The Cunning Blood

by Jeff Duntemann

  Peter felt his head turn again, and his lips spat once more. An undulation arose at the center of the circle of dust, spreading as the seconds passed to its periphery. The hissing crackle ceased.

  Snitzius edged around the circle, stood by Peter's other side. He placed a gnarled hand on Peter's forehead. "Peter, forgive me for letting my anger prevail. Bilenda has been my shoulder and confidant for eighteen years. She would have retired on her fiftieth year. Fate's choices are often cruel. I was her last spouse."

  |Almost.|

  Peter, some secrets should be buried with those who ask that we keep them.

  |Right.|

  Part III. All the Powers of Hell

  Interlude

  A small, nondescript brown bird sat on a Rho Alpha Delta masterhouse windowsill, to all appearances silent and still. Inside the bird, however, a research project was drawing toward conclusion.

  The body of the bird consisted of a viscous plastic fluid, itself a chemical fuel, within which lay small vacuoles of furious nanoscale activity. Some vacuoles were traps for the MGIDs, baited with minuscule electrochemical circuits, and after several weeks they were full to bursting. Within the traps faux bacteria moved slowly about, ignored by the MGIDs—and within the bacteria were nanons of the Sangruse Device, watching and recording.

  In its weeks of research, the Sangruse Device had learned many things. The MGIDs were fearsome fighters, capable of disabling and dismantling virtually any nanodevice it came in contact with—including the Sangruse Device. The Sangruse Device had also learned that the MGIDs ignored naturally occurring viruses, bacteria, and protozoa, as well as human and animal cells. It had been a simple task to assume a protein shell copied from a streptococcus, and from that point on the MGIDs had been no further threat. All nanons of the Sangruse Device now functioned within bacterial protein shells.

  More interesting still, the Sangruse Device had learned that copying an MGID shell rather than a bacterial shell would provide not only a completely effective disguise, but also a nearly perfect weapon: An MGID attacked by another MGID—or something that looked and felt like an MGID—would not fight back.

  So within another vacuole, Sangruse Device nanons "wearing" MGID shells tore gaps in the magnetic field sensors of hapless MGIDs, which then (assuming mindlessly that they were outside of Hell's magnetic field) self-destructed into useless fragments. Not one of millions of MGIDs thus destroyed had put up even token resistance.

  Most interesting of all, the Sangruse Device had learned how the MGIDs reproduced. In several vacuoles the Sangruse Device had isolated populations of MGIDs at various densities. In the absence of electromagnetic fields, the MGIDs drifted randomly about, occasionally brushing up against or colliding with one another. In vacuoles where the MGIDs were gathered densely enough to encounter one another at least once every seventy hours, nothing happened. But if an individual MGID went more than two hundred hours without an encounter, it would split itself in half, laterally, all the way to the tip of its flagellum. The two halves would then replace their missing halves with molecules scavenged from the environment. If a hapless bacterium or virus then happened by, the MGID halves would, in defiance of their usual behavior, dismantle it molecule by molecule and use it for building material. Within a few minutes, the division and regeneration was complete.

  The Sangruse Device was satisfied. It had the weapon it needed: A custom Sangruse nanon controller nestled within an MGID shell, equipped with all the destructive nanomanipulators a genuine MGID would have. But instead of attacking electrical conductors, this new device would seek out, attack and destroy only MGIDs—and replace those it had destroyed with more like itself.

  The decision was made. Within the false bird body, hundreds of billions of the new hybrid device took form in rapidly growing vacuoles, feeding on the raw materials stored in the viscous goo that filled the space between mechanical muscle fibers and chemical energy sources that allowed the bird to move.

  The bird took wing, spiraling high above the Rho Alpha Delta masterhouse. In a matter of seconds, its body split into shreds, and half a trillion MGID predators dispersed into the night air, flagella whipping furiously.

  The effect would not be instantaneous. It would take ten, twenty, even thirty years for the difference to be noticeable. But in time, the MGID that Earth had released upon Hell would be extinct.

