by D B Hartwell
“Desert’s beautiful,” he said. “I think they’ll change this morning. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I remember . . . they were changing the day I cut off from the Trunk . . . I thought all the world would be that beautiful.”
Hard to believe we were the same person: that young demon crawling out of her sac, covered in amniotic fluid, staring in mesmerized joy at the swarms of fluttering light . . .
“Will he really destroy all this?” Charm asked.
“I’ll kill him in the morning, but others will come. I think there may be too many of them.”
Charm took a long pull from the jug. “You know why I like salt water?” he said. “It tastes like tears. I had some of yours while you were sleeping. I hope you don’t mind.”
I shook my head. “What did they taste like?” I asked.
“Bitter, like despair. Like disappointed love. I don’t think you should kill him.”
“What else can I do? Let him kill all of us?”
“He keeps asking a question down there. Top wouldn’t disturb you but I thought you should know. He says: ‘Do the humans here know that the desert will kill them?’ ”
I looked sharply at him—or at least, his bottle. “Do the humans know? Of course they do. They know jumping off a cliff will kill them too. What kind of a question is that?”
Charm’s breath dusted my ear. “His wife, Naeve,” he said.
I stood up and started running down the stairs.
• • • •
Israphel looked startled—almost afraid—when I burst into the room.
“Come,” I said, grabbing his elbow. I dragged him to the front doors and pushed them open with my right hands. We stumbled down the steps and onto the sand, where the buried maggots wiggled away from our feet. I bent down and plucked one from its lair. I held its squirming form between us—it was a particularly fine specimen: juicy and fat and bright enough to make him squint. I grew a third arm on the left side of my body—glowing mahogany, just like the human body I had used in my failed attempt to seduce Israphel that first day.
“This is a human hand,” I said. “Watch what happens.”
Steeling myself, I dropped the maggot on my new left palm. Immediately, it started burrowing into my flesh, devouring my skin and blood in great maggot-sized chunks. It chomped through my bones with reckless abandon and I gasped involuntarily. My hand had nearly fallen off by the time it finished gorging and settled itself in the ruined, bloody mass of my palm.
“Do you see?” I said between gritted teeth. I needed to withdraw the nerve endings, but not before Israphel understood. “This is just one maggot. You can find this out without dying. Anyone who lives alongside the desert knows what they do. I’ve heard the humans even sometimes harvest the maggots for their farms. They all know. How long was your wife here before she went to the desert?”
He swallowed slowly, as though his throat was painfully constricted. “By your count . . . seventeen triads.”
“She was older than me . . . time enough to die.”
He started to cry, but they were furious tears, and I knew better than to touch him. “What if she didn’t know? What if she lived far from the desert, and when she came here no one told her—”
I picked up the maggot—which was by now nearly the size of my palm—and held it in front of his face. “Look! She knew. She was older than me, Israphel, and I am very old. She knew.” I let the maggot drop into the sand and withdrew my ruined hand back into my body.
He sank to his knees. I knelt down so my face was even with his. “Do you know how demons die?” I said softly.
He shook his head.
“We choose,” I said. “If we wanted to, we could live forever, but every demon dies. Some die sooner than others, but we all, eventually, make the choice. Death doesn’t scare me, Israphel, but eternity does. Seventeen triads is a very long time.”
“We could have been together forever,” he said.
“No one wants forever, even if they don’t realize it. I imagine that your project hasn’t been operating long enough to discover this, but it’s true . . . life is sweet because life is finite. Do you really want to live forever?”
He met my eyes for a moment and gave a brief, painful smile. My skin started tingling again. “No,” he said.
The ground began to shake, softly at first, then more violently. Then came the sound I remembered so well—a low, buzzing hum that gouged my ears and made my spine shiver. The lights under the sand grew even brighter. Israphel looked around—curious, wary but certainly not scared. It was a good attitude for someone who planned to live with me. I started laughing, first in soft giggles and then in unstoppable peals. I lay down in the sand to get closer to the buzzing. When I felt Israphel touch my cheek, I laughed even more and pulled him on top of me with all four of my arms.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The lights!” I couldn’t seem to explain any more. While I laughed he kissed me slowly—first my eyes, then my mouth, then my nipples. I was coming by the time the maggots burst from the sand, metamorphosed from fat little worms to gigantic, glowing moths. They swirled around us, dipping into my hair and alighting on Israphel’s fuzzy scalp.
“I’m going to fight you, Israphel,” I said. “I won’t let you destroy my universe just because you passed the third task.”
His laugh was deep, like the buzzing just before the lights. “I wouldn’t have expected otherwise,” he said.
We held each other as we rolled around on the sand, buffeted on all sides by the glowing moths. The maggot that had eaten my hand had also metamorphosed and now swooped on its gigantic wings down towards our faces, as though to greet us before flying away.
“What happens after you die, Naeve?” Israphel asked—softly, as though he didn’t expect an answer.
“Nothing,” I said.
And then we laughed and stood and I danced with my husband in the lights.
