Outland Exile

by W. Clark Boutwell

  “I set up an auto ping on the looie’s plug job every few hours. If she comes within two hundred klicks of the Rampart, we get a signal.”

  “I need to do anything?”

  “As if I could trust you, Gunny.” He smiled. “Nope, the signal goes to Khama himself.”

  “Sounds good to me, Doggy. Let’s sit down and go over the new enunciation protocols before ThiZ time, okay?”

  “Aye, aye, Gunny!”

  Feigning work, Iain watched as Jasun walked over to his workstation and reversed a blue folder from its habitual place. Someone from Ciszek’s faction would notice, no doubt, and would report the odd occurrence to his handler. Iain was sure to meet his own handler, a woman he knew as Shirley, within the day.

  The factions were quiet for now. That was good. He had come to like Jasun, even if he belonged to the wrong faction. He really wanted things to be peaceful for a while, at any rate. He was distracted.

  Monee’k was quite a distraction.

  Jourdaine’s Presence was his own discovery from years ago while he had been a mere ensign. He had told no one about it since. Jourdaine did not have a foolishly generous character. Really, he thought of it as the unintended reward for attempting to rescue the COREd-out protégé of his commander, Major General Divny. For reasons that escaped Jourdaine, the old man, almost a Sisi himself, had decided to rescue his E7 boyfriend from a CORE coma.

  “You know him, don’t you, Eustace? He was a classmate of yours at the academy, wasn’t he? Olevar Thimosen? You could talk him out of it. It was a mistake, I’m sure. I shouldn’t have been so harsh with him. A bit too much ThiZ, and he looked into the CORE. I found him at my apartment, dead to the world. He’s at Bellvu now. We have to do something!”

  “It would mean trying to go into the CORE myself, sir. I-I’m not sure, sir.” Jourdaine had sensed his heart pounding in his ears.

  “I’m not a fool, ensign! I have a CORE tech on the strength. He has an idea. The implants have their own ID number, of course. He can reprogram your implant. Get you to poor Olevar’s locus in the CORE in one shot. Olevar trusts you. He’ll listen to you, and we can put a tracer on you … give you a way back. It’d mean a promotion for you, just for trying. I know I’m asking a lot, but if this works, think what good it would do for all the other COREd-out citizens?”

  Jourdaine indeed knew young Olevar. They had been more than classmates but less than lovers. Olevar had abandoned him the month before Jourdaine had gone off to Officer Training School.

  After an admittedly long period of self-loathing, Jourdaine had bounced back to what he’d hoped was a competent sober officer. When Olevar had joined Divny’s professional family as a protégé, neither of them had acknowledged their previous attachment.

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. For the good of the service. I am sure he will know me. I consider it a great honor, sir.”

  His stomach lurched at what he was saying.

  “That’s my boy! I’ll contact Pippitte right away. He’s the CORE tech. One more thing: When was your last ThiZ? Pippitte wants the attempt to be done cold, off ThiZ at least for forty-eight hours.”

  “I haven’t had mine today, sir.”

  “Good, it will give us some time to set up. Go see to transferring your assignments, and we will contact you. Dismissed.”

  Taking ThiZ was the only way he knew to navigate the rest of the day, and now that was taken away as well.

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  After the wrenching diarrhea and nausea of the next two days, the little of Jourdaine’s confidence had drained away with the toilet flushings. Nevertheless, he came when summoned.

  Pippitte turned out to be a dark little man who talked to himself. Jourdaine was required to wear some sort of orthodontic apparatus that allowed him to hear Pippitte even when he was in the CORE.

  The first few attempts were futile. The CORE illusion using the standard O-A was of gleaming mental corridors, branches, turnings, doors, passwords—a net of connections, passages, and information. Jourdaine easily slid along the illusion at Pippitte’s direction, his nausea subsiding as he went on, even as the man’s mutterings grew less helpful. In the end he ignored them.

  He reached a blockage. Pippitte’s plan was foolish, really. No two consciousnesses could occupy the same locus at the same time. Jourdaine was preparing himself for failure when he glimpsed the dark line along the wall. It should not have been there. Questing along the line, it moved to his command.

