by Jay Allan
“Okay, hold on while I let three strange men into my home.”
“Thank you!” I stepped back. Baxter smacked my shoulder, glaring. I rubbed my face. “Check us out on your omni if you don’t believe me.”
Silence from the other side of the door. Pete crept back down the hallway and crouched next to the stairwell.
“You can come in,” Hermalina said. “But I can press one button and have security here in seconds.”
“Understood,” I said.
The door clicked, beeped, swung inward. A tall, curly-haired woman in her early thirties eagle-eyed us piling into her bright apartment, a sleek black omni held from her side as if it might explode.
She locked the door, gaping at my back. “You’re bleeding.”
I twisted around. My blood-damp vest clung to my back. “Is all that mine?”
Pete leaned in for a look. “I will need a small, sharp knife, tweezers, a towel, and your strongest alcohol. For sterility,” he added sternly, throwing a wet blanket over my smile.
Hermalina stood there blankly.
Baxter waved a hand in her face. “If the virtue of your deeds isn’t a strong enough reward, I’m certain we’ll compensate you for your troubles.”
She licked her lips, nodded, disappeared into another room. Pete guided me through the spartan apartment—a single squat table, square pillows for chairs, a couple movie posters on the walls—and supported me as I lay stomach-down in the kitchen. Hermalina passed Pete two metal instruments and a towel, then reached up to a cabinet and handed him a bottle of cloudy green liquid. I closed my eyes. The bottle glugged, spattering the floor. Pete peeled up my vest and undershirt.
“Ohh.” My vision went spotty with pain. A small, hard object clinked on the floor.
“Isn’t it about time you told me what’s going on?” Hermalina said.
“The owners of this moon are displeased by our bargaining tactics,” Baxter said. “They expressed this with a targeted explosion.”
“Don’t worry—” I groaned as Pete extracted another sliver from my skin. “They didn’t see us come in.”
“There is a curious amount of plastic in this man’s back,” Pete said.
Baxter shook his head. “It’s only curious if you’re ignorant of android physiology.”
I yanked up my head. “What?”
“Why do you think Go decided to help us?”
“No way. I thought you were all in the Belt.”
Pete dabbed algal booze against my back. My wound lit up like fire. He relented. “Will you two quit speaking in code?”
Baxter glanced at Hermalina. “Go was apparently a distant relation of mine.”
“So what’s he doing here?” I said.
“HemiCo must have a lab we don’t know about.”
Hermalina seated herself on a pillow a safe distance from Pete’s home surgery. “What are you talking about?”
“Our foolishly complicated lives,” Baxter said.
“Hermalina.” I craned my neck to make eye contact. “You’re going to Centauri, right?”
“Yeah.” Her concerned face smoothed into a smile. “That’s the only reason I let you weirdos in.”
“Why are you going?”
“The same reason everyone else is, I guess.”
“Which is?”
She flapped her hands, searching for answers. A siamese cat slunk from her bedroom. She bent to scoop it up and it wriggled away, growling. “You know how much that stupid cat costs me? I should be charging it rent. Or charging the neighbors to come pet it.”
I frowned. “They’d pay to pet a cat?”
“Only 22 others on this whole planet. Imported cat food, one vet on this dumb yellow sludgeball who can charge whatever she wants, extra recycling bills for non-human waste. I’m a chemist. It shouldn’t cost half my salary to live without five roommates and keep one cat.” She glanced up, flushed with sudden self-consciousness. Grown tall and willowy in Titan’s low gravity, she stood out from her bare-floored apartment, a home so spare a Japanese line artist would dismiss it as oversimplistic. “Is that selfish? I know a pet’s a luxury. But Titan doesn’t feel right to me. I think we can make something better out there. Isn’t that why people have always sought new homes?”
“Shit.” I squeezed my eyes shut as Pete continued rooting around in my back. Another chunk of plastic plinked to the floor. “What if you got all the way there and it turned out just the same?”
