No, that’s crazy thinking. No one is watching, not one—
I slipped the ring on my thumb. If I was already in trouble, no one would notice a little more trouble. I punched the name Lenard Kavara into the system and waited. In seconds, I had a floating note telling me that the account had been terminated, because Schrödinger Pilot Kavara was dead.
I closed my eyes. I counted to ten. And then I moved rapidly. I didn’t run. I didn’t panic. Or rather, it was impossible for me to panic. I’d gone beyond panic to a sort of warbling madness, where some part of my mind was stuck saying oh no, oh no, oh no. But behind it, beyond it, was my rational mind, which had seen me, a girl from a fisherman’s village in cursed Madrasta, all the way through the training in languages in the capital, and then all the way to training in diplomacy on Earth, and then—
Here. And no longer sure that the government I’d worked for for so long was what I’d thought it was. In fact, almost sure it wasn’t.
There were some things I owned with inherent value. A golden locket my father had given me when I’d left the village. It was real gold, and gold remained rare and prized across the universe. Two hand-carved coral rings, also from my village. A dealer had offered me fifteen stellar for those not so far back. Handmade objects from the colony were rare. They had to be transported to Earth as someone’s prized possession, since they counted against your weight allowance on the ship. And very few people sold their prized possessions. But the time might have come. Oh, the time might have come.
I put the locket in my pocket, and slipped the other rings on my fingers, around the one Glenn Braxladden had given me. I resented not having anything resembling a weapon, beyond the little knife I used for all sorts of domestic tasks. But I slipped that into my pocket, also. Then I added to it all the cash money I had—crystal gems coded with the account but with no name—the sort of money you used for vending machines that dispensed things like that ring. I didn’t have much. A hundred bits and a stellar. I never kept much on hand, except for a sudden desire for a drink or something that I could only get from the machines after the human-staffed or at least human-watched establishments had closed.
Then I hesitated for a moment. If I were not being spied on and traced; if my being declared dead was an accident, then there was nothing for me to worry about. If I left my apartment like this, nothing would happen to it. Nothing would happen to me. In a day or so, when I stopped panicking, I could come back and find my place undisturbed, and point to the authorities they’d made a small mistake. I’d be reinstated among the living, and I’d go on living, right?
But if this feeling of unease were right? If it were right, it was possible that right now, if they suspected I hadn’t died, they’d be on their way here, weapons at the ready.
I opened my front door and felt completely stupid looking both ways down the hallway. There was no one in sight. There were two grav wells on the floor, and then there were two stairways—one at each end of the building and not to be used in anything but emergencies, when power failed to the grav wells. I was twenty floors up.
But suppose the armored toughs who’d taken out The Babble decided to come here? Which way would they come? The wells were surely too public. But then how did I know there would be armored toughs? Surely to take out a woman, alone, there need be only one well-armed man. Actually, he wouldn’t need armor. He wouldn’t even need to be very good at his job, I thought, rather ruefully.
And then my back brain made a decision for me. I ran to the door to the stairway, and, instead of going down, I ran upward, one flight of stairs, two.
I was half up the second flight when the explosion came, rocking the building. I knew—don’t ask me how, but I did—it had come from my erstwhile apartment. It was followed by cries and screams, and noises of surprise from the neighbors, but before those, lost in the after-echoes of the explosion, there was the sound of a door opening and closing almost soundlessly—the door to the stairway.
And I was moving. Walking down the stairs. I can honestly say that if there were rational thought behind it, I wasn’t aware of it. There was just the idea that someone had tried to kill me, someone had destroyed my home, someone was on the stairway of my building, thinking they’d eliminated me, ready to report my demise.
The person was a man, I saw as I rounded the turn in the stairway, smaller than I and pale-blond, and looking perfectly normal in street clothes—a somewhat over-tight pair of green pants, and a waist-cinched jacket in pale blue—but he moved too assuredly down those stairs. One flight, two. No one ever used those for more than a flight, and even then, most people preferred the safety of the public grav wells. But what if he was an innocent bystander? My hand dove into my pocket and gripped the knife.
