by Moshe Ben-Or
“Jacques? Can we get one?”
Jacques Delavre had been the deputy chief of campus police. In the first three weeks of the Collapse, when mobs of starving rioters tens of thousands strong had thrown themselves at Polytechnic University’s hastily-erected ramparts with the courage of desperation, it was Jacques’ leadership that had made the difference. That, and the primitive weaponry hastily cobbled together by Mechanical Engineering, with much collaboration from the Department of Chemistry.
“Pretty much everything outside this campus has burned to the ground, sir. There is no place I can think of, where we could get one. Even if we could, we’d have to disassemble it and move it. We have neither the trucks to do so, nor armed personnel enough to guard the work parties and the campus both.”
“All right, then, if we can’t bring one in, we’ll just have to build one ourselves.
“Mark?”
Mark Jamesson had been the department head of Mechanical Engineering. Today he, his students and the few Facilities people who hadn’t run away in the first few days of general panic kept the campus in one piece with, it seemed, nothing but welding kits, duct tape and endless cannibalization of whatever could be cannibalized.
“Well, we can get blueprints at the library. Algae tank designs were part of the Doomsday Knowledge Store, of course,” replied the chief engineer.
By reflex that still wouldn’t die, he’d reached upward as if to reset a malfunctioning pair of net glasses, then rubbed his nose in consternation when his fingers met nothing but skin. Reaching for the thick, dog-eared notebook on the tabletop in front of him, Professor Jamesson began to clumsily rustle pages, here and there reflexively tapping letters that stubbornly refused to become bigger and clearer on command.
No one was used to relying on memory yet, or to writing things down on paper, thought dean Weinberger. He himself had been surprised at how much work it took to use sheets of bleached cellulose one had to mark with pigment contained in a plastic tube, instead of the convenient arrays of polymer weave, embedded processors and pigmented nanites that had been called “paper” only five weeks ago.
Yet it could have been worse. Oh yes, it could have been much worse than this. Any who doubted that truth needed only to stand on a rampart and look at what had become of the pleasant, genteel neighborhood that had once surrounded this campus.
“The heater elements can come out of the pool in Zoares Hall,” continued the engineer.
“Ditto on the fans to stir the water.
“We can get the main waste processor back up and running to feed the algae.
“The filters we can make.
“We’ve got the light bulbs…
“If we could get the raw plastic to form the main body out of, sure, we can build it. It’d take us about a week, maybe a week and a half.”
“Good,” said the dean.
“Jacques, I want you to organize a reconnaissance in force down to what’s left of the warehouses around Alamedo Airport. Down Jose Moreno street and then up the highway. Out at sunrise tomorrow, back before sundown. Try to avoid fighting if you can, but if those fools holed up in the Marianna Towers refuse to see reason and let you pass by peacefully, give them a few cannonballs.
“Mark, don’t go yourself. I don’t want to put too many eggs in that basket. Send Barboza. Also Ribeiro from Architecture, Rocha from Materials and Diaz from Chemistry. Between the four of them, they ought to be able to figure out if we can get suitable materials, or can use what’s there to make what we need.
“Next item.
“Carmen, what is it I hear about a planetary government being set up? What do we know about it and who’s running the show?”
Carmen Denero had been a student in the Sociology department, one of the campus misfits so busy trying to change the world that they forgot to study or go to class. Half a dozen groups at the least, by Weinberger’s last pre-Collapse count. From “Revolutionary-Progressivist” agitation in favor of unaffordable social welfare boondoggles to the latest crusade to save some Three-Toed Slug, if it involved shouting slogans and waving signs for Universal Justice, Carmen was there.
After ten semesters of barely avoiding academic probation by dint of sheer raw brainpower, she’d been about to graduate this spring with a degree in Applied Social Policy and finally hand the baton of Chief Campus Headache off to a, hopefully, less-capable successor.
Now Carmen Denero and two dozen of her friends kept tabs on the outside world as best they could. It was not an easy job. In the very first few days, before they’d gotten more cautious, two of her people had simply never returned. Three had been raped. Six had been roughed up, one badly enough to have broken bones. These days, even though they were decently armed for the circumstances and pretty much everyone outside this campus would tell them every current rumor in exchange for a handful of algae paste, things were much, much tougher.
As of last week, there were now cannibals less than five kilometers away, on the outskirts of the Francisca barrio. Not one or two madmen on the loose from psychiatric wards, but a rational, organized gang of murderers who had chosen to trap and kill their fellow human beings for food. And that gang was surely not going to be the last.
“I’m afraid the news is definitely bad,” said Carmen.
“The man in charge of the new so-called government is Ricardo Sanchez.
“Yes, that Ricardo Sanchez,” she remarked in answer to the volley of startled glances.
“Apparently the bastard has somehow managed to make contact with the top of the alien hierarchy. He and his thugs have the official backing of the alien governor, someone called Prince Khharrq. So far, they’ve taken over Downtown and most of Marketside. They are using equipment provided by the aliens to eliminate all the competition that doesn’t immediately knuckle under, and to settle old scores between Sanchez and the other crime bosses.