  He pushed again; it opened to blackness. He looked around to see if anyone noticed.

  He moved through the gap more from frustration than curiosity to find himself in another reality. Nothing was “up” unless he told himself so. He looked back at the defect he had discovered. The bright corridors of the ’net stretched around him but were different from this vantage point, “the outside.” It looked like patchwork, as if made of plates. He expected it was code segments.

  He had escaped the interior of the ’net; he was outside. His disembodied bowels began to rebel. He was floating free. He would be lost … like so many others. In panic, his mind yearned … quested … to touch the merest edge of the crack from which he had just emerged, to find a handhold, something solid … and it was so. Gracefully, his Presence swept back to the fissure, and Jourdaine reached out a “hand” to run along the edge. It sizzled coldly at his touch.

  Finding Olevar was just as easy. Jourdaine thought of his name and was drawn the short distance to the locus. He could tell it was Olevar somehow; he had the right smell. However, the tornado of swirling thoughts surrounding Olevar battered Jourdaine away. Olevar recognized him.

  “What are you doing? Why are you here? Useless. I’m so cold. Where are all the pencils? The general … wanting … Don’t! Why? Go away! Og ywaa?”

  Olevar was continually terrified of falling, but his frenzy was like a buzz saw to Jourdaine’s touch.

  Pippitte’s urgent mutterings broke through to Jourdaine, even here, and ordered him to return. Once back, Jourdaine just told them he had been successful in contacting Olevar. The general was pink with hope. Pippitte wiped his mouth on his sleeve and asked for his apparatus back.

  Jourdaine went again. He had to. Divny demanded, cajoled, and eventually ordered him, then fell to wringing his hands during Jourdaine’s attempts. Later, Jourdaine’s questing mind went unsupervised. He stopped using ThiZ. He was learning.

  The CORE, outside the limitations of the Unity conventions, was a great temptation.

  The lights, sounds, concepts, and jangle of identifiers flashed by, oblivious to Jourdaine’s freed Presence. In the CORE but outside Unity restrictions, Jourdaine claimed a new world as his own.

  Sitting near Olevar’s turmoil, Jourdaine watched huge magenta engines of commerce chunter by, flaking off RFPs in the same color that scattered in six directions. Svelte ellipses of the arts in myriad colors teemed in a large scintillating ball in the distance, waiting for sponsors, occasionally fountaining off into smaller groups, then recombining. Individuals appeared to him, at a distance, to be wraithlike squiggles, nodes that, while appearing to fill the space, were invisible when he looked past them, varying in appearance only once focused upon. Whole dimensions of meaning were somehow compressed into the scene, obvious to him but near impossible to describe once he had exited.

  Only with difficulty did he go back to Olevar.

  “Olevar, it is me. It is Eustace. You know me. You liked me once. Remember? You don’t have to do this. You can come back with me. Everything will be all right. Divny wants you to be happy. I want you to be happy. Just take my hand … Olevar, it’s me,” he said again and again.

  At first that had slowed the maelstrom of mirrored thoughts, but only at first. Olevar had stopped talking after the first few times. At intervals, he lashed out with bursts of sensation: heat, cold, a stench of death, quinine bitterness, and pain. But fa
r worse were the memories: memories of Eustace being taunted by his crèche mates, Olevar’s own abandonment, Olevar’s ascendancy as Divny’s protégé, his smug disdain for the plodding Jourdaine.

  “Olevar, it is me. It is Eustace. You know me. You liked me once. You don’t have to do this. You can come back with me. Everything will be all right. Divny wants you to be happy. I want you to be happy. Just take my hand … Olevar, it’s me. It is Eustace.”

  It was all he could offer, unarmed as he was before the mounting violence of his friend’s circular thoughts. Battered, he would leave for a few hours, only to be forced back by Divny’s mounting anxiety and threats.