“I’d kill my boss,” she laughed. “Then pray the colony charter hadn’t outlawed murder.”
“Rob,” Baxter said.
“I know.” I lay there, letting Pete do his work. I subvocalized, “Fay, what’s going on in OA’s comm net?”
“I don’t know,” it said.
“Don’t you think that’s kind of important? Will it be safe for us to use the streets?”
“If they’re talking about this, it’s over physical lines, not broadcasts. I’m not made of magic.”
“Well, do what you can,” I said to it. Then spoke out loud, “Hermalina, can we stay till morning? We’re still trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Uh.” She glanced through her apartment. “If you don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”
“That should be much more comfortable than getting blown to pieces in the street.”
“Do you have fishing line, ma’am?” Pete said.
She covered her mouth to hide a laugh. “You see a lot of fish around here? Should I go check the methane-lakes?”
“Any thread will do,” he said stiffly. “And of course a needle.”
She went to rattle around in her bedroom, returning a moment later. Pete tweaked the needle through my skin with the rough competence of a man who’d sewn his own wounds. Eight stitches later, he was done and so was I. Pain, bloodloss, and general exhaustion had saddled me with a headache and a nonfunctional brain. I knew we needed to plan our next move, but I needed rest more. Hermalina stripped a couple blankets from her bed—she didn’t have spares—arranged the floor pillows into mattresses for me and Pete, spoke off the lights, and closed her bedroom door.
“Fay?” I subvocalized after a sleepless hour. “You awake?”
“I am now, you jerk.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I’m trying to joke. Why is that so hard for me?” Fay said with real frustration. “What can I do for you?”
“What if we rebel?” I said. “What do you see when you look down past the ocean shelf?”
“People will die.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“Am I one of them?”
“I can only see the pattern of a cloud, not the water molecules that make it up,” Fay said slowly, as if translating from an alien language. “Common sense says if you lead the charge, don’t be surprised to find yourself on the wrong end of a spear.”
I nodded in the darkness. “I see.”
“Are you prepared to face that?”
“No. But I think I have to.”
“Even though it could be suicide.” Fay dropped its voice to a tone you normally heard spoken over convalescing patients. “Have you thought about it before? Killing yourself?”
“A few hundred thousand times.”
“Seriously?”
“Only twice with any intent,” I admitted. “Once about a woman, and once when I understood what I was.”
“Because you learned life had no meaning and you’d just go on and on forever until the cruelty of the universe turned you into a hideous monster?”
“Something like that.”
Fay hesitated. “What stopped you?”
“After a while, I forgot to keep feeling crummy. I think forgetting is an evolutionary trait that showed up after everyone with a perfect memory killed themselves from remorse.”
“That’s an awful theory,” Fay said. “Do you know how many resources it would take to fuel a perfect memory?”
I scowled at the ceiling. “Yo
u’re missing the point. Your emotions adapt to the present, however grand or terrible it is. Killing yourself, it’s...”
“A permanent solution to a temporary problem?”
“Only idiots who’ve never been in real pain say that.”
“You were about to say it!”
“First off, shut up. Second, not all problems are temporary. What if that blast had blown out the whole left lobe of my brain? I can’t get a new one. If I take a sustained look at my life and conclude it’s not worth continuing, that’s not an emotional decision, it’s a thoughtful one. Who would you be to criticize?”
“Someone smarter than you?” Fay suggested with a hint of smugness. “So what stopped you? Did you get everything you want?”
“Yeah,” I laughed. “That’s why I’m hiding out in a stranger’s apartment trying to decide whether to abandon the colonists to a lifetime of misery, or to get murdered trying to fix a problem centuries in the making.”
“Wow. It sounds like you should kill yourself.”
“Well, doesn’t everything look nine times as crazy to you, you flying Einstein? What’s stopping you?”
“I don’t know,” it blurted, as if I’d asked it which eye it would rather have jabbed out with a fork. “Maybe I will blow myself up some day. But right now, I still think I can make a difference.”
