Pock's World
Page 28
A barefoot old man in a long brown robe was striding into the archway. He had not been invited. Ratty waived back an aide and advanced to greet the friar himself.
“This is an unexpected pleasure, Brother Andre! We expected Cardinal Phare.”
The old man looked weary and dusty in the heat. He bared long yellow fangs. “I am the papal legate in this matter. It is my duty to lead this conference out of error and enlighten the delegates so they will reject the seductive words of that devil spawn.” He grimaced past Ratty’s shoulder.
“Well, you are welcome in the cardinal’s place. Isn’t he, Deputy Ambassador?”
“I suppose so,” Umandral said. “A couple of questions arise, though. Where were you while the rest of us were at Real Quassia, Brother? May I call you ‘Brother’?”
“No. You are no brother of mine. I was assisting at Mass in St. Michael’s Cathedral.”
“At Quassia the people were praying for deliverance from the probe. What exactly were you praying for?”
Oh, very sneaky! Ratty wondered if the kid might even be as smart as he claimed.
Brother Andre could see the traps on all sides of that question. He hesitated.
“Did you beg your God to destroy the world to get rid of me?” Umandral asked. “If you did, He refused. Did you ask Him to save it? If so, your prayers were answered and you should ask for equal credit with the Church of the Mother. I doubt that your request will be granted.”
“We prayed that God’s will be done on Pock’s World. He chose to grant us life so that we could do our duty, which is to hunt down and destroy you and all your like.”
“So you still retain free will and the right to choose your destiny. On what basis—”
“That’s enough!” Ratty said. “Leave discussion to the conference. My aide over there has a car ready for you, Brother.”
“The rule of my order requires me to travel on foot.”
Ratty was tempted, and Duty would probably bless him if he gave in. But he didn’t. “It is at least ten kilometers to the meeting place. You will be late, perhaps even miss the whole event.”
Andre pouted but agreed to accept a ride and strode off with an aide.
“That’s the lot,” Ratty said. How long until the Ambassador arrives?
—More than ten minutes and less than eleven.
“Come, Young Friend. Let us finish our discussion about miracles.” Ratty ushered the cuckoo back into the cubicle.
He sank into his chair again. “A few hours before impact, radar showed the probe bang on target to impact Pock’s, close to Hostie Caldera, wherever that is. But it missed. It was a few seconds late, I am told, and a few seconds at that velocity is a long way. As it came down, the Station intervened. It hit the Station instead, and the impact vaporized both of them.”
Had Athena made it safely home? There would have been chaos up there at the end. He would never know. He could only hope that she had not been trapped in Pock’s Station to be vaporized. Lynn Lazuline, now… No, the gods were never kind enough to vaporize scum like him.
“I don’t understand why the debris didn’t destroy the world anyway, but—”
“That’s easy,” Umandral said, back on his stool. “If it had hit the ground, it would have plowed right through the crust and blasted out a crater hundreds of kilometers in diameter. An enormous chunk of Pock’s World would have been blown into the air and come down as a rain of hot rock, some of it hours or days later.”
“Yes, but—”
“And remember that the probe was in a retrograde orbit around Javel. Pock’s orbit is direct, and of course the station’s orbit around Pock’s was also direct. Probe and station were of roughly equal size and mass. They impacted in a head-on collision. There was some flash damage directly below the impact, as you know, but the mass of rock involved was tiny compared to what would have been disturbed by the expected impact. The expanding gas ball depressed the atmosphere, causing an immense shock wave, but even that was catastrophic only locally. The small part of the debris that fell in solid form was no coarser than dust, and the grains burned up as that meteor shower we saw.” The kid loved to lecture.
“So my question is, how did the probe get delayed? A multi-million-ton boulder takes a lot of delaying.”
Umandral shrugged his little shoulders and spread his big hands. “How should I know?” he asked mockingly.
“Then I will ask you this. I reviewed the records of the spectators when the flash came, when the meteor storm lit up the sky. Most people were aghast and terrified, thinking that this was the end of the world. A few, the well-informed, were jubilant, because they already guessed that the danger was over.”
“And?”
“And you had tears in your eyes.”
Umandral scowled, as if caught out in a weakness.
“I believe,” Ratty said, “that there was a third martyr.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes you do. Talk about water, then.”
“Water?”
“Space probes need a large supply of water—for their cooling systems, their hydroponics, the needs of their crews.” Ratty had watched a zillion cog-dramas involving space probes and researched probes for some of his own cog-docs. “I realize that your probe was only crewed for a short time. In all the centuries it traveled through interstellar space, it was uninhabited. But it would have needed a large crew before that, when it was being tunneled and equipped, and you admitted that there were at least forty-eight of you living in it near the end. So that rock was made to carry a lot of water.
“I cognized Braata’s original report in the airship and was surprised when he said he found the climate control system turned off. Normally it would be left on—not to prevent the probe freezing solid, but to keep it from exploding as the heat from the hot leading surface spread through to the water reservoirs. And on Frivdy he confirmed that the probe, like others I know of, was built with many shafts accessing the surface. You wish to comment now?”
“No.” The cuckoo was scowling.
It was like pulling teeth with eyebrow tweezers. “Who was the third martyr, Friend Umandral? Before you all loaded into the shuttles to descend to Pock’s World, you held two lotteries, didn’t you? You lost the second draw and accepted the job of hare, to alert the hounds that cuckoos had invaded. Who lost the first draw?”
Umandral sulked for a moment, then said, “You mean who won the first draw?”
“All right, who won the first draw?”
