by Dave Duncan
“Nothing! Not a flacking thing! We tried again with double the dose. Still nothing. Now it’s hiding behind the table, so we’re drilling a hole in the outside wall. This time I’m going to burn holes through its head.”
Eryngo, trotting along behind them, made whimpering noises.
Ratty remembered the end of the commissioners’ visit, when Solan and Umandral had laughed together. By all the gods, that thing was sentient! Joy was right to want to rescue it.
“No, you’re not. Not until I say so. Why did it, he I mean, attack your men?”
“Who knows?”
He must not lose his temper. “You had him under surveillance, didn’t you?”
“They were writhing it,” the big man admitted angrily.
“That’s torture. Would you stand for that if you didn’t have to?”
This time there was no answer. They had reached a bend in the corridor, which was being guarded by four men with guns. Ratty had seen this area in the playback of the commissioners’ visit. He wanted to go in there less than he had ever wanted anything.
“Does he have implants?”
“It did have,” Eryngo said. “But we couldn’t tell what they did, because we don’t know how its brain is put together. So we burned them out with a gamma ray laser.”
No solution there, then.
“The room on the left?” Ratty removed his writhe and holster and handed them to the major. “What’s the code for the shock fence?”
“I forbid you to—”
“And I will have you busted to latrine cleaner. And excommunicated. Answer!”
“OAK 479.”
“Right. Get back out of the way, all of you! I don’t trust your trigger fingers. Move! Right back, out of sight.”
All this amazing authority came from the red towel draped over his left shoulder. With cold lizards wriggling in his belly, he walked along to the door. It had holes in it, and there was sawdust on the floor. His mouth was too dry and his bladder too full. He punched the code into the control on the wall; the light turned green.
He knocked and opened the door a crack. “I’m not armed. Is it safe for me to come in?”
After a moment a boyish voice said, “Just look out for those thugs behind you.”
Ratty went in with his hands up and kicked the door shut behind him. The room stank like a cesspit, probably because the body at his feet had been leaking fluids. He had been a very large man but now his brain had boiled out through his eye sockets, he was very dead. There was another body at the far end of the room. Ratty went over and bent to have a closer look.
“Vegetated,” said the boy.
Ratty turned to look at him. He had propped the table on one side and was crouching behind it, down on hands and knees on his mattress. He seemed too young and pathetic to be a remorseless killer.
“How do you feel after all that shit they pumped into you?”
He shrugged. “They’ve done worse. I’m coming out of it.”
“You’re Umandral. I’m Ratty Turnsole.”
“I know. Seen you on a cog-doc. Thought you were Ayne-based.”
“Made a career change. Now I’m consort to a Monody incarnation.”
“Lucky you.” Warily, not exposing any more of himself than he had to, the boy squirmed around so that he was sitting cross-legged. Ugly as sin, yes, but sentient, human.
“Yes.” Ratty gestured vaguely at the corpses. “Why did you kill them?”
“They pissed me off.”
“I want to get you out of here, but murders make it harder. Monody is overhead in an air car.” Had that been a trace of a nod? “And you cognized her message, right?”
The boy nodded again.
“So your implants are still working?”
Pause, then another nod. “Some.”
“They must be as indestructible as you are.” A world of supermen would devise super-technology, of course. “So you know there’s a lynch mob after you?”
“Yes. They’re smarter than you are.”
“You sure know how to plead your case. Young Friend Umandral, I’d like to take you out of here and see you treated as a person, not a lab rat, but how can I trust you?”
The boy pouted. “How can I trust you?”
“Because I’m your only hope. That head gun goon says he’s going to kill you, orders or not. Here!”
Ratty snatched up the writhe lying beside the wall and lobbed it to the alien. He threw it faster than he normally would and it went higher because he forgot to allow for the gravity. No matter—a skinny arm shot up and caught it. Then Umandral shifted his grasp to the handle and put his finger on the trigger. He looked thoughtfully at Ratty.
Who shrugged and showed his empty hands. Now his bladder really felt like it was going to explode.
The boy smiled. “Thanks.” He tossed the writhe away.
“My pleasure.” For not being vegetated. “I must have your word that you won’t break any more laws while you’re in my custody. No more killings? You won’t try to kidnap Monody or do anything nasty like that? Because I’m climbing a pole for you, lad, and if you misbehave, then I’ll be slush.”
Suddenly the boy moved, inhumanly fast. One moment he was cross-legged on the mattress, and the next he had gone past Ratty and was standing in a corner out of sight of the door. Ratty jumped, hopelessly late to have done anything, even if had been armed.
“I promise,” Umandral said quietly. “I’ll need some clothes.” He had only a cotton strip around his crotch, not enough even by Pocosin standards.
Ratty pulled a face and took another look at the smaller corpse. He was not truly dead, and his sphincters had not relaxed. He was big, but not like the other one.
“This will be baggy on you. Let’s try.” Ratty stripped the body and handed shorts and boots to the alien. Then he went over to the door, opened it slowly and put an arm out first, to show his skin color, then his head. The major and another man were standing at the end of the corridor with guns aimed.