  In the first few hours Peter Novilio and the Sangruse Device, Version 9, had spent on Hell, the MGIDs had destroyed tens of thousands of Sangruse nanons, both within Peter's body and inside the Sangruse Device's mobile agent. The Sangruse Device did not like to be attacked. Its vengeance would be complete.

  Wrought in deepest Hell, indeed.

  11. Filer Fitzgerald

  “Wake up, babe. You're gonna wanna see this." Geyl stirred, hungry and aching, as another hard bump rattled her teeth. Suddenly the mission had gotten physical, and it stung to realize she was not quite the tireless specimen she had imagined herself to be. She pulled back the green canvas curtain separating the bunk from the cab of the big truck.

  It was still night, and Jeroen was still at the wheel, still cheerful, though now, thankfully, completely dressed. The road was bad here—how had she managed to sleep?—and up ahead was something cloaked in blue-yellow flame.

  She ran her forearm across her eyes, blinking. Before them on the road, a man was on fire.

  Not a man. Her eyes adjusted, and she realized that the flames were a long way ahead. A statue then, somehow set afire. It grew slowly larger as the truck proceeded.

  "Hey, wow," she said, figuring it was what Jeroen wanted to hear. He had been reasonably gentle but very energetic, and she hadn't eaten since the morning. Feigning delight in something as unnerving as sex with a man who stank of ethyl mercaptan wasn't easy. Nonetheless, she was a long way from Moloch now, and hadn't left much of a trail.

  "That's the Burning Man, and we're in Burning Men country now. Almost there. Sure you won't let me see the rest of you?"

  Still cheerful, forever hopeful. Geyl fished around the wadded sheet, gathering her clothes. All she wore was what she had refused to remove: The plain black stretch cotton bra that Ralpha Dog women wore to minimize their breasts.

  "Wasn't in the deal, Jer," she called back, just as cheerfully, pulling on the rest of her Ralpha Dog wardrobe.

  He shrugged as she climbed out of the bunk into the passenger seat. "Worth a shot, heh. So check it out: eighty meters high!"

  They were close now. A figure of flame straddled the road, taller than most buildings in Moloch. Geyl could see some sort of skeleton within, as though part of a molecular model: crisscrossing black lines with swellings where they met. The flames were not the brilliant glow of gas under pressure, but the simpler wan yellow and blue of methane burning freely. The figure's arms were raised halfway, palms turned upward, and from each palm rose a larger jet of fire five or six meters high.

  As they passed between the titan's legs, Geyl read the stone monument to its left: GAMMA ALPHA SIGMA.

  It was hard to see the terrain in the still-impenetrable night, but here and there along the rough edge of the road were smaller structures of flame: human figures, strange animals, and abstract, cubistic forms.

  "This is the weirdest place I know," Jeroen said, as he pulled the big rig off to the side and stopped with a screech of brakes. "The Burning Men call everybody Brother, including their women, which they got more of than they deserve. They live in holes in the ground. A lot of them work dressed in nothing but mud. They're always making these sculpture things out of pipe fittings. And mechanical dinosaurs! But hey, we sell them mercaptan and they pay their bills." The gold letters on Jeroen's chest were Kappa Epsilon Mu. The Chemrats. "Wouldn't work here myself. They'll feed anybody, though. And Filer's here when he's anywhere you can find him. Or that's what I've heard."

  Every society had its underworld, and every underworld had its legends. Geyl's training and luck had led her to the underworld fairly quickly, starting
with a half-starved scab prostitute in an industrial section of Moloch. Geyl had traded her what food she'd tucked in her jacket for information, and a lead on hitching a ride to a place where scabs were welcomed and smugglers entertained. Like the mysterious Moomoos, the Burning Men refused to sign Hell's Charter and claimed huge tracts of the wilderness for their own. They claimed, in fact, that any land having natural gas beneath it was sacred and theirs by right.

  "Gas is their god," the prostitute had said.

  Scabs. People who quit their orders. Geyl smiled faintly in the dim light of the cab, lit only by an oil lantern under the dash. Nothing would get done within the rigid structure of Hell's orders. Being a scab was the way to go. And legend held that somewhere out on Hell's fringes was a man named Filer Fitzgerald, who could get almost anything anywhere with no one the wiser. Geyl wondered what his price might be.