  Jourdaine recounted to Olevar his own memories, random but always containing something that he should recognize: a teacher, a matron, a lost friend. Eventually, mercifully, it worked. Jourdaine never knew what it was that stopped Olevar’s whirling intensity of self-loathing. The chaos slowly petered out like a dying top.

  For the first time, Eustace saw what had become of Olevar in the mirrored corridors of his thoughts. Wizened, sapped of vitality, feral, his face in the illusion of the CORE was nevertheless unmistakable. Jourdaine still shivered anytime he thought about it. The face was there, the same smooth brow and gentle mouth, but now creased with rage, guile, and savagery. In repose, the face relaxed almost to beauty—until Olevar recognized Jourdaine.

  “Little Useless, come to fumble, have you? Clueless Useless, fathering baby. Feck off someplace and fumble yourself!”

  “Olevar, I came to help you come back.”

  “You help me? Help me? You have nothing! Nothing to help me!”

  Jourdaine had tried again and again, but that one thought was the only one he got from the creature that Olevar had become. Pippitte told him to return. By then, Jourdaine was weary and repulsed by the creature.

  In his disgust, Jourdaine did what was necessary just before he left.

  Sacrifices had to be made.

  The boy’s body died a few days later. Jourdaine’s report to the general described how the damage was too severe. It gave no mention of the illusion of Jourdaine’s hand sliding along the slender silver tether of Olevar’s life and severing it with a paroxysm of disgust.

  The exercise had gained him rewards. Divny had given him an excellent efficiency report and, after being denounced, had not suspected Jourdaine’s betrayal. In his grief, the man had no longer cared.

  Thus, Jourdaine learned to be a thinking Presence, a resident phantom in a land peopled by tourists. He alone had plumbed the possibilities of the CORE. He could project his Presence into the CORE itself and thence to another O-A recipient.

  Cadets for generations had been warned that they might contract CORE fever. He wondered if the CORE had been warned that it might catch a case of Jourdaine.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE SISI

  Environs of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin Territory, Restructured States of America (RSA)

  Late afternoon, October 14, 2128

  Malila awoke, her ears ringing and too dazed to move. The air was redolent of wood smoke. She lay in a small campsite on her side in a lean-to crafted from still-green boughs woven onto saplings rooted into the ground. An ax and sheathed knife threaded onto a broad leather belt hung from a small branch near her head. Only when she moved to retrieve them did she comprehend she had been bound, her wrists tied behind her back and her legs tied at the ankles. A shiver coursed through her when she found she was naked as well. On hearing a faint scuffling behind her, Malila closed her eyes, calmed her breathing, and relaxed her body, sagging into the bonds. She felt the slight breeze of someone’s entrance and then heard nothing but the forest.

  “You are awake, lass.” It wasn’t a question. “Open your eyes, or I start to take off toes.”

  She detected an alien soft-burred accent. After a few seconds, a hand gripped her left foot by the instep. Her eyes shot open, startled, all pretense lost at the immediate threat.

  A Sisi was crouching back on his heels, holding her foot, an odd short, curved knife in his other hand, his face concealed in a grizzled beard, his skin burned muddy brown. Over his left cheek he wore a series of blue streaks, faded and indistinct. His hair grew out from under a knitted cap of uncertain design: abundant, lank, white, and to his shoulders. He filled the small space.

  After a second to regard her, the old man dropped her foot and turned back to working a small piece of leather. “There you go, lass. Much better. Let’s have your name. I can’t be calling you ‘lass’ all the time, can I?”

  Malila calmed herself, waiting until she was confident of her voice. Before she could answer, the old man looked up at her from under his thick eyebrows with such menace that she squeaked, “Chiu, Malila E., E11, S08, lieutenant … acting second lieutenant … serial number 59026169.”

  The old man tilted his head back, his face split to show brilliant and sound teeth. He started a low vigorous laugh, stopping after he dabbed at his eyes with a square of rough fabric taken from his leather tunic.

  “You should see yourself, lass, trying to look official and all, lying bare-ass naked and trussed up like a prize sow.”

