by Moshe Ben-Or
“All right, so there’s no way to conquer your worlds without nuking them to slag, and it’s really hard for anyone to set himself up as a dictator,” conceded Patty, “But how can you live like that? Your society is full of violence. You revel in it. It’s even indecent on your worlds to walk around unarmed. Anyone can challenge anyone to a duel anytime. People must get shot every day. How can that be normal? I can’t imagine it. It must be like living in a war zone. Even the Palmer Dictatorship was better than that, at least people could walk down the street without fear of getting shot at random.”
“Actually,” replied Leo, “the League is a very peaceful place, most of the time. Dueling is a complicated issue, so let’s set it aside for a bit. It’s not as simple as walking up to some fellow you don’t like and issuing a Challenge. Suffice it to say that we have about twenty-seven billion people, yet fewer than a million duels are fought each year, mostly on Sparta and New Helena. But as far as common crime goes, we have one of the lowest violent crime rates in known space.
“It’s kind of hard to be a violent criminal when you’re always surrounded by armed citizens. Police bots can’t be everywhere, much less live cops. If you’re a smart crook or a lucky crook, you can avoid the police. But back home you’re guaranteed that every prospective victim aged thirteen or older has both the weapons and the training to either shoot you or stab you, or both. What kind of idiot do you have to be to try anything? Criminals aren’t that stupid. Most of them just want to get a bit of money with as little risk as possible.”
“Fine,” said Patty testily, “maybe it’s all right to arm adults so you have a bit less crime, and I can see how people would be more polite to one another if being rude might mean getting shot at. But kids with knives, kids with guns… That’s horrible! Teenage boys and girls shouldn’t have knives! They’ll stab each other left and right over nothing!”
“Well, if you treat grown men and women like little kids, maybe they will. But teenagers are not children. They have the capacity to make their own decisions. They can be responsible for their actions. You just have to demand it of them instead of treating them like little kids.
“In the eighteen years before I went into the Shock Corps, there was only one stabbing in town, and it sure as heck was justified.”
“What, you mean somebody said something against guns?” asked Patty sarcastically.
“Nope,” smiled Leo.
“My mother’s chambermaid had a daughter, Riikka Lahtinen. Their family was from Duchy Saar, up on the southern shore of Ledonia. The Lahtinen women have served as chambermaids to the Saars from time immemorial, so when Mother married a Freeman, naturally…
“Well, anyway, Riikka was a beautiful girl. Curves like an hourglass, long blond hair, everything in the right place. Fourteen.
“One of the stableboys, Petya, took a liking to her. Big lad, handsome, three years her senior. She liked him too, everything hunky-dory.
“So they’re fooling around up in the hayloft one day and old boy Petya starts getting a bit too fresh. Riikka tells him she’s had enough, but the lad won’t listen. All the blood’s rushed right out of the upper head into the lower; testosterone anoxia’s setting in. He won’t stop. Pushes our girl down onto the hay, flips up her skirt, forces her legs wide open…
“He’s about my size, all muscle on muscle, got maybe forty-five or fifty kilos over on her, and not a one of them is fat. His damned arms are bigger around than her legs.
“What would you have done? Cry, beg, scream, scratch him?”
“Call the police,” said Patty.
“Yup,” answered Leo.
“And, assuming you got your net glasses to dial before he ripped them off you and stomped them to bits, the cops would be there in thirty minutes to take you to the hospital for your rape kit.
“Riikka, though, was one of our girls, and not you. She pulled out her puukko and stabbed old boy Petya right through the neck. Then, when he was down on the floor gurgling like a stopped-up sink and bleeding like a stuck pig, she fixed her skirt and called the police.”
“Did he die?” asked Patty, her face a mix of wide-eyed anxiety and sheer annoyance at the casual way her companion talked about such horrible things.
“Nope. Riikka used the stable’s first aid kit on him. All he needed was some blood clotter and an intubation. No big deal.
