by Tom Holt
George looked at her. “Not too bad for business, either.”
“There is that, yes.” She looked back at him and pulled a face. “I don’t know about you, but I reckon a revolution in the information technology sector’s just what we need to pull the global economy out of the recession caused by this run on the banks we’ve been having lately. Can’t hurt, anyway.”
“Of course,” George said. “Talking of jobs, by the way …”
Lucy beamed at him. “Pleasure to have you on board, Mr Stetchkin. After all, you did save the world.”
“Did I?” George looked blank. “Oh, I see what you mean. Well, yes, I did, I guess.” He grinned at her. “Shame nobody’s ever going to know.”
“I know,” Lucy said. “Look, I was thinking about buying up all the banks I nearly put out of business and turning them around—”
“You could do that?”
“Oh yes,” she said cheerfully. “But I’d need someone to run them, of course. Hey, I’ve just had an idea. You’re in banking, aren’t you?”
George laughed. “Not me,” he said. “I’m a scientist, remember. I’ve thought about it — what I really want to do with the rest of my life, now that I’ve finally got one — and I intend to devote myself exclusively to research.”
“Consider it funded,” Lucy replied. “Out of interest …”
“I propose,” George said, “to invent the world’s first 100 per cent—effective hangover cure.”
“I have every faith in you,” Lucy replied gravely.
George smiled at her. “Much to my own surprise, so do I. Oh go on, then, you greedy dog.” He threw Rags the last bit of shortbread.
“Hey, you two,” Mark Twain called out. “I’ve found the Ostar fleet on the scanners. They’ve powered down their weapons and they’re breaking up their attack formation. I’d say that means they’re getting ready to leave.”
“We’d better send him back,” Lucy said.
George nodded. He reached down to put Rags’ lead on. A warm wet tongue met his hand. “I’ll miss him,” he said.
“Um,” Lucy said. “He did try and blow up the Earth, you know.”
“Yes,” George said, “but he’s not going to do that again, are you, boy? He’s going to be a good dog from now on.”
Helplessly the director wagged his tail, as bitterly happy as an atheist sitting on a golden cloud playing a harp. He thought about genetic manipulation, about the callous barbarism of breeding a slave species, its very soul so horribly mutilated that it wanted to be enslaved; he thought about how far the Ostar had come from that crash site on a hot, bleak, empty world. He thought about the last time, about how he’d escaped; about how it had taken him eighteen months of intensive counselling before he’d stopped howling and pining for his lost master. They were just thoughts, a sort of mild viral infection of the brain. The tail knew better. It wagged.
“Signal from the fleet,” Mark Twain said. “They’re ready to teleport.”
“Just a moment,” Lucy said. “I want a word with them first.”
She was put through to the young pilot, now acting commander-in-chief of the Ostar fleet. “I just wanted to say …” he said.
“Yes?”
“Well,” the pilot said, “Sorry, and all that. Not our finest hour, really.”
Lucy gave him a look, then nodded. “You could say that,” she said.
“When I get back—”
“Just remind them there’s a bomb pointed at them,” Lucy said. “Sorry, make that two bombs. With hyper-super octopus-enhanced targeting and stealth technology, not to mention sensors that’ll pick up an approaching fleet long before they’re in firing range. We—” She hesitated, then let the pronoun stand. “We call it the balance of terror. It’s basically quite a silly idea, but then all war’s silly, isn’t it?”
The pilot nodded without speaking.
“That’s settled, then,” Lucy said. “You can have your director back now.”
A moment later, a veil of blue fire clouded Rags from their sight. When it dissipated, he’d gone.
Lucy looked at George. His lips were pressed tightly together and his eyes were a trifle reddish. “It’s all right,” she said. “You can always get another dog.”
“Not like Rags,” George replied. “But what the hell. If the Almighty hadn’t anticipated that we’d lose dogs, he wouldn’t have given us alcohol.” He stood up and nodded politely to Lucy and Mark Twain. “You wouldn’t happen to know if there’s anywhere round here where a dedicated scientist could do a little serious research?”