And then all doubt was removed. He couldn’t have heard me. He truly couldn’t have heard me. And yet he did. He turned around. There was a small, dangerous-looking burner in his hand, and when he saw me, he registered both surprise and annoyance.
Not rage. Not hatred. Annoyance. Like someone confronted with yet another task to perform, when they thought their work was all done. He aimed at me.
I ducked, instinctively, and the burner ray flew over my head. Then I was falling, rather than jumping at him, my hand outstretched, with the knife in it, a wordless scream at the back of my throat.
I’d never fought. Not for real. But in the village, in the old days, I’d learned the mock knife-fight that was the dance of peasant boys. Until mother had found out I was doing it, and forbid me. After all I was neither a boy nor—she said—a peasant/ Mind you, it would have taken a really well trained eye to discern the difference between me, the daughter of a regional export accountant and the fisher brats grubbing on the sand. Except maybe the brats ate better.
Now, in peril, the movements of the dance came back to me. I was too close for the stranger to aim, or perhaps too fast. He tried to hit me on the side of the head with his fist clenched around the burner, but he failed. I sidestepped and ducked. And came back from a half-crouch with the knife in my hand. The blade entered his chest with surprisingly little resistance. Blood spurted out and on me, but I was grabbing the burner from his suddenly-lax hand, and running, running down the steps as fast as I could, pausing between floors for a breath, and then running again.
As I ran down, past my floor, the sounds of commotion diminished, I heard the sirens of rescue vehicles, but they were landing on the terrace of the roof, and I ran down, and down.
It was very quiet at the bottom of the building. I smelled of blood, and there was blood on my hands. I must get clean. I must think what to do next.
A public fresher down the block, which I unlocked with two bits, revealed to me that the blood had hit my face and my hair but had somehow managed to miss my clothes, the same black suit I’d been wearing in the Babble. Or perhaps the black hid the blood well. I used a private compartment to wash my face and hands and paid three bits to vibro my clothes in the pay-vibro. I smelled of sweat and fear, but the little fresher didn’t accommodate anything like a shower. I washed as best I could with the water from the little sink. I stared at my too-pale face, my disheveled hair in the mirror above the sink, and swallowed. Had I killed a man? Had I truly done something like that? It was different when you read about it in books.
But I had no time to think about it too much. I would not let myself think about it. After all, he’d tried to kill me. It seemed like rationalization. It was rationalization, but it was reason, too.
He’d tried to kill me.
I was so tired. I wanted to sleep. My feet felt like they were on fire. But I couldn’t sleep. Nowhere would be safe. They’d find the remains of my would-be assassin soon, and if they didn’t know, they’d suspect who had killed him.
Where could I go? Where had Lenard Kavara lived? Who was likely to know him? Who was likely to be able to help me? Surely the full might of dimatough-armored men, the full might of assassins, the power of Earth’s government hadn’t been deployed me
rely to get rid of one isolated man. No. Even if Glenn Braxladden was the man they wanted to destroy, there must be others in the conspiracy?
Having made sure I was clean, I left the fresher, and watched behind me, to make sure I left no footprints. If I were my pursuers, what direction would I least expect me to walk in? Why, the way I’d come. I crossed the street, but retraced my steps back, towards my building. Then I dove into an alley and navigated by memory to where I knew there was a public hollo machine. Two bits pushed into the slot bought me ten minutes’ time, probably more than I needed. I brought up city directory and punched Lenard Kavara’s name again. This time, I half expected it would blink up with “address unlisted” or perhaps with the death notice again. Instead, it brought up an address on the other side of the park, in a neighborhood thick with Benders.
Made sense. I couldn’t erase the public hollo, of course, and I couldn’t be sure they didn’t have a track on Lenard Kavara’s name, but the city directory wasn’t a very smart system, and it was almost mechanical in its dumb simplicity.
