by Larry Niven
She dressed, packed, and went downstairs to check out. There was a chubby Indian woman in a chauffeur’s outfit waiting for her. “Ms. Johnson? Eva Ibarguren.” She took Alice’s bag as if it were stuffed with tissues, and turned to lead her to the car outside.
“I haven’t checked out.”
Over her shoulder, Ms. Ibarguren said, “I was told to say, ‘That’s not your bill to pay.’ I heard Yellowhorse say he figured you’d been fired.”
“I was.”
“What did you do?”
“Forgot to be tactful to an ignoramus.”
The driver had to stop moving so she could laugh. “I meant, what was your job?”
“Encyclopedic analyst for the DHS.”
Ms. Ibarguren turned back toward her, looked around with some care, switched the bag to her left hand, and said, “I’ll go out the door ahead of you.” She paused outside the door and looked around again, then said, “Stay here. I’ll open the car. Go straight in.”
“I hardly think they’d have me hit. Even if they would, there hasn’t been time to set it up.”
“I’m sure there hasn’t. But if there aren’t at least fifteen countries that would like to get hold of U.S. intelligence people, and who have agents in place whose jobs include keeping track of them, then I’m not on the same planet where I went to bed.”
As Eva opened the car and shooed her in, Alice felt extremely foolish. Not for what she was doing; for not thinking of that.
Eva got into the driver’s seat, locked up, opened the connecting window, and said, “You want a gun?”
“Best not. —Though I have been feeling kind of naked since I got here.”
Eva gave her the once-over, smiled in an entirely unprofessional manner, and said, “Sorry to have missed that.” With which she turned, started the car, and was all business, giving Alice time to recover from a case of severe self-consciousness, brought on by an utterly unexpected wave of curiosity.
She never had gotten an opportunity to find out what kind of partner she liked.
“If it helps, you can probably pick and choose from jobs in JNAIT,” Eva said. “The information that people have to sort through always expands faster than search engines improve. It’s a huge pain. A good reference librarian could name her price.”
“I’d want to look over who I’d be working for,” Alice said. “My last boss called me in the middle of the night because I was in another hemisphere.”
Eva was silent