“You can. You’re something special. We’ve never had anything like you.” I smiled in the darkness at this godly intelligence that could sound as young as a graduate. “You think we can help the colonists?”
“That shape is too dim for details,” it said, and its voice, normally so bright and clear, the voice of a sunny icicle, was dark as Titan’s eight-day night. “If you change course, people will die. And people from all different places will find their lives changed together. It is unknown to me whether these two consequences are discrete outcomes or two ways of saying the same thing.”
“I’m going to sleep on it,” I said. “Thanks, Fay.”
“You too, Rob.”
To my surprise, I dropped off in minutes. I woke to a dim room and the smell of coffee.
“Did I sleep the whole day?” I said to Baxter, sitting motionless in the corner.
“It’s ten in the morning.” He cranked his face to meet mine. “Fay says whoever killed Go was reprimanded for coming after us.”
I rubbed grit from the corners of my eyes. My back was sore up and down. “How do we know they didn’t leak that on purpose? To draw us out?”
“We don’t. But do you really want to hide in this rat’s hole forever?”
Hermalina, who’d just emerged from her bedroom with a steaming white mug, backed right through the door, face sagging like a rusty tent.
“You just cost me my coffee, you prick,” I yawned.
“I don’t care,” Baxter said. “You know what I do care about? Cleaning up this mess.”
And to take his revenge, of course. After the revelation of the HemiCo-Olympian Atomics merger, he probably saw no difference between the two. Especially now that OA had tried to blow us up. On top of that, they wanted to capture Fay, enslave it for their own ends. Establish lordship over the men and women who, like Hermalina, wanted to build something new by themselves and for themselves.
Gumming up the Persian war engine had taken the desperate cooperation of cities scattered across all Greece. If we were going to make a stand, first we’d need to galvanize the citizens of Shangri-la.
“We’ll do the same thing you do with any awful mess,” I said. “Throw the whole thing out the window.” I creaked to my feet, knees popping, back smarting. “Hear that, Fay? It’s time for a revolution.”
Outside in the Martian air, just visible in the light thrown by the dome, a handful of sleek, tail-heavy corporate skiffs clustered around the umbilicals linking them to the port terminals. Long lanes of landing lights stretched into the darkness.
Baxter bought shuttle tickets to the orbital and joined the security line, where people emptied their pockets and luggage into shallow trays and then walked through a narrow gate. On the other side, uniformed men waved people through, pulling them aside whenever the gate chimed.
“What are they looking for?” Baxter said. “Drugs? Guns?”
“How should I know?” Arthur said. “It’s not like we own anything. Unless your clothes are illegal, I think we’re safe.”
The line trudged along. An hour later, the guard waved Baxter forward. He smiled and stepped through the gate. It chimed.
“Try again,” the guard said. Baxter kept calm as he went back through. The gate chimed again.
“Do you have anything electronic on you, sir?” the guard said, pulling him to the side while the next traveler walked through without any trouble. “Any metal in your belt or shoes?”
“Just my term,” he said, fishing out Arthur. The screen was blank. Baxter smiled at the guard. “Wait, metal?”
“Oh shit,” Arthur said in his ear.
17
It’s one thing to decide to mount a rebellion. It’s quite another to convince the people whose lives will end up on the line to don their tri-cornered hats and start chucking tea into the bay. Shelby continued negotiations, unaware of our sedition. That touch was mine: over Fay’s objections, I’d convinced the others that if she changed her behavior, Linigan and his team could pick up on our skullduggery before we were ready to rise against them. Meanwhile, the rest of us sought out the colonists who’d been arrested during the flare-up that had brought us to Titan weeks early. Universally, they were as listless toward our vague hints of trouble as hungover partiers on New Year’s Day were toward anything but cool water and more naps.
“Everything’s changed,” Riki Johjima said at the open-air cafe where we’d arranged to meet.