Just in case, though, I looked for three other names in succession, none of them names of people that were in the Babble, or people in any way connected to me or, if I was lucky, to Glenn Braxladden.
And then I took to the back alleys again.
I won’t describe the erratic path I took, partly because I couldn’t. And I won’t describe how tired I was, because back then I felt I was in a sort of sleep-walking nightmare, too tired to be awake, and still trudging on.
When I reached the park of Interplanetary Harmony, the temptation proved too strong. I walked deep into the park, and crawled under a bush. Never had a bed felt more inviting than the mulch under that bush. I curled on it and fell asleep.
I half expected to wake up to full daylight, or perhaps to the sniffling of servos on my trail. I did neither. I woke up two hours later, cold and cramped. My feet were still on fire, my legs were still tired, but I felt less like I was walking in a dream. More in control.
I crept out of my hideout, crossed the park, and walked onto the other side, into the warren of streets taken up with hastily built high-rises for the Benders. I traced the address of Lenard Kavara. I had the vague idea of going to the nearest place run by a human: café or bar or cluster of machines watched by a clerk, and asking about Lenard Kavara, and who his friends and contacts might be.
I might have done it, too, and likely come to grief over it.
But instead, as I walked from an alley into the street where Kavara lived, I heard someone behind me, and turned.
“You!” I think Braxladden and I said, at the same time. And then, “But you’re dead,” in perfect unison.
He smiled. He lowered the burner he’d been holding pointed at me, and I lowered the burner I hadn’t realized I was holding on him.
“You escaped,” I said.
“So did you,” he said. “I thought you were gone. I thought it was all gone. I heard that—I wasn’t sure what name was yours. I thought—But then I heard of the explosion in the apartment of a Madrastan translator… and I thought…” He shook his head. “I thought I’d better check here, in case you’d got to Lenard, and that got him the ring, before the attack.” He shook his head again. He was holstering his burner.
I slipped my stolen weapon into my pocket. “I guess,” he said, “That Lenard really is dead?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I almost was. Who is after us?”
Glenn shrugged. “I’d guess the Earth government.”
“But… why?”
“It would take too long to explain.” The amazingly transforming grin again. “But I will. If we survive.”
“We?” I said, and then, “Do you want your ring back?”
He shook his head. “No. Come. You. Come. If they find us, I fight them off, and you escape, with the ring. If you can’t find anyone else to give it to, remember three taverns: the Pipe, The Sunburst and the Manitou. One of them will hopefully still be standing. If not, then all it’s gone, and the ring is useless. Or at least, it will never reach Valhalla.”
“But,” I asked, as he started to move with purpose. “What is the ring and where are we going?”
“I’ll tell you what the ring is when we’re off Earth and headed for Valhalla. If you’re captured, it’s best you don’t know.”
“But—”
“Trust me.”
With people following me, trying to kill me, trusting this man might be mad, but after all, he’d saved my life, when he didn’t have to.
While he took me on a circuitous route that I realized was leading us towards the field where the Schrödingers were kept, I asked, “Why did you save my life?”
He shrugged. “You were nice looking. And you looked completely harmless.” Something twinkled in his eyes. “I guess you aren’t, or you’d be long dead.”
I don’t know how long it took us to get to the Schrödinger field. There were Schrödinger ships of all sizes and shapes, from message ships, small and fleet, able to leave and enter the atmosphere of every world in record time, to large freighters, which either had to negotiate for landing rights, or would end up being emptied in orbit. For a moment it shocked me that there was no guard in sight. But why would there be? The only way to even enter the Schrödingers was to be gen coded to do so: to have your genetics inscribed as a trusted user into their locks. The exterior was impervious to any attack, being made of dimatough, which could survive the void of space.