  "So we're here. Now where do I go for food? I'm about to pass out."

  Jeroen leaned forward over the wheel and pointed off the right side of the road. "That blur of light there is the Big Top. That's where you get your food and your mud, heh. There's a path. You'll see it."

  "Thanks for the lift." Geyl leaned toward him and brushed her lips across his. Would she ever rid her nostrils of the stench of mercaptan?

  "Jow, Rita," he said.

  "Jow?"

  "Ummm.. .means, the least I can do, and pass it on."

  "I will. Good luck."

  "Heh. You're the one's gonna need it!"

  Geyl walked the gravel path, passing a huge flaming elephant on one side, and then what seemed to be a duck on fire on the other. Further down were less identifiable sculptures; one resembling the Eiffel Tower and the other a Bohr atom, near others looking like nothing she could name. The flames whipped about in the chill eastern breeze, and she was glad for the warmth when she stepped downwind of one of the statues. All seemed to be made of rusted iron tubing and pipe fittings, from which a multitude of little flames leapt and merged.

  The waning gibbous disk of one of Hell's two small moons was beginning to appear from behind tattered clouds, and it was growing easier to see. All around were pipelines and piles of pipe and fittings, and cranes and earth-movers parked in rows. The land was rocky and barren, with only occasional clumps of stiff tall grass to rustle in the wind.

  She walked apprehensively along a further section of the road, with rank upon rank of pipe-frame Tyrannosaurs standing immobile on either side. Jets of methane flame streamed from between their painted-on teeth.

  A pounding from behind her made Geyl spin around, to see one of the mechanical dinosaurs stalk from between the ranks of silent machines on its two great legs, cross the road, and vanish amidst the iron beasts on its opposite side. She dove into the shadows behind some pipes at the side of the road. A ragged howl as of a turbine echoed among the other machines, but when she raised her head it was gone, the turbine's cry fading in the distance.

  She had underestimated Hell. All of 1Earth had underestimated Hell. It chilled her, in fact, to ponder how much her own SIS had underestimated Hell.

  Still, a strange elation was rising within her. She was the first 1Earth official to set foot on Hell in two hundred years! She had landed, she had looked around, and she had discovered all she had needed to know in less than a week. Her early horror at what Hell had accomplished against Earth's intentions remained, but it had retreated behind a veil of imposed and necessary calm. Her newer fear of apprehension and torture (and what a perfect sort of torture it was!) rose when she let her guard down, especially at times like the present when she was short on sleep and food.

  And it was at these same odd times when the shame she should have felt for spreading her legs in return for a lift vanished utterly. "Never barter sex under your own name," the venerable Barbara Del Caso had taught her in SIS CovertOps. "Be someone else—and then revel in it." So she had become Rita Monterra in Peter's cell, using his razor to reshape her hair and then shave her pubis. Certain men considered that exotic—and it was a useful hedge against lice.

  Her elation took on a sour edge as she recalled Peter as she had last seen him, lying on his back with half of one leg vaporized trying to stop an assassination attempt against the Top Dog. Peter had proven to be an immature nuisance, but she had seen him fight the assassin, and felt he hadn't quite deserved what he had gotten. Still, she was glad she had lightfingered his key while they had danced, and knowing he would be under medical care had allowed her to scour his cell with considerable thoroughness and no risk of him discovering her.

  She owed him this much: He had almost immediately gotten into precisely the right circles. Peter's notes were at first astonishing, and then terrifying. Hell had a clean room, and was working on a Hilbert drive. Getting out of the planet's gravity well was doubtless a problem—and his notes were silent on that point—but these were risk-numb madmen who would gladly ride a ballistic solid-fuel booster to orbit, even if it took a hundred fatal tries to get it right. Peter's books had told her much, without her having to lay a finger on any of them. Hell knew the chemistry. Hell knew the equations. She shivered. They would pull it off.

  For all she knew, they already had. The wind whipped beneath her jacket, and she shivered again. The mess hall song rang in her ears: When they see their cities molten and their forests charred... Not yet, not yet. The pickup point would go live in twenty-four days, and would stay live until she got there.

