl would be separated from him, but when he was shown to his cell Geyl was already there, seated on one of two narrow cots.

  "So, what'd you find out?"

  "Peter!"

  She patted the cot beside her. Peter sat down. Geyl immediately grasped his arm and roughly pulled him down to horizontal on the cot, her hands behind his head.

  "I didn't think you liked me this much," Peter whispered.

  "I don't." She allowed herself a sour grin. "Grope me and you'll regret it. But I don't want to be overheard."

  "You're the professional paranoid this trip. And the boss. What's our next move?"

  "Your report first."

  He described what he had seen at the various booths, and the eagerness with which the Ralpha Dogs and the Airhogs had courted him. He watched her gray eyes dart to the side frequently, tabulating, thinking, deciding.

  "That supersonic jet is frightening," she said. "I spent a fair amount of time with Kappa Epsilon Mu. The Chemrats. I would guess they have everything they'd need to refine weapons-grade uranium."

  "So? Lot of good it'll do them without starships."

  "Peter, think. Damn, you're such a naïf! They're still here. They could bomb each other to kingdom come but they haven't. That means they've somehow sublimated the most fundamental urge of all male-dominated human societies: the urge to wage war. And there's only one way to do that."

  "Drum roll."

  "Stop it. Be serious for once in your life! They've bent their whole society into a war machine focused on the Earth!" />
  Peter's first impulse was to groan. Then he remembered Eubanks' comment on a common enemy. "Your point."

  Geyl closed her eyes for a moment. "All of this would be pounding their fists on a mountainside if it weren't for something else. In the lander I started to mention signals. This whole mission happened because a zigship recorded radio signals coming from the surface of Hell."

  "Radio."

  "A simple on-off code called Morse. It's in the history books. Retrotech hobbyists still use it."

  "Is there any way to generate radio signals without electricity?"

  "Nothing that produces clean, constant-wavelength energy like we recorded."

  "And what are they saying?"

  "It's a cipher, probably an XOR one-time pad. We're working on it, but if they took certain simple precautions a cipher like that is provably unbreakable. When we left there'd been no progress at all."

  Peter reached up with one hand and ruffled Geyl's hair, to her obvious annoyance. She grabbed his hand and threw it back to his side. He tsked. "Hey! Stay in story. So that's the second secret of Fatima. Is there a third?"

  "If there is, you'll find out when I damned well tell you. In the meantime, I want us both to sign up with Rho Alpha Delta. If anybody can make a radio work down here, they can. And if they can do that, well..."

  Peter understood. If they could do radio, they could do digital computation. And from there to Hilbert-style fractal fields was a small enough jump. "Bad juju."

  Bad juju indeed! This is such a delightful puzzle!

  7. Social Integrator

  Peter would have slept badly without the Sangruse Device to adjust his blood chemistry. Supersonic jets without electricity! He ached to know how it was done. Worse than that, he ached to fly one. Worst of all, he now had hope that he might...someday...get the chance.

  That Hell was not a prison surprised him less than he had expected. After all, Geyl had seemed confident that she would have the freedom to move about and gather intelligence. What had surprised him was his own enthusiasm for his sentence. Hell was a sentence to freedom! The Sangruse Device's last words as he forced himself into calmness after lights-out did little to dampen his delight.