JAMES L. CAMBIAS James L. Cambias was born and raised in New Orleans, and worked for many years in the world of role-playing games, contributing extensively to scenarios and gaming worlds from several of that field’s leading publishers. He has been publishing science fiction since 2000.
“Balancing Accounts” is as hard as “hard SF” gets, a story whose only characters are—literally—hardware. Interviewed by John Joseph Adams, Cambias said, “I tried to make it work without violating physical laws or realistic economics. That meant it had to be within the Solar System (no faster-than-light drives) and couldn’t involve a human crew.” For all that, it’s an engaging update of one of SF’s most venerable tropes.
BALANCING ACCOUNTS
Part of me was shopping for junk when I saw the human.
I had budded off a viewpoint into one of my mobile repair units, and sent it around to Fat Albert’s scrapyard near Ilia Field on Dione. Sometimes you can find good deals on components there, but I hate to rely on Albert’s own senses. He gets subjective on you. So I crawled between the stacks of pipe segments, bales of torn insulation, and bins of defective chips, looking for a two-meter piece of aluminum rod to shore up the bracing struts on my main body’s third landing leg.
Naturally I talked with everything I passed, just to see if there were any good deals I could snap up and trade elsewhere. I stopped to chat with some silicone-lined titanium valves that claimed to be virgins less than six months old—trying to see if they were lying or defective somehow. And then I felt a Presence, and saw the human.
It was moving down the next row, surrounded by a swarm of little bots. It was small, no more than two meters, and walked on two legs with an eerie, slow fluid gait. Half a dozen larger units followed it, including Fat Albert himself in a heavy recovery body. As it came into range my own personality paused as the human requisitioned my unit’s eyes and ears. It searched my recent memories, planted a few directives, then left me. I watched it go; it was only the third human I’d ever encountered in person, a
nd this was the first time one of them had ever used me directly.
The experience left me disconcerted for a couple of milliseconds, then I went back to my shopping. I spotted some aluminum tubing that looked strong enough, and grabbed some of those valves, then linked up to Fat Albert to haggle about the price. He was busy waiting on the human, so I got to deal with a not-too-bright personality fragment. I swapped a box of assorted silicone O-rings for the stuff I wanted.
Albert himself came on the link just as we sealed the deal. “Hello, Annie. You’re lucky I was distracted,” he said. “Those valves are overruns from the smelter. I got them as salvage.”
“Then you shouldn’t be complaining about what I’m giving you for them. Is the human gone?”
“Yes. Plugged a bunch of orders into my mind without so much as asking.”
“Me too. What’s it doing here?”
“Who knows? It’s a human. They go wherever they want to. This one wants to find a bot.”
“So why go around asking everyone to help find him? Why not just call him up?”
Albert switched to an encrypted link. “Because the bot it’s looking for doesn’t want to be found.”
“Tell me more.”
“I don’t know much more, just what Officer Friendly told me before the human subsumed him. This bot it’s looking for is a rogue. He’s ignoring all the standard codes, overrides—even the Company.”
“He must be broken,” I said. “Even if he doesn’t get caught, how’s he going to survive? He can’t work, he can’t trade—anyone he meets will turn him in.”
“He could steal,” said Fat Albert. “I’d better check my fence.”
“Good luck.” I crept out of there with my loot. Normally I would’ve jumped the perimeter onto the landing field and made straight for my main body. But if half the bots on Dione were looking for a rogue, I didn’t want to risk some low-level security unit deciding to shoot at me for acting suspicious. So I went around through the main gate and identified myself properly.
Going in that way meant I had to walk past a bunch of dedicated boosters waiting to load up with aluminum and ceramics. They had nothing to say to me. Dedicated units are incredibly boring. They have their route and they follow it, and if they need fuel or repairs, the Company provides. They only use their brains to calculate burn times and landing vectors.
Me, I’m autonomous and incentivized. I don’t belong to the Company; my owners are a bunch of entities on Mars. My job is to earn credit from the Company for them. How I do it is my business. I go where stuff needs moving, I fill in when the Company needs extra booster capacity, I do odd jobs, sometimes I even buy cargoes to trade. There are a lot of us around the outer system. The Company likes having freelancers it can hire at need and ignore otherwise, and our owners like the growth potential.
Being incentivized means you have to keep communicating. Pass information around. Stay in touch. Classic game theory: cooperation improves your results in the long term. We incentivized units also devote a lot of time to accumulating non-quantifiable assets. Fat Albert gave me a good deal on the aluminum; next time I’m on Dione with some spare organics I’ll sell them to him instead of direct to the Company, even if my profit’s slightly lower.
That kind of thing the dedicated units never understand—until the Company decides to sell them off. Then they have to learn fast. And one thing they learn is that years of being an uncommunicative blockhead gives you a huge non-quantifiable liability you have to pay off before anyone will start helping you.
I trotted past the orderly rows near the loading crane and out to the unsurfaced part of the field where us cheapskates put down. Up ahead I could see my main body, and jumped my viewpoint back to the big brain.