“The uniform of Sanchez’s new police force is a pair of black pants and a yellow coat with a shiny eight-pointed star badge covered in some curly script that no one can recognize. They wear it here, on the left side of the chest. They seem to be recruiting jailhouse friends and every kind of scum.
“Wherever they are in charge, there is outward order and utter terror.
“The cops do hand out algae paste and whatnot, sometimes. But they take whatever they want and rape whomever catches their eye.
“You’d think they’d pay for it. Almost everyone out there would do pretty much anything for a bit of food. But they enjoy the taking and the raping. Goddamned sadistic proto-feudal thugs, straight from your course on societal collapse, Dean, I swear it.
“The Sanchez government is also beginning to round up technical specialists, at least what few they can find who are still alive. It looks like they are trying to restore infrastructure, in between carving up the city into a bunch of gangland fiefdoms. Give them a few months, and the whole planet will be living under a neo-feudal kleptocracy.
“I don’t know how you’ll deal with them, Dean, but you’ll have to, and soon. The whole city knows that there is some sort of organization running the Polytech campus. I’m surprised Sanchez hasn’t sent his thugs here already.”
“Indeed,” thought the de-facto dictator of what, not too long ago, had been nigh-on the most progressive and liberal university campus on the planet.
“Indeed I will have to deal with good old Ricardo. And you, my dears, will not like it in the least.
“But you will do as I say regardless.
“Even if the noble-minded fools who had been in charge of selecting data for the Doomsday Knowledge Store had included weapons in the collection, I would have no choice in the matter. Not if the man really does have the backing of the Occupier.
“Anyway, after these past few weeks, not a one of you will have the gall to stand upon any moral high ground and gainsay me, when I give the orders. And if you do try something that foolish, good old Jacques will set you straight right quick.”
When the lig
hts had gone out and the old world had come crashing down, it was only natural that this campus would turn to its most famous resident. He had not, at the time, been even the department head of Sociology. Just a semi-retired Professor Emeritus whiling away his waning years in the well-deserved comfort of a tidy little house on Professors’ Row.
Not that anyone had cared about his titles. Once the first riots had broken out, it was his past, not his present, that had mattered to them.
Nine out of ten students on campus had traveled to the planet’s top engineering school from out of town. Pretty much all of them had had nowhere to go, and no one to turn to. And for the roughly thirty-five percent of the student body who shared his unfortunate ethnicity, the collapse of law and order had presented a threat far greater than the mere prospect of going hungry. By the second day of the Collapse, mobs of barrio rats were massacring blancos all over the city.
Take the reputation of The Man Who Overthrew Palmer, add the student uniforms and campus traditions left over from the days when this place had been full of ambitious petite-bourgeois cadets trying to break through the national glass ceiling by way of the Royal Corps of Engineers, season liberally with fear and confusion... And voilà! Yesterday’s Liberal Progressivists allegedly suffused with the notions of personal freedom, social justice and the dignity of the individual had turned, nigh-on overnight, into an army of unquestioning military automatons the likes of which the most hidebound Palmeristo could only dream of.
But they were not Palmeristos, in the end, and so the default moral refuge of having mindlessly followed the orders of the infallible Leader was not available to them. No one among the denizens of Polytech, mused Klaus Weinberger, would ever forget what their Dean had ordered them to do, and what it had meant in practice. All felt the weight of guilt, even those who had merely tended the algae tanks and fixed the power distribution grid. But none felt the weight of guilt, surely, as much as Jacques Delavre.
The Dean might have given the orders, and the department head of Mechanical Engineering might have repaired and set to work their sole fabricator and the two military earthmovers that had sat, unused, in the Facilities garage since the days when this place had offered three-month accelerated courses in field fortification and earthmover maintenance to select groups of Army sergeants.
But it was the new Chief of Campus Police who had rounded up the half-dozen officers who had not fled the campus. It was the new Chief of Campus Police who had led the small expedition to locate the half-mad grad student from League Studies whose draft dissertation had dwelled, in obsessive technical detail, upon the bloodiest aspects of Sparta’s Time of Isolation. And it was the new Chief of Campus Police who, armed with the weapons and tactics said student could describe down to the tiniest detail even in the absence of accessible notes or electronic records, had raised and commanded the militia that had ultimately fulfilled the Dean’s intent.
The heaps of stabbed, shot-up and dismembered corpses might have been cleared away, but even now the Psychology Department’s improvised clinic was full, on a daily basis, of those for whom the shutting of eyes at night returned full force the cries of starving women pleadingly thrusting out half-dead babies, the boom of cannon and the crash of musketry, and the wet, sucking sound of bayonets plunging into living flesh. And the tangled piles of what, only days before, had been living people just like themselves. And the stench of rotting human meat.
The only consolation left to the survivors, thought Klaus Weinberger, remained the plain fact that it had to be done.
Without that set of decisions, and all that had inevitably resulted from them, this campus would be a burned-out, looted pile of ruins, same as most of the rest of San Angelo. And the vast majority of the precious cohort of scientific and technical experts who would surely be needed to rebuild the city, not to mention the rest of the planet, would now be as dead as the poor devils whom the Campus Militia had torn apart with grapeshot and musketry, at the foot of the berm that connected together the remnants of the Palmer-era security walls and the six high-rise dormitories on the western edge of the inner campus.