As for a rogue Bender stealing a ship–unless he stole Luff, too, he would be locked out of the computer’s mind, and no more able capable of piloting the Schrödinger than of flying unassisted by flapping his arms. Technically the Schrödingers could transport the ship and passengers, unassisted between different coordinates of space and time unassisted. But the problem was that, on their own, the computers didn’t understand what the coordinates meant and were as likely to take you between here and there instantly as between here, now, and then two thousand years go. It had resulted in a lot of accidentally seeded colonies, and a lot more of missing shiploads of cargo and passengers before, two hundred years ago, the system of having the computer have a bonded pilot had developed.
But the Benders needed Luff to achieve the mental state of high-abstraction in which their brains could properly communicate concepts of time and space to the computer. And giving yourself Luff—even if it could be found outside the carefully controlled confines of space authority—without careful medical supervision was just a complex way of committing suicide.
I realized Glenn had done something to the door of a nearby Schrödinger, one of the little couriers, which had sprang open, and was climbing aboard. He offered me his hand.
“But–” I said. And then “Luff.”
He grinned at me, looking conspiratorial. “Come.”
I realize I was with a madman, likely to kill himself by taking Luff on his own, or worse—better?—to get us lost in the immensity of space.
Glenn closed the door after me. “Don’t look so horrified,” he said. “I don’t think this is theft. At least, the alarms won’t sound. Someone forgot to erase my gencode from the door. Or maybe they really thought they killed me. Sheer good luck.”
He had already sat behind the controls and motioned me to the passenger seat as he strapped down.
I strapped down, myself, shoulder-and-chest harness. He checked them with one outstretched hand before his hands danced on the controls.
“Luff,” I said.
“Trust me,” he said. “Orbit first.”
He got us to orbit smoothly. He had, if that insignia in his uniform didn’t lie, done this for ten years after all.
Once we were in orbit, the alarms started, and I said “Won’t they shoot us down?”
“Not if we don’t give them time,” he said. “Would you give me the ring?”
I handed it to him, wondering what a little ceramite ring would do in this situation. Then I thought of all the time I’d spent r
unning that day, of everything I’d done. Being shot out of the sky seemed a relatively clean way to go, and I regretted only that I’d never told my parents goodbye. I’d left so many years ago, in a bid to become what no one in my village had ever been—someone who helped interplanetary peace. It was all I could do not to laugh now. Interplanetary peace! Particularly because it wasn’t even remotely funny.
Glenn had removed a panel in the controls, and was fitting the ring carefully into place. “My aunt who is a research scientist,” he said, “told me this ring would connect… I can’t explain, but it would make a Schrödinger able to connect to the pilot, even if the pilot wasn’t on Luff. You know Earth has kept the monopoly on travel by keeping the formula to Luff secret and killing anyone unauthorized who produces it.”
“If everyone could fly, there would be interplanetary wars,” I said. And then I realized what I’d said and opened my mouth to unsay it, but Glenn nodded.
“I used to think that, too. It’s been a long time since I believed it. It’s more, that now only Earth can have interplanetary wars.” Glenn paused, gave me a quick look. “My aunt’s only son, my cousin Reehat, died in the Daicean revolution.”
“Oh,” I said.
I supposed he meant Earth really had financed that, but he only said, “Yeah, oh. She devoted her life to studying– Never mind.” He shrugged again. “I was supposed to pass the ring on to someone who would take it aboard a freighter to Valhalla. I guess it’s too late for that now. I never meant to become a Guinea pig.”
“What do you mean?” I said, though I knew very well what.
He pulled down a helmet that I’d thought until then was part of the seat. It fell over his head so only the lower half of his face remained visible: the square jaw with the shadow of a red beard, the firmly set lips. The lips opened and he said, “I mean, if this doesn’t work at all, and we’re lucky, we’ll end up a thousand years in the past, still on Earth orbit, manage to land and become one of those fabled UFOs, just before we vanish into the population of the time, to live like savages.”
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 16