  He wiped his eyes again, and his face sobered. “Let me tell you what you’ve told me, so far, Acting Second Lieutenant Chiu, Chiu, Malila E. You are seventeen years old. You’ve been sent on this shit of an assignment because you messed up, and they broke you down a rank or three. You have been given the chance to redeem yourself … if you don’t screw up, as you just did. You have been in the service for seven years, and you think you are hot stuff, which you ain’t, as we wouldna be having this here conversation otherwise.

  “You have a small scar under your chin, another over your left shin, and one under your right tit, which I should remark is pretty enough, although personally I prefer a little more. The scars under your chin and on your leg are no doubt from training accidents. Your hair is too short for my taste. Your facial features are regular and rather pretty in an exotic way, lass, nice shade of blue in your eyes. Once upon a time, you broke your left forearm as a child from a fall on an outstretched hand, due to some fool game, I should think. You have never birthed a baby. You are sound in heart and limb, but I don’t know about your head yet. Your nutrition could be better, and you would do well to add a few pounds for aesthetic reasons. Have I missed anything, Lieutenant?” he said, again transfixing her with his pale eyes.

  Malila’s features creased in revulsion despite herself. A sense of violation inundated her as fear, adding a watery sensation, arrived unannounced. Her empty stomach sent bile surging into the back of her throat. She swallowed but then started coughing.

  The man was at her side almost at once, cutting her hands apart and lifting her to a sitting position.

  “There you go, Lieutenant. Can’t have you dying on me,” said the old man, almost gently.

  Her nausea subsided. She tensed her elbow to swing back into his throat now that her hands were free.

  “I wouldna, Malila. I really wouldna do that,” hissed the old man. It was then that she again sensed the cold of the knife pressed against her back. The watery sensation returned.

  “Put your arms behind you, lass.”

  She complied, and the man bound her wrists again. She took several deep breaths. It seemed to help. The day was almost spent, the scene becoming more hostile and surreal as the dimming light filled it with ominous shadows.

  Elderly of the Unity were shepherded into their own enclaves on their fortieth birthday. While Malila supposed they enjoyed their retirement, she and the larger society had little use and scant respect for any of the old, used-up, and worn-out Sisis. That one of these ersatz humans would rise up to touch … to violate a citizen … a DUFS officer … was impossible to imagine.

  “I need some water. You, get me water!” she demanded.

  She used her command voice, thinking that and the simplicity of the
request would gain her the old man’s compliance. If she could get him to abandon his script for even a moment, she increased her chances of escape. If given an opening, her years of training in the killing arts would make short work of this ancient savage. The elderly were supposed to be differential and obedient. This old obscenity needed a dose of reality. The look of dismay on the old face would go far to heal her humiliation.

  “I need some water, you fathering Sisi piece of shit.”

  “No, Malila, you don’t. And watch your language; there’s a lady present!”

  Malila looked around but could see no other person.

  “Where are my men? You can’t keep me from my men,” she said, trying to keep her voice low and flat with menace.

  “Your troopers? You were given a platoon of dead men, lass. We just did them the kindness of burying them.”

  She heard a sharp, gritty sound as a spray of incandescent sparks spurted in a short arc in the darkness. The sound repeated a few times. For a heartbeat, the sparks showed the old man crouching studiously in the dark. After a few attempts, he took up something from the ground and blew on it. It erupted into a red blossom of fire in his hand and the old man placed it back onto the ground before adding small twigs, creating ghastly shadows in the small space. The old man’s eyes became mere pools in a death mask. A moment later a small lamp flared, and the old man hooked the light onto the lattice of the lean-to, illuminating the dirt floor.

  “Are you going to rape me now, you fathering twisted Sisi?” she shouted.

  The old man shook his head, more in disgust than negation.

  “Why is it that all young women think they are going to be ravished at the drop of a blouse? But no, lass, not yet … even if you ask nice. And watch your language.”

  “Flecking moron! Fathering Sisi!”

  The blow caught her by surprise, her teeth cutting into her lip, the metallic taste of blood filling her mouth.

  The old man smiled. “Now, lass, have I got your attention? Talk nice!”