“Try the Blue Penguin in Krasny Prospekt; it’s just by the metro station. I believe they have unrivalled facilities.”
George nodded again and left the room; and let the record show that eventually, he did manage to perfect the 100 per cent hangover cure, after many years of patient, brilliant work; and that when he’d tested it to make sure it worked and made up a fifty-gallon drum of the stuff for his own personal use, he deleted the formula and burnt all his research notes, saying that nothing in life should be too easy.
When he’d gone, and there were just the two of them, Lucy looked at Mark Twain, and he looked back at her, and she said, “Right, what shall we do next?”
“Well,” the PDF man said, after a long silence. “That went well.” The pilot and the director both stared at him without speaking.
“It did,” the PDF man said. “We’ve given the new dislocation drive a thorough field test and it works perfectly. I’m entirely satisfied with it, and I’ll say so in my report.“
Two solar systems flashed by. Then the director said, “You might just mention that we think we’ve tracked down the real cause of the — um, noise-pollution problem. Turns out it was one of our own research stations all along, nothing whatever to do with aliens or any of that nonsense, and once we’ve turned it off we shouldn’t be bothered by the music stuff any more. Isn’t that good news?”
“Splendid,” the PDF man said. “People will be thrilled. Life can go back to normal.”
The director hesitated, then said, “What will your report say about … you know, Earth?”
“Where?”
52
?????
The warship teleported the director straight to his office in the main Institute building. Everyone else had gone home. He filed a brief record of what had happened — the improved version rather than the somewhat uncomfortable truth — and issued an order for the immediate decommissioning of the secret booster station in the W’rrgft peninsula. Then he drafted a memo to the Ruling Council, informing them that the noise crisis was over, explaining how the mistake had come about and tendering his resignation. He read it through three times, then sent it before he could change his mind.
Instead of teleporting home, he took a transit tube to the village and walked the rest of the way. The suns were just setting when he accessed his back door and let himself in. With a great cry of joy, Spot came bounding out of the kitchen to greet him, hindquarters wagging. A slave species, he thought.
Spot jumped up, planting his sticky artiodactylic paws on the director’s chest. “Down,” he snapped, but he couldn’t stop a smile hijacking his face. “Good boy,” he said, instinctively reaching into his pocket for a human treat. He found a small corner of shortbread, which he remembered having saved for later. It had come a long way, just as he had.
“Good boy,” he repeated, tossing the shortbread in the air. Spot jumped, both feet clean off the ground, and caught it gracefully in his mouth. It was his best trick.
“Did you miss me?” he asked. Spot wagged furiously. At times, he was sure Spot could understand every word he said.
A slave species: living evidence of a crime against a species gifted with latent sentience, with the potential to evolve into an advanced form of life; like us, the director thought, the children of Millie and Prince. Maybe evolution, like the universe itself, is curved, and must eventually loop back on itself to form a circle.
He went into the kitchen and opened a tin of Human Chunks, with real gr’rrfl gravy, for Spot’s dinner. After all, he told himself, it’s something of a privilege to have been both: dog and man, man and dog. If you’ve only ever been just one, how can you hope to understand? Briefly, he considered two rogue type-6 probes, currently completely out of control on a distant planet whose name would soon be erased from the Ostar planetary database. Of course, they’d been both too; he wondered if it’d prove useful to them in the long run, or whether they’d end up like everybody else. And then there were the two Ostar (he still wasn’t quite sure how they’d fitted in); they too shared this wonderful treasure of double-ended perspective, though he had a feeling that, if they could have chosen a special gift, on balance they’d have preferred socks.
Perspective. Even his temporary and uncomfortable ally, the PDF officer, had been given a taste of it. But he’d preferred to change the universe to suit him; he’d blotted out a whole planet, after all, causing it to cease to exist (at least as far as the Ostar were concerned, so it all came to the same thing in the end). It had been mission accomplished as far as he was concerned. The director thought about that, and decided he was in no position to argue. At least nobody had been killed, and that was a good thing.
Later, he took Spot for a walk in the twilight. He threw a stick, Spot chased after it and brought it back. A dog and his man together, as it was in the beginning.
The End
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