“The cops took the dummy to the hospital, and come next morning he was right as rain, on his knees in front of her, begging for forgiveness.”
“What do you mean begging for forgiveness?” exclaimed Patty, “He should have been in jail!”
“Why?” replied Leo.
“No rape had taken place. There were no visual recordings of any kind, either. The prosecutor had one teenage male idiot with a stab wound through the neck who was assiduously exercising his right to remain silent, one uncooperative teen female with a bloody knife, and one incoherent call to emergency services.
“Let’s say they’d charged Petya with attempted rape. Any halfway competent defense lawyer would have made the whole thing into a he-said, she-said, and Riikka would have been up on the stand against her will, explaining to twelve strangers, and Heaven knows how many sets of net glasses, what she was doing up in the hayloft, alone, with a man.
“At the end of the day there would be no conviction, but a young woman would end up losing her reputation, and a young man’s life would be ruined. All over a bit of overwrought teen drama. That’s just dumb.
“Petya got his forgiveness, and a new feeling of respect for women in general, and one chambermaid’s daughter in particular. The other stableboys ribbed him about the whole thing for a while, but it wasn’t too bad. Even Petya himself agreed that he’d richly deserved the stabbing, but most everybody could sympathize with the poor dolt. It’s not like they’d been discussing the weather, up in that hayloft.
“A reputation for stabbing uppity boyfriends went very nicely with the Tough Northern Girl mystique. Riikka ended up being the most popular girl in school, which only fed her already exaggerated sense of her own irresistibility. They were an item for the rest of the year, and then Petya’s draft date came up, he went into the Navy and she found a different boyfriend. No harm, no foul.”
“Now I know you’re all nuts,” replied Patty testily, crossing her arms on her chest.
“I can’t imagine living like that. It’s simply mad.”
“Yup, that’s what all the other Outsider girls said, too. All except one,” smiled Leo sadly.
Something about his tone gave Patty pause. Suddenly, she had the uncanny feeling that she’d been traipsing, blithely and unknowingly, through a minefield. Or, perhaps, standing on the edge of a gulf whose very existence, much less the true width and depth, had, until that moment, been wholly unknown to her.
“Who was the one exception?” she asked carefully.
“Princess Isabella van der Rijn,” answered the Spartan.
* 25 *
“That’s the last one I can reach,” said Mirabelle. “The rest are all sunk too deep. I can’t grab them with the tweezers. If there were ends sticking out to begin with, you’ve broken them off.”
“No moaning about how gross the pus is. No complaining about blood,” thought Yosi. “You have potential, sweetie, you really do.”
“Start squeezing stuff out,” he said out loud.
“I’ll make a water nozzle for you so you don’t have to use your own reservoir to wash it off me. And push hard. Don’t be afraid to hurt me. The more of the stuff you get out, the more likely I am to be all right.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, “How bad is all this?”
“It’s bad,” answered Yosi.
“I won’t lie to you. If we don’t make it back to my friends, it can kill me. I’ve half a mind to hand you the scalpel out of the first aid kit and tell you to cut until you get the rest of the splinters and all the dead tissue. If you were one of our girls, you’d know how to do that. But you’re not. An
d I have a ruck to carry.
“If the infection spreads more, I might ask you regardless, and take my chances.”
“Right,” said the girl, apprehension mixing with determination in her voice.
“If you die, I die, don’t I?”
“Yeah,” replied Yosi, “More likely than not.”
“Then I’m not letting you die,” resolved Miri.
“Hey, does this thing have climate control?” she remarked by way of redirecting her attention to something less scary than the prospect of dying alone in the woods, “I’m getting pretty warm.”
“The purpose of stealth mode is to hide you,” smiled Yosi, “Bend light around your body and blend you into the background in every spectrum where someone might conceivably be looking, from UV down to the far infrared and radar. The AI does its best to muffle the sound of your movements. It even tries to hide your footprints. As long as you don’t move too fast for it to keep up, you’re the next best thing to a ghost.”