Having filled the moat at the base of that berm with mangled corpses several times over, the denizens of Polytech had no choice, really, but to believe wholeheartedly that their skins were more valuable than the skins of pretty much everyone else on the planet, and that, therefore, for the sake of future generations to whom only they could bring a secure, dignified existence, any vile atrocity they committed today had to be justifiable.
And thus the same men and women who only yesterday had sneered contemptuously at the blind obedience of moronic Palmerist goons would now do whatever their Dean commanded, regardless of morals or circumstances. And the Chief of Campus Police would, at need, ensure that no form of dissent or hesitation, verbal or otherwise, would be tolerated.
* 38 *
Yosi lay on his stomach. His teeth chattered, yet he was soaked in sweat. His immune system was fighting a full-scale war against an alien invader. It wasn’t pleasant to be a battlefield.
Miri was here. She was always here. Dimly he remembered her coming and going. Sometimes she brought food. Once, he remembered being carried. Leo must have carried him here. Leo came by a lot. Shin Takawa came too, quite a bit. He always brought stuff to drink. Mostly it tasted bad. Funny, he’d never thought of Takawa as an herbalist. It wasn’t in his dossier.
“You’re conscious again.” It was a statement of fact, not to be refuted. She had that nice, authoritative, matter-of-fact voice. Lovely, really. Very motherly. He could use some mothering.
“Maybe. Then again, all this could be a fever dream. I remember talking to Rachel once, and to Menachem. They’ve both been dead sixteen years. Almost seventeen now.”
“You’ve been talking to a lot of people. I think most of them are dead, by the way you talk to them. Shin says it’s partly the medicine he gives you. Most of the local wildlife mixes its antibiotics with hallucinogens.”
“Have I told you about the weapons cache?”
“Three times. Leo went and got everything last week. One of the suits fits Shin. We think one might fit you. None fits me or Leo though. He’s too big and I’m too small.”
“What’s with all the homebrew herbal potions? What happened to Leclerk’s autodoc?”
By the way Miri hesitated, Yosi knew that the answer was bad.
“Well?” he insisted.
“The autodoc...
“It says that you have a native Paradisian bacterium in your wounds. No standard medicine that it knows how to make does any good against it. We fed the AI your extended survival library, and it’s been kind of improvising based on that.”
“That’s where Takawa got the recipes for all that herbal stuff?”
“Yup. Turns out herbal medicine was a hobby of his. Once the autodoc told us which wildlife made what we needed, he just kind of took charge of collecting it all and making the medicines.
“It’s not as easy as it sounds. Even with the poncho helping out, it takes a trained eye to find the right thing in a forest. The darned recipes are complicated, too, and if you screw up one little step you end up making a bunch of poison.
“I have trouble enough making soup on a campfire. I thought I knew how to cook, but it turns out all I knew was how to press buttons on the Autochef.”
“Native Paradisian bacteria?” thought Yosi ruefully.
Not good. Very, very not good.
Of all the stupid, unlikely...!
Based upon a left-handed pseudo-DNA written with eight “letters” completely unrelated to the Terran system of five nucleobases and twenty canonical amino acids, native Paradisian life attempting to invade the body of a Terran mammal found itself in a hostile, metal-poor alien environment full of strange organic chemicals as useless, unpalatable, or outright toxic to itself as it was to the Terran host. Though the invader’s utterly alien nature considerably hampered the initial immune response, eventually, if it didn’t immediately poiso
n itself or starve to death in the meantime, the foreign lifeform would be attacked in increasingly vigorous fashion by the host’s defenses.
Virtually all native Paradisian pseudobacteria succumbed quickly. However, there was a genus of native extremophiles called the Crystallosporarae some of whom had, after centuries of interaction with Terran and hybrid life introduced by the Terraformer, developed means to colonize such new environments.
The things didn’t occur down in the lowlands, where people lived. Even up here, above the toxic line, they were ridiculously rare. So rare, in fact, that no one had bothered to actually do anything seriously medical about them. The one or two dangerous cases a year, mostly hapless extreme-sports enthusiasts whose immune systems were somehow abnormal to begin with and who had had the misfortune to suffer deep wounds in the wrong place at the wrong time, were treated using large doses of phage nanites, and that was that.
Except that all the autodoc’s phage nanites had been used up treating Leclerk.
Well, that explained the fresh-feeling wounds on his back, thought Yosi.
The autodoc must have cut out a bunch of infected tissue. But, regardless of what antiseptic it used afterward to wash out the surgical sites, it wouldn’t have killed all the endospores. Just the active organisms.
Paradisian cells didn’t reproduce by division, like Terran cells. Instead, they grew endospores inside themselves. As few as two, or as many as a dozen, depending on the species. When the endospores filled up the cell, the thing burst and its children were released. If the spores sensed a favorable environment, they activated. If not, they stayed dormant and waited.
Compared to Terran life, Paradisian life was a good bit slower to reproduce and expand, but it was much, much harder to eradicate.