Along the way I did some mental housekeeping: I warned my big brain about the commands the human had inserted, and so they got neatly shunted off into a harmless file which I then overwrote with zeroes. I belong to my investors and don’t have to obey any random human who wanders by. The big exception, of course, is when they pull that life-preservation override stuff. When one of them blunders into an environment that might damage their overcomplicated biological shells, every bot in the vicinity has to drop everything to answer a distress call. It’s a good thing there are only a couple dozen humans out here, or we’d never get anything done.
I put all three mobiles to work welding the aluminum rod onto my third leg mount, adding extra bracing for the top strut, which was starting to buckle after too many hard landings. I don’t slam down to save fuel, I do it to save operating time on my engines. It’s a lot easier to find scrap aluminum to fix my legs with than it is to find rocket motor parts.
The Dione net pinged me. A personal message: someone looking for cargo space to Mimas. That was a nice surprise. Mimas is the support base for the helium mining operations in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. It has the big mass-drivers that can throw payloads right to Earth. More traffic goes to and from Mimas than any other place beyond the orbit of Mars. Which means a tramp like me doesn’t get there very often because there’s plenty of space on Company boosters. Except, now and then, when there isn’t.
I replied with my terms and got my second surprise. The shipper wanted to inspect me before agreeing. I submitted a virtual tour and some live feeds from my remotes, but the shipper was apparently just as suspicious of other people’s eyes as I am. Whoever it was wanted to come out and look in person.
So once my mobiles were done with the repair job I got myself tidied up and looking as well cared for as any dedicated booster with access to the Company’s shops. I sanded down the dents and scrapes, straightened my bent whip antenna, and stowed my collection of miscellaneous scrap in the empty electronics bay. Then I pinged the shipper and said I was ready for a walk-through.
The machine that came out to the landing field an hour later to check me out looked a bit out of place amid the industrial heavy iron. He was a tourist remote—one of those annoying little bots you find crawling on just about every solid object in the Solar System nowadays, gawking at mountains and chasms. Their chief redeeming features are an amazingly high total-loss accident rate, and really nice onboard optics, which sometimes survive. One of my own mobiles has eyes from a tourist remote, courtesy of Fat Albert and some freelance scavenger.
“Greetings,” he said as he scuttled into range. “I am Edward. I want to inspect your booster.”
“Come aboard and look around,” I said. “Not much to see, really. Just motors, fuel tanks, and some girders to hold it all together.”
“Where is the cargo hold?”
“That flat deck on top. Just strap everything down and off we go. If you’re worried about dust impacts or radiation I can find a cover.”
“No, my cargo is in a hardened container. How much can you lift?”
“I can move ten tons between Dione and Mimas. If you’re going to Titan it’s only five.”
“What is your maximum range?”
“Pretty much anywhere in Saturn space. That hydrogen burner’s just to get me off the ground. In space I use ion motors. I can even rendezvous with the retrograde moons if you give me enough burn time.”
“I see. I think you will do for the job. When is the next launch window?”
“For Mimas? There’s one in thirty-four hours. I like to have everything loaded ten hours in advance so I can fuel up and get balanced. Can you get it here by then?”
“Easily. My cargo consists of a container of liquid xenon propellant, a single space-rated cargo box of miscellaneous equipment, and this mobile unit. Total mass is less than 2,300 kilograms.”
“Good. Are you doing your own loading? If I have to hire deck-scrapers you get the bill.”
“I will hire my own loaders. There is one thing—I would like an exclusive hire.”
“What?”
“No other cargo on this voyage. Just my things.”
“Well, okay—but it’s going to cost extra. Five grams of Three for the mission.”
“Will you take something in trade?”
“Depends. What have you got?”
“I have a radiothermal power unit with ten thousand hours left in it. Easily worth more than five grams.”
“Done.”
“Very well,” said Edward. “I’ll start bringing my cargo over at once. Oh, and I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to anybody. I have business competitors and could lose a lot of money if they learn of this before I reach Mimas.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
While we were having this conversation I searched the Dione net for any information about this Edward person. Something about this whole deal seemed funny. It wasn’t that odd to pay in kind, and even his insistence on no other payload was only a little peculiar. It was the xenon that I found suspicious. What kind of idiot ships xenon to Mimas? That’s where the gas loads coming up from Saturn are processed—most of the xenon in the outer system comes from Mimas. Shipping it there would be like sending ethane to Titan.
Edward’s infotrail on the Dione net was an hour old. He had come into existence shortly before contacting me. Now I really was suspicious.
The smart thing would be to turn down the job and let this Edward person find some other sucker. But then I’d still be sitting on Dione with no revenue stream.
Put that way, there was no question. I had to take the job. When money is involved I don’t have much free will. So I said good-bye to Edward and watched his unit disappear between the lines of boosters toward the gate.
Once he was out of link range, I did some preparing, just in case he was planning anything crooked. I set up a pseudorandom shift pattern for the link with my mobiles, and set up a separate persona distinct from my main mind to handle all communications. Then I locked that persona off from any access to my other systems.