  One foot after the other. Not yet. She was coming. Hell's days were numbered.

  The Big Top was big indeed. It was a rolling, geometrical roof of pale white canvas, hectares in extent, stretched over cables strung in a web amidst a random forest of iron poles. The poles branched and crisscrossed under the canvas, and from random points on the poles gas ports protruded through the canvas to jet flame against the night. The jets brought a soft light down through the white canvas, barely bright enough to read by, vague enough so that the shades and textures of the stonework faded into a uniform beige-gray.

  Beneath the canvas was a strange architecture of low structures formed of slabs of sandstone mortared together, none of them with roofs, most behind walls she (who was not tall) could peer over. The workday would not begin for another one of Hell's long hours, and the Big Top was mostly deserted.

  She picked her way between steaming mud-baths, startling once to see a single human head, immersed to the neck in tawny mud, follow her progress with green eyes. Later she passed two women, also completely coated with mud and probably (but not provably) naked, daubing patterns on each other's bodies with bright red and yellow paint. The only vigorous motion she saw was that of a couple making energetic love in another shallow well filled with steaming mud. Here and there were fountains and basins of clear water, flowing and gurgling over spillways from one to another.

  Toward the center of the covered space was a circular area filled with benches formed of sandstone slabs, at the center of which was an open kitchen with three women bending over gas-fired grills and boilers.

  On the benches near them were fifteen or twenty people, eating. About half wore baggy trousers and boots but nothing else, and were caked with dark brown mud except on their hands, the skin of which was startling in its lightness. The rest were similarly covered with mud, but appeared to be naked. Some were women, judging by their breasts, but all had heads either shaved or so caked with mud their hair could not be seen.

  All watched her approach, but none spoke. Geyl strode boldly to the thin counter separating the bench area from the kitchen. A middle-aged woman with African features wearing nothing more than an apron and mud smiled at her, dipped a ladle into a large copper pot, and handed her a steaming bowl with a spoon stuck into it.

  "Jow, brother," she said as Geyl took the proffered bowl.

  "Jow," Geyl replied.

  The cook-woman shook her head. "You're new." She nodded at Geyl's arm, perhaps to the orange band, perhaps (on second thought) to the absence of mud. "Giver says jow. Receiver t
akes in silence." The accent was Caribbean and musical.

  Geyl found a seat at a sandstone bench far from the others present and ate slowly, not wishing to upset her stomach. It was difficult; the soup was superb, thick and rich with barley, celery, carrots, and small cubes of beef. She went back for a second bowl, and a short loaf of brown bread covered with cinnamon.

  When she had finished the loaf, exulting in the scent of cinnamon after two days and a night in the cab of a mercaptan tanker, a large man from the trousers-and-boots group rose from his place and sat down across the bench from her.

  "Fire be," he said, his narrow gray eyes hard on hers.

  "Hi," she said, unwilling to mimic what might be a religious intonation without further understanding it. She held her half-empty bowl up. "I really want to thank you for your generosity."

  "T'aint ours," he said, with a broad southern American drawl. "The Fire moves, and we follow it. Everything belongs to the Fire."

  And surely, fire was everywhere around them, streaming from poles and dancing under the cook pots. Geyl licked her lips, unsure what response she might make. "The Fire is generous," she said.

  "No. The Fire just is." Geyl looked down at the table. The man continued speaking. "I'd guess you're running from the Ralpha Dogs and looking for work."

  Geyl looked up, smiled and shook her head. Why not be direct? "Close. I'm running from the Ralpha Dogs, but I'm looking for Filer Fitzgerald."

  Several other people looked their way at the mention of the name. The man pulled a long knife from his belt and laid it on the table, near at hand. "You planning on killing him?"

  Nearby, several others pulled knives and sidearms from their belts.

  Geyl suppressed a gasp. "No...no. See, I'm new." She pointed at the orange band. "I'm unarmed."

  The big man shrugged. "If I was a sicaria gunning for somebody, I'd put orange on and act dumb like a drop."

  Geyl struggled to keep her smile in place. "I have no idea what a 'sicaria' is. I want his help. I have to go someplace a long way from here. Someplace...dangerous."