Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

  After a long, long pause the female said, “Let me just get this straight,” she said. “You’ve been sending Ostar to Earth all this time, and you never told anyone?”

  The director suddenly laughed. “Think about it,” he said. “When the archaeological team excavating a possible alien artefact in G’wrzt told me that they’d found a wrecked spacecraft that had crashed on Ostar a hundred million years ago, I immediately realised the implications. We’re a proud species, wouldn’t you agree? For most of our history, we were convinced that we were the only sentient life in the universe. When we were forced to accept that this was not the case, the implications nearly tore our society apart. All our major religions crashed and burnt practically overnight; there were riots, massacres, governments fell, we were a hair’s breadth from planetwide civil war. When we pulled ourselves together and accepted the facts, it was only because we could still pride ourselves on being the most advanced species, the only true intelligent form of life. Just imagine what the repercussions would be if the Ostar people were asked to accept that they’re the progeny of a pair of laboratory specimens; that our common ancestors were held to be entirely without value, completely expendable. Something like that could kill us as a species. You do see that, don’t you?”

  The female didn’t reply, but her face was completely frozen. The director nodded, and scratched his ear with his hind paw. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m getting ahead of myself. When the G’wrzt researchers sent me their first report, I’d never even heard of Earth, needless to say. It was some time before we were able to match up the alloys found in the wreckage with spectrographic analyses of known habitable planets. There were four possible candidates, and we investigated them all. The other three proved to have produced no form of life higher than insects. Then we turned our attention to Earth. We found a planet with a dominant humanoid species, currently at a stage of development roughly analogous to ours a thousand years ago. Could Earth have sent a spacecraft to Ostar a hundred million years ago?

  “At first, I thought my job would be to search Earth for signs of a lost civilisation, of whom the present inhabitants are a hopelessly degenerate and barbarised relic. But when my tracker probe downloaded the archives of the NASA and we found schematics of a missile practically identical to the one we dug up at G’wrzt, I knew there had to be some other explanation. By a lucky coincidence, other researchers were investigating the possibility of a long-extinct wormhole in the U’urgt asteroid belt. We found the site of the wormhole, and we managed to backtrack its path. The trail, as you’ll have guessed, ended at Earth. The temporal distortion effect, the wormhole scientists told me, was something in the order of a hundred million years. The conclusion, I put it to you, is inescapable. When the Earth missile was launched, with Millie and Prince on board, it fell into the mouth of the U’urgt wormhole, which carried it a hundred million years back in time and seventy light-years through space. It brought it here, to Ostar, where it crashed. The beagles, to coin a phrase, had landed.”

  The silence that followed, though no less profound than those that had preceded it, had a slightly different edge to it. Eventually the young male whispered, “Sorry, did he just make a joke or something?”

  The director scowled at him and went on, “So there you have it: the evidence, and the conclusions. I’ve had to bear the weight of this for thirty years. Now you can share it with me.” He grinned. “Of course, it goes without saying that if any of you breathe a word of this—”

  “Yes, fine,” the female said, her voice somewhat ragged, “but I don’t see the connection. So our species originally came from Earth.” She paused, as if she’d just heard what she’d said and couldn’t believe it. “That still doesn’t explain why you went to all the trouble of faking the Earth music so we’d want to blow them up. I can’t see why you’d want to do that.”

  The director appeared genuinely shocked. “You can’t?”

  “Well, no, actually. I’d have thought — I mean, our cousins a billion times removed are living on that planet.”

  The director nodded. “As pets,” he said.

  “Pets?”

  “Pets. The humans keep tame dogs.”

  “That’s—” The young male opened his mouth and closed it a couple of times. “That’s sick,” he said. “It’s like that tri-vid, Escape From the Planet of the Humans. Only,” he added thoughtfully, “that’s just sci-fi.”

  “Even so,” the female said firmly, pulling herself together with a visible effort, “I still don’t see why you’d feel the need to blow the planet up. It’s like I’m missing out a step somewhere.”

  The older male cleared his throat. “Was that the one where he finds the Sacred Bone of R’qqrt buried in a sand dune?”

  The young male shook his head. “No, that was Return to the Planet of the Humans,” he said. “Escape was where the chief human’s daughter turns out to be the hero’s eldest pup genetically mutated into a—”

  The director made a soft growling noise that won him their undivided attention. “Thank you,” he said. “To answer your question: well, isn’t it obvious? If the Ostar people ever find out the truth about their origins—”

  “You’ve already said that,” the PDF man interrupted. “And maybe you’ve got a point there, I don’t know. But blowing up Earth isn’t going to solve anything. If that’s what you’re concerned about, all you need to do is purge your files and make sure those bits of crashed spaceship are coated in concrete and buried somewhere deep. Bear in mind, there’s no reason whatsoever to think the Earth people know about this. There’s no need to kill them, and the D’ppggyt Accords would seem—”

  “No.” The director’s face was unreadable, but he’d dug his claws a centimetre deep into the arms of his chair. “They’ve got to go,” he said. “We can’t risk it.”