Miri went still for a moment, and Yosi caught himself instinctively counting. He never made it past three.
“But I radiate heat!” she exclaimed.
“So that’s why you don’t walk around all invisible all the time! If you’re not careful, your own body heat will kill you!”
It was amazing how quickly she picked up on things, thought Yosi. With surprise, he realized that the thought excited him.
“Yes, it will,” he agreed.
He could not overemphasize this point enough. Mismanaged ponchos killed their users. Killed them as dead as enemy flechettes, but much more subtly. So slowly that most victims never even realized that they were dying until it was too late.
She had to understand this instinctively, or else she might well end up like one of the steam-cooked critters they hauled out to the infirmary by the truckfull during every elementary school field problem.
“If you look closely at your housekeeping icon, you will see an emergency heat dump attribute. If you hit it, the poncho will exit stealth mode and dump a bunch of water all over your skin to cool you off, even if it has to get the water out of the waste recycling system.
“Right now the attribute is tiny. If the AI starts to believe that you’re in danger of heat exhaustion, that attribute will get bigger and bigger. The AI will warn you, again and again. And again. But under no circumstances whatsoever will the poncho dump heat or exit stealth mode on its own. Never ever.
“This is gear for grown-ups. If you choose to fry for the sake of the mission, or if you’re stupid enough to fry by accident, the AI will let you die.
“Never forget this. Never tell the AI to just shut up with the heat management warnings, because it will. Never dismiss the temperature warning gage after it pops up, because it will go away.
“When I was a little kid, I died from heat stroke twice on school field problems. Out here, there’s going to be no babysitter to yank you out immediately when your heart flatlines, and no autodoc on standby to bring you back to life so the whole class can laugh at you over recess.”
Miri swallowed. All of a sudden her throat had dried up. For a few minutes, in her mind, Yosi had become just a man. Not alien. Not scary. Flesh and blood, just like herself. Just someone who needed her to pull a bunch of infected splinters out of his back. Somehow familiar, even vulnerable, in his own way. A friend.
She had forgotten the depth of the canyon which lay between them, thought Mirabelle nervously. She couldn’t let herself do that. The little cartoon girls from the Israeli Hebrew tutor loomed menacingly in her mind. Real guns. Real vibros. Real ponchos. Not toys, but real, grown-up tools of war. In the hands of seven-year-olds.
What kind of people would let small children die as a school lesson? What kind of children would laugh at such things? And what kind of adults did such children grow up to be?
Sharks. Wolves. Nothing in common with normal people. Pity for no one...
“W-wait,” she stuttered, consciously forcing herself away from the memory of Dad’s hectoring voice, “There have to be ways to dump heat without breaking stealth. This thing wouldn’t be useful if there weren’t.”
“There are ways to postpone the inevitable,” agreed Yosi good-naturedly.
“Under the housekeeping icon, you will find a heat management menu. I’ll teach you how to use it later. For now, just go ahead and choose the roots option. That’s the best way dump heat, deep underground, ideally into the water table, where it won’t bubble back up to reveal your position. But the downside is, you can’t move quickly without losing a good chunk of your poncho.”
Miri paused as she dug through menus.
“Lots of stuff in here,” she remarked after a little while.
“It’s simple on top, so even a kid can use it, but underneath it’s like an onion.”
You could hear the intrigued little smile in her voice, thought Yosi.
The poncho was a puzzle to her. And she loved puzzles, didn’t she? He was willing to bet she’d spent hours and hours as a little kid, putting things together and yanking them apart. She must have dived down from housekeeping straight into the maintenance interfaces.
“Hey, scripting!” she continued, “Programming, too. This thing is it’s own Tailor, and then some.
“Not available except to power users, huh? Well you just wait! I bet all these menu presets barely scratch the surface of what you can really do, you impetuous bunch of nanites, you!
The more this went on, reflected Yosi, the more he liked his new companion.