“Labba. She was my sister.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “I’m truly sorry about your sister, and I understand that you must honor her heroism. So you knew what happened to Malacostraca. You knew STARS would try to sterilize Pock’s World. Your superiors set a trap for STARS, and STARS fell right in. You put the probe into a cleverly chosen orbit, an orbit where a very slight deflection would create an impact trajectory, but if STARS refused that bait, it would have to wait a long time for the orbits to line up again. One of you had to stay behind in the probe until that deflection had been made and the impact trajectory was established. Then she had to calculate exactly when to vent the volatiles, right?” Ratty wondered if Labba had used a clandestine computer or done the calculation in her head. It didn’t matter.
—The Ambassador’s car is approaching the gate, Consort.
Thank you.
“Labba opened the valves to flood the probe with hot water, and at the right moment, she blew open the final lock on whichever shaft or shafts happened to be pointing in the right direction. The pressure dropped to vacuum. The probe vented all that air and steam out into space, tons of it. And the impulse was just enough of a nudge to raise the probe a hair’s-breadth in its orbit and save the world.”
Umandral blinked a few times. “And Labba went out with it.”
“I guessed she must have.”
“You asked me whether we understood love.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“You’re a sneaky devil, for a primitive!”
“Thank you,” Ratty said, rising. “Time to go.”
“You got one thing wrong, though. After Labba won the first draw, I was excused from joining in the second one. I insisted, and I won that one.”
Ratty stared hard at him and decided he was probably telling the truth.
“Bully for you. Why?”
“I wanted to be worthy of her.”
“I couldn’t have done that.”
“You? You nearly killed yourself helping that woman on the pillar.”
“I had only a few minutes to live.”
“You could have gone home to Ayne and chose not to. I make that four martyrs, Friend Turnsole.”
Ratty laughed awkwardly. Wagering one’s life to get laid was not in the same league as saving a world, as Duty had done, or even saving one’s mission, like the two cuckoos. “I didn’t think Linn Lazuline would let me go home.”
“You didn’t ask him.”
As they went out the door, Ratty said, “So? You’re saying we’re both either heroes or damned fools, you and I. So what happens now? You demand citizenship, else you start carrying out all those threats you threw at the Ayne mission in Hederal? Ovipositors? Impregnating the natives with parasitoid cuckoos? You colonize us? In five hundred years Pock’s will be like Malacostraca is now, inhabited by Children of the Future and the humans will be all gone?”
The alien shrugged. “That option is still available to us. It has worked on other worlds, but we’d rather not do it that way. You don’t understand yet? Even you, Sneaky One? Of course your mate is effectively sterile, and you won’t ever have offspring of your own. And Brother Andre is celibate.”
“What has our saintly friar got to do with it?”
“Nothing. That’s the point. But if you were going to be a true father, and your children could be genetically modified before birth to be twice as smart, how would you decide? To leave them burdened with genetic diseases and the innate human design faults—bad backs, hernias, myopia—or to have the sort of superior design the Children can offer?”
The aides were lining up in the archway. An ungainly looking woman was emerging from the air car out in the plaza.
“Bribery!” Ratty said. “Just as Brother Andre predicted.”
“Yes,” Umandral said, “he knows, but he doesn’t understand. We bribe you into letting us live. And we abide by the treaty. But the Pocosins won’t be able to resist our offers any more than the humans of Malacostraca did. They’re all still there, or their descendants are. But they are Children of the Future now, like us. The humans have gone. Do you mourn Homo erectus, Friend Ratty?”
Ratty laughed. “No.”
“Does Brother Andre?”
“Probably.” Nobody would choose to have kids as ugly as this insectile freak. But few parents-to-be would resist a genetic nip here and a tuck there. In a couple of generations the “Children look” would be high fashion, and everyone would choose it for their offspring.
Ratty sighed. “Do these gifts of yours include the ability to remove a brain implant?”
Umandral glanced at him appraisingly. “I expect so. It would be easy in our brains, which are far more complex than yours but much better organized and more accessible for implants. Even for you, though, we could run a nanotube down in between the neurons and vacuum out unwanted matter one molecule at a time.”
So even one of the Monody incarnations could be bribed, with her lover’s life. Who could refuse?
“Sounds like fun. And what’s in it for you, Child Umandral? You personally? You left your world and embarked on a dangerous interstellar adventure. You let yourself be caught and tortured and threatened with death. What’s your motive?”
“Love,” the alien said loftily. “To bring hope to all you poor defective humans. We’re just like the saintly Brother Andre.”
The ambassador was entering the archway, but Ratty continued to study the boy.
“No. I told you I’m a cynic. What you want to do is father a world. One way or another, your children will inherit Pock’s. You may procreate them, or implant them, or just contribute germ plasm to fertility labs, but Umandral will be a founding father of nations.”
The cuckoo chuckled. “And founding mother. That’s more work.”
“So you were offered a chance to go forth and multiply. Isn’t that a rather primitive motive for a superhuman species?”
“No. It’s the defining characteristic of life. We win, but you don’t lose anything—except your delusions of superiority. You’re wasting your time, trying to argue with me, Turnsole.”
“I suppose I am,” Ratty said. He turned to bow to Ambassador Ignitor.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Dave Duncan
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-3453-4
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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DAVE DUNCAN
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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Table of Contents
Map
PART ONE: Wundy
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
PART TWO: Toody
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART THREE: Thirdensday
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PART FOUR: Forsdy
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART FIVE: Frivdy
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PART SIX: Sixtrdy
PART SEVEN: Sevundy