  The PDF man returned his stare. “You mean,” he said, “they’ve got to be punished. For keeping dogs as pets. For shooting our ancestors out into space as an experiment, not really giving a damn if they died or not. Yes?”

  The director drew in a long, hard breath. “Yes. Do you have a problem with that?”

  The other three were watching the PDF dog, he knew. Whatever he said, they’d go along with, mostly because he was standing up to the director, challenging him for dominance. The thought of what he was doing made the fur inside his shirt stand on end, but he kept his face straight and his ears upright, and he thought, Well, do I have a problem with that?

  “Well?”

  He shrugged. “No,” he said. “I guess I don’t.”

  45

  Novosibirsk

  There was a manual, and it had a translation function. He only found it quite by chance, pressing buttons to see what they did. One button brought up the usual screenful of alien gibberish in that eye-bruising, obscene-looking script they used, but just as he was about to try again with a different button, something caught his eye and he looked back. There was a symbol, roughly two-thirds of the way down the screen. It looked a bit like a crucified vole and he’d never seen it before in his life — needless to say —but he knew what it meant; not when he looked at it straight on, but when he caught a glimpse of it in passing, out of the corner of his eye. It meant “English”. That was too crazy for words, so he assumed he was imagining things; and then, as he looked up at the top of the screen, it happened again. English.

  He thought about it for a second or so. Maybe, he reasoned, a tiny part of him was still a creature of pure text, able to read any script, break any code; but that tiny part of him was buried so deep that it only came to the surface when his conscious mind was fully occupied elsewhere. Or something like that.

  He ran the cursor down to the mysterious character and hit the biggest button of all. The screen flickered, then re-formed itself into proper letters; letters that he could read.

  Neutron disintegrationing mover storer imprison to device a lot questions they ask.

  Translations of technical manuals, he reali
sed, are pretty much the same the whole galaxy over. Fortunately he was used to them. A lot questions they ask, for example, were obviously FAQ. The other stuff, disintegrationing and imprison, tended to suggest that he was on the right lines. The first bit was just the usual lawyerspeak (So they’ve got lawyers up there too; not as advanced as all that, then), so he scrolled down until he reached another menu.

  To getting back reintegrationing out by of storage

  Actually, compared with most of the Eastern European manuals, it was a doddle. Press this button, and then that one. So he did.

  Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing he could have done, particularly in a small hotel room. The flash of green light blinded him. The blast threw him against the opposite wall, trashed the wardrobe and brought plaster down from the ceiling. Oddly enough, there was no noise, or at least none that he could hear. For some reason the TV came on, and the hands of the clock on the bedside table started whizzing round like the blades of a windmill. The slow dripping noise he could hear as he picked himself up off the floor was molten metal: he’d left a handful of small change on the table while he’d been playing with the alien gun, and now there was a pool of liquid copper-zinc alloy, although the table itself wasn’t visibly scorched.

  Apart from that, nothing seemed to have happened. He swore, and reached for the glass of water to ease his suddenly-parched throat. The water was frozen solid.

  He limped across the room and looked at the gun’s screen. The instructions were still there, and under them a new entry: At work please waiting. He shrugged and went into the bathroom, where he drank water from his cupped hands. It tasted of strawberry.

  When he returned, he saw two tiny little people, a boy and a girl, sitting on the gun, their feet dangling. As soon as they saw him, they started yelling at him, but their voices were so high and squeaky he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He bent down and looked at them. The boy produced a tiny little lightsaber and took a wild swing at him, but he was well out of reach.

  “Greetings,” he said.

  The girl winced and covered her ears; the boy dropped his lightsaber and howled with pain.

  George nodded and whispered, “Greetings” as softly as he could. The girl pulled off a shoe and hurled it at him. She missed.

  “Just a moment,” he whispered. “I think I may be able to do something.”

  In his suitcase, along with all the other stuff he’d looted from the aliens’ New York hotel room after he’d tracked them down by following the trail of credit-card transactions registered to the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes, there was a sort of palmtop-cum-Warthog thing. He had no idea how it worked, but he’d found that if he looked away from it and pressed keys at random, he could make it do what he wanted; the dormant copt, presumably, doing good by stealth.

  With his eyes fixed on the TV screen, he touch-typed in a few commands, in a language he didn’t know, to effect an operation that surely wasn’t possible. A minute or so later the TV screen cleared, and on it appeared a close-up of the tiny people’s feet.

  “Just a moment,” George whispered, and he nudged the palmtop-cum-Warthog over a little bit until the TV showed their faces. “Say something,” he said.

  They said something; quite a lot, in fact. Their voices came through nice and clear from the TV. George thought about people in the neighbouring rooms, and turned the sound down with the remote.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “I guess I must’ve done something wrong.”

  They agreed with him on that point — so much, in fact, that he had to mute out the sound until they’d calmed down a bit. “All right,” he said, “here’s the deal. You tell me what to do, and I’ll put you right again. In return, you help me out with a few things. Agreed?” He smiled beautifully at them, and added, “Come on, guys, don’t give me a hard time. You shot me first, remember?” There was a long silence. Then the boy said, “All right.”