You could feel the fear, underneath. But she kept getting better at fighting it with every passing moment. And she was smart. Scary smart. Sexy smart.
“So, how long can you really stay invisible with all this stuff, if you’re careful?” asked the girl.
“In theory, indefinitely. A fully charged power pack has juice to last for months, and you could bring spares if you needed to,” answered Yosi.
“In practice, it’s torture to stay stealthed up for more than a couple of days, especially if you have to move about a lot. The constant heat and high humidity wear you out. Salt and urea build up on your skin. The poncho tries to clean you, but you still get sores in all the wrong places, especially if you’re wearing clothes underneath.
“The air gets stale and pathogens multiply. Eventually, you get sick.
“The longer you go, the worse things get. A week in, it gets straight-up brutal. Past a week, it gets outright dangerous.
“Starting in sixth grade, they make you go for a week non-stop every year, on harder and harder problems, just so you can prove to yourself that you can. The longest I’ve ever gone was a bit over a month straight.”
“Yeah?” said Mirabelle, squeezing yet another little pocket of pus out of his back, “How come?”
She was glad she couldn’t smell anything, she thought. The stuff had to smell as horrible as it looked.
“Well, the Omicronians had this big old camp, right in the middle of our territory,” said Yosi.
“Their regional headquarters. Huge place. Thousands of troops, an airfield, artillery, ground to space missiles, the works. The swine thought they were bloody invincible behind their barbed wire and minefields. We’d fire rockets at them when we could, and once we even got a transport plane on takeoff with an antiaircraft missile, but for the most part there was nothing we could do about the place.
“So one day we saw a bunch of their women walking around over there, and that was the last straw. Me and Menachem got ticked beyond belief and said, ‘screw it, we’re gonna get the bastards even if we die’.
“Everyone thought it was a suicide mission, but they couldn’t talk us out of it. The two of us just couldn’t take it, you know, watching them make themselves at home like that. By that point we’d all kind of accepted that everyone was going to die anyway, so we figured we might as well die attacking that place.
“So we stripped down to nothing but ponchos and sandals and ammo and a couple of ration bars apiece
. Even left our tallit katan behind, so the ponchos could get at all of our skin better. Figured Hashem would protect us regardless, in the merit of what we were going to do.
“We spent three days slowly creeping forward across their exclusion zone, through the minefield. Once, a perimeter patrol walked close enough to me that I could have touched them. The bastards never saw us. They didn’t believe anyone would try, you see. And they’d gotten sloppy, letting all kinds of grass and bushes and whatnot grow up all over the exclusion zone, especially next to the stream where they used to dump their gray water. There were all kinds of critters nesting in the bulrushes over there, ducks and nutria and frogs, you name it. With all the wildlife moving about, the sensors never noticed us creeping along the streambed.
“So we get through and we’re lying in the rafters in this huge hangar, all exhausted. We’d been up, creeping, seventy-two hours straight. I’ve got little devils dancing in the corners of my eyeballs. All I want to do is just lie down and sleep. But there’s a transport getting ready to taxi out. Biggest plane I’d ever seen in my life, outside VR.
“So I decide, what the heck, we’re inside the perimeter, Hashem is with us, I’m gonna get the sucker. I wait ‘till the flight crew are all loaded up, and the props are turning. All the ground crew are clear of the bird; he’s about to go load his passengers out on the tarmac; no one is paying attention to the inside of the hangar anymore. I run up along the rafter and drop a limpet down on the wing.
And then I’m sitting there watching, and I see these six buses pull up.”
“Were they full of soldiers?” asked Mirabelle.
“Better!” grinned Yosi.
The girl, the woods, his aching back, it all simply faded away like a mirage, and he was suddenly back there, in that moment. The triumph of it, the exhilaration washed over him all over again, as if it had happened yesterday. By the Hand of the Almighty working through His servant Yoseph Weismann, one tiny measure of sweet revenge for Rachel and Leah. He could taste the joy of it.