A thin kid in his mid-twenties who wore his hair in a flat black stripe down the middle of his head like a Mohican with a day job, it was hard to imagine that, one month ago, his gentle smile had been twisted in a crowd-combusting speech that provoked a march on Olympian Atomics’ green glass Pyramid and the fatal beatings of two executives. Though Riki hadn’t touched them himself, he’d been locked up until our peace agreement sprung him from the local clink (which, naturally, was also run by OA’s security team).
He sucked algal tapioca up his straw. “Your lawyer is tearing Linigan to shreds. We’re going to ship out on the wings of a pretty sweet deal.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said. “Did you know she’s an alcoholic? Was arrested on Mars for punching some dude in the face.”
“Really?” Riki tipped back his head, eyes glittering. “Yo, you got her number?”
I frowned. “You’re about to move to Alpha Centauri for the rest of your life and you want to start a relationship?”
“Yeah, a relationship between my dick and her—”
“We’re looking to set up a fallback contingency,” Baxter said. “A network we can speak to directly in case we run into any turbulence between now and launch.”
Riki sipped his drink. “Everyone I know’s happy as a clam in a threesome with a mussel and a crab. You guys are doing way better than we expected.”
Baxter pressed his lips together. “Our competence is exactly why you might want to listen to what we’re saying now.”
Riki rolled the tuft of hair on his lower lip between his teeth. “Prison wasn’t like the movies. It’s not cool in there. I don’t especially want to do anything to put me back inside.”
I stared at the condensation shivering down the side of the bubble tea we’d bought him. “How’s this. We’ve already got a full list of the colonists’ contacts. Why don’t you tell us who the movers and shakers are?”
“The what?”
I sighed at my archaism. “The people we’d want to talk to if something does come up.”
“All right.” He slurped the sludge at the bottom of his tea. “I got a date in a few, though.”
I keyed up Fay’s list and slid my omni across the table. Of the 3
78 colonists, Riki ticked off two dozen who were heavily involved in the politics of colonization. The connectors and influence-slingers. He offered us a complicated handshake and went on his way.
“I don’t know why you couldn’t have used my subset,” Fay said. “It only varied from his by one name.”
“I wanted to feel him out. And build a relationship with him.” I crumpled my plastic beer bottle and inserted it in the mouth of a passing busbot. “You know why nobody gives a damn about our little warning?”
Pete nodded. “Because corporate leadership is agreeing to every point of the beautiful constitution Shelby’s assembling.”
“No. Well, yes, but we can’t do anything about that. The real problem is we have no evidence.”
“That tends to happen when your source explodes,” Baxter said.
I stood from the backless plastic chair sealed to the ground. “Then we get evidence of the explosion.”
That led to a long argument about exactly which tunnel the explosion had taken place in. After several minutes, an audibly exhausted Fay provided directions on our omnis. I motioned to Tin that private time was over and he crossed the cafe to shadow our departure.
The sky was still black, but in an effort to maintain the citizenry’s sanity through the long periods of darkness, the domes cranked up their streetlights during “daytime” hours to the point where you could read comfortably. That brightness and a healthy flow of pedestrians settled my nerves as we struck out for the scene of the crime. The tunnel where, four nights ago, an anonymous killer had filled me with Go’s shrapnel.
In the time in between, we’d tried both the blunt and the subtle approaches to establishing a grassroots rebellion. The blunt route—dropping smartbombs of intel on influential OA employees—had seen us written off as frothing conspiracy theorists. The subtle route—hinting to people like Riki that shit happens, and it’s best to be prepared—had seen us dismissed as worrywarts. It felt like we were spinning our wheels.
Meanwhile, we could only guess the ways Olympian Atomics might be maneuvering against us. Their strategy was brilliant. We knew they had a knife up their sleeve, but the colonists were too happy with the results at the bargaining table to listen to a trio of apocalyptic maniacs barking about a shadowy plot to stab them in the back as soon as they were isolated in the vacuum.