“Put those pissy things down!” he yelled. “Umandral and I are coming out. We’re going to go up to the roof and fly away, understand?”
“You have no authority!”
Oxindole, if you’re kibitzing, I need some backup now.
—You’ve got it. Hold on a moment.
The major snapped to attention, swung down his weapon to aim at the floor. His eyes widened, his face turned brilliant scarlet. “Yes, sir! No, sir! Of course, Minister! You are free to go, Consort.” He spoke as if the words hurt. “The prisoner is released into your custody.”
Ratty said, “That’s better. Now clear all your men out of here. Nobody between us and the roof.”
Monody’s face appeared, but not Joy, probably Duty. —Very smoothly done, Consort! We haven’t decided whether to give you a medal or cut your head off.
When will you make that decision, Holiness?
She smiled. —After we see what happens at Undra.”
Chapter 5
As the shaft elevated them up to the roof, Ratty said, “It is customary to touch one knee to the ground when being presented to Her Holiness. Do you have religious or egalitarian misgivings about this?”
The boy said, “Nothing serious. I don’t believe in her stupid goddess, though.”
“I don’t either, but I’m too polite to say so.”
“I’m too smart to lie about it.”
“You would lie if you were getting what I’m getting.”
Umandral grinned at him. The start of trust?
They emerged on the roof. A faint rushing sound resolved itself into cheering from the crowd.
“People are weird,” Ratty said. “They are making you welcome. Wave.”
Umandral snorted with adolescent contempt, but he waved. His oversized pelvis gave him an awkward, rocking gait. Glamorous he could never be, not by human standards.
Kropotkin was standing at the door of the car, glowering nervously at the alien. Inside, Omass had his writhe a
lready drawn, his finger on the trigger.
Ratty paused before entering. “Listen, both of you. Young Friend Umandral is superhuman. He is fast enough to run rings around both of you, and he can tune out pain so that a writhe wouldn’t stop him. Put the damned things away. You can’t do any good against him.” If the world was watching this through his implants, he hoped someone was censoring the proceedings. “Your Holiness, may I present Young Friend Umandral of Canaster Sector?”
The boy stepped in and dipped as expected. Then he sat down, stretched out reedy legs, folded even thinner arms, and kept his face expressionless. He kept flipping back and forth between terrifying monster and surly kid.
“You are welcome to Pock’s World,” Joy said graciously, although Ratty could see her nervousness.
“I am glad to hear it, Priestess. After all the shit they’ve been giving me, I was starting to wonder.”
Joy sniggered. Ratty deliberately laughed aloud. He went to sit beside her. The door slammed shut, and Car One whined straight up into the shy.
“I can arrange for you to say a few words to the World Council if you wish,” Joy said eagerly. After a sensational start to her first public duty, she must be plotting even greater triumphs.
No, no, no! Worse and worse.
“I would love that,” Umandral said solemnly.
“But what will you say?” Ratty asked.
“Nothing but the truth.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Like how you’re planning to wipe out the human race on Pock’s?”
“Yes.”
Joy gasped. “There are six hundred million of us and only a… how many of you?”
“He won’t answer that.”
“Billions,” Umandral said, “depending how many planets you include. Forty-eight still at large on Pock’s world. That makes the odds heavily in our favor.”
The two guards growled. Joy was nonplused.
Ratty said, “You seem to tell the truth all the time, even when it is not to your own advantage. Are you capable of lying?”
The boy shrugged. “I can, but I hate to. It is virtually impossible to deceive us, so telling lies is bad policy. The Children soon learn not to.”
“‘The Children’?”
“We are the Children of the Future. You are the Past. Of course, if Pock’s World is sterilized by an impact, we shall die with you. The prospect is harder on us, because of our wider knowledge and more effective imaginations. We can analyze all the ways it may kill us—the initial searing fireball, the flash deaths farther away, the shock wave that can kill folk without leaving a mark or roll them in a debris wave until they are shredded, the rain of fire all over the world as the ejecta fall, the days of choking darkness when the air is full of smoke and soot and the sun never shines, the killing wintertime that will follow, and then, after that, when the skies clear, the greenhouse effects that roasts the entire—”
“And which one exit would you choose?” Ratty asked acidly.
“The last, because the earlier effects would be so interesting to watch.” Umandral sounded sincere. The strangest thing about him was that Ratty had to take him seriously, as he never would a human boy of that age. He sensed the presence of a mind already superior to his.
“So is the world going to end tomorrow?”
“A few minutes after tomorrow was what I overheard.”
“It will end?”
Umandral nodded solemnly. “It seems so. What did STARS do to our ship?”
“According to a turncoat STARS employee—who may, of course, be a plant, lying to us poor dumb humans—they destroyed the computers and the entangler equipment so that no one could leave or board after they left, and they programmed the probe itself to impact Pock’s World. They also set delayed charges to disable the Wong-Hui projector to prevent anyone changing the new trajectory later. Independent observers predict impact, as you say, for a few minutes into eclipse on Sixtrdy.”
“If what you have just told me is true, then Pock’s World is doomed.”
“One of my senior incarnations,” Joy declared, “has been assured by our Goddess that the impact will not occur.”