  “Excellent.” George clapped his hands together, which made the little ones shudder. “And just in case you change your minds, I’m keeping this thing.” He leaned over and patted the gun. “I’ve always wanted a ray-gun that really works.”

  The boy told him what to do, which buttons to press, and not long afterwards he and his sister stepped out of a cloud of shining green mist and collapsed on the bed. “You’re welcome,” George said, and covered them both with the gun. “Now, who the hell are you?”

  46

  Novosibirsk

  “That ought to do it,” Mark Twain said, pressing the Send button of the communicator they’d taken from the probe designated Bob. “I’ve told it there’s nothing down here to worry about and everything’s fine.” He put the communicator down on the concrete floor, stepped back half a dozen paces, aimed the therion blaster and fired a burst. There was nothing left of the communicator except a little dribble of melted titanium alloy.

  “Nice touch,” Lucy said.

  Mark Twain grinned. “I left the channel open,” he said. “With any luck, the ship’ll pick up a trace of the weapon’s beam frequency, so it’ll know the communicator was destroyed by a therion blast. That’ll give it one more thing to think about.”

  He sounds different, Lucy thought. He’s talking… well, almost like a human. Like me. Also, he doesn’t smile all the time, which is a relief. You could get sunstroke, being around a smile like that.

  “Right,” she said. “Now what?”

  And that was a very good question. The answer she longed to hear, on one level, was, Let’s take a break, chill out, maybe crack open a bottle of Chablis. Instead she got, “I suggest we tear down the central data-storage node and run a level-9 refrag-and-retrieve protocol. You never know, there may be a few scraps left that we could retrobuild from.” Well, she thought, it was a good answer in its way: positive, energetic, quite an intelligent approach. Sensible, in other words. And maybe there’d be a time for Chablis later, when they’d saved the planet and all.

  “Good idea,” she said. “You carry on with that, I’ll clear some space in the main drive buffers. We’re going to need a lot of memory for something like that.”

  Mark Twain’s idea (she’d already thought of it, but she wanted to let him think it was all his very own) was to comb through the main computer of Lucy’s ship, now concealed and cannibalised as the central control hub of PaySoft, in the hope of finding back-up copies of the wee-small-hours conversations Lucy had had with the ship after she’d bleached her own memory. Needless to say, they’d already looked and found nothing; but they had noticed disturbances in the computer’s file architecture that suggested that large chunks of stuff had been deleted. If those chunks had been Lucy’s chats with the computer, it might be possible to piece together a word or two here and there, a couple of whole sentences if they were really lucky; and that might just be enough to give them some clue as to why Lucy had aimed the bomb at Homeworld before giving herself amnesia. Privately, Lucy didn’t hold out much hope. Even if it worked, she couldn’t really see how it’d be likely to solve the problem of the other bomb, his bomb, lurking in orbit overhead. On the other hand, Mark Twain happily, frantically engaged in displacement activity was far less likely to get on her nerves while they waited to see what the bomb did next than Mark Twain with nothing to occupy himself with. It was, in effect, a hi-tech equivalent to painting the spare bedroom and fitting a new shower curtain in the bathroom.

  He was lying on his back on the floor, half under the skeleton of a dismembered console, grunting and doing things with screwdrivers. She thought about that. He was getting more and more male with every hour that passed; likewise more idiomatic, more emotional, more human generally. Presumably she’d been through the same process of going native, but she couldn’t remember, of course. Convenient. She could see a lot of good reasons why she should have chosen to blank her memory, quite apart from the obvious one of not wanting to be aware she wasn’t actually human, hadn’t had a home, family or childhood, that she’d origin
ally come here not to settle down and make a life for herself but to turn the entire planet into space-dust and loose chippings. Memories, she told herself, are what give organics their identity; but mostly they don’t have any say about what happens to them, so their memories aren’t of their own choosing. Lucy Pavlov had no past, which was one of the main reasons why she’d had such a wonderful future to look forward to — before he came along, at least.

  Not him: the bomb. She was pretty sure he’d stopped thinking of himself as part of it, started viewing it strictly as the enemy, or at best an estranged parent he was determined to defy. She very much hoped so. It was, of course, frivolous and irresponsible of her to let herself think ahead, to beyond the bomb, to what might happen as and when they’d sorted it all out. The phrase “and they lived happily ever after” kept sneaking in through the cat-flap of her mind, and when she’d found the cultural reference, it made her wonder what was going on inside that funny little hybrid machine/organic head of hers. Still, she thought, if not him, then who the hell else?

  Bad logic. She finished the job she’d been doing, then wandered over to the coffee machine and drew off two cappuccinos. It was only after she’d given him his and sipped her own that she remembered she didn’t like frothy coffee.

  “No promises,” he gasped, crawling out from under the console, “but we may be on to something here. You wouldn’t happen to have such a thing as a phase-inverted tricameral verteron inducer?”