The boy shrugged again. “Wishful thinking is self-deception, the most stupid of all forms of lying. Denial is one of the greatest weaknesses you humans have, so it has been eliminated from our genome. We can accept reality without anxiety. Of course, her lies will never be proved against her in this case, will they?”
Joy pouted. The guards glared.
Unfortunately, Ratty agreed with the punk. It was thirty hours or so to Armageddon. “And how do you feel about this?”
Umandral gave him an exasperated look, as if the question was too stupid to bother with. “Sad, of course. But we all die, and it will be a better death than what Eryngo and her scats were planning for me. Before being captured, I could look forward to a much longer and richer life than any of you could. Mostly I am regretful that we cannot complete our mission to upgrade this world.”
Joy said, “Some lies are told for good purposes. If the human population of Pock’s World believed that it must die on Sixtrdy, there would be panic and suffering. Is not a lie to the contrary a kindness?”
“The Children would neither consider it so nor find it necessary.”
“The Goddess’s children would. We shall arrive at Undra shortly and I am told that the leaders assembled are anxious to see you. If we let you address them, will you promise not to say anything to make them unhappy?”
Ratty opened his mouth to protest and saw a gownsman he did not know, wearing a cape of green with white polka dots.
—Please stay out of this, Consort. We shall see that you are in control. The image smiled wryly and disappeared.
In control? As far as Ratty was concerned, Joy was in nobody’s control, never had been, and never would be. And Umandral was worse.
“If you will promise not to return me to prison,” the cuckoo said. “I know nothing about the probe’s current trajectory except what you have told me, so I promise not to foretell it. I would speak honestly about our plans for mutually beneficial cooperation between humans and the Children.”
Joy beamed. “Then we shall all listen! Consort Ratty will ask you some questions, won’t you darling?”
Both Omass and Kropotkin looked at Ratty disbelievingly. They thought she was crazy, and so did he. The Children’s program to improve Pock’s World would almost certainly begin by removing the present inhabitants or using them as brood stock. If the probe’s impact did not kill all the human beings tomorrow, then the Children soon would.
* * *
Grandiose buildings were rare on Pock’s World, because it tended to shrug them off. The World Council met in a former volcanic vent, a natural amphitheater with steep rocky walls and a grassy floor. Thirty-one governments were represented, each having sent a delegation of three or four persons, and each group sat apart under its own transparent umbrella. A steady drizzle was falling, and clouds hid both the sun and Javel.
“Acoustics?” Ratty said incredulously in the robing room where Monody was preparing to make her entry. “You use voices? At the close of the thirtieth millennium?”
“It’s traditional, darling.” Joy eyed her hair in a mirror as an attendant primped it. “The council’s been meeting here since long before cognition was invented. And everyone can chat with their friends during the speeches. Are you boys ready?”
Ratty looked at the cuckoo. “I am.”
The cuckoo said, “So am I.” Someone had found him clothes to fit.
Ugly runt! On impulse Ratty asked, “How old are you, sonny?”
Umandral took no offence. “In round numbers, 425.1 million standard seconds. That’s about 15.121 of my home years. In Pock’s years, 7.56. On Ayne 13.456, or 13 years, 7 long-fortnights, and 12 days.”
“How did you work all that out?”
“In my head.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Ratty hoped the brat had used an implant, bu
t he probably hadn’t.
* * *
Worrying about what might be about to happen, Ratty escorted Monody as she made her entrance through a tunnel, emerging on a balcony-rostrum while a choir sang a hymn to the Mother. Almost all the delegates knelt to her, even the Theriac Emperor in his gold robes. A few dissenters merely bowed.
She recited a prayer, then bade them all be seated, her voice reverberating strangely across the arena. Every delegation would include at least one reporter, so the world would be watching this meeting of the council as it had not watched any such assembly in centuries.
Joy retired to her throne, and from there she presented new Consort Ratty. What he was about to do was very much what he had done for a living on Ayne, but a live audience would be disconcerting. Joy had warned him that he would be applauded; he was not prepared for a deafening standing ovation, the whole crater echoing with cheers. He did not flatter himself that he was good enough to have earned that acclaim.
He raised a hand for silence and introduced the visitor, Young Friend Umandral. The cuckoo waddled forward to join him, and Pock’s World had its first view of the alien.
Now, would the cuckoo stick to the agreed script? Somewhere a control was programmed to cut him off, but neither humans nor human machinery did well when trying to outguess this gawky-looking kid.
“Will you tell us exactly where you come from?”
“The name of my world would mean nothing to you. It is roughly eighty-three light years away, in the Canaster Sector.” His double throat produced an unpleasantly harsh overtone.
“And why did you come?”
“Out of goodwill. Because we can offer much technology that your world sadly needs. We can show you how to double your life spans, abolish poverty, raise your children’s intelligence, and adapt your genome to the world so that you won’t suffer from cancer and allergies and won’t need tonic.”
So far, so good. Why had he and his friends landed in secret?
Because STARS, Inc. had historically blocked all attempts at communication between the sectors.
Why would STARS do that?
Because STARS, Inc. controlled the flow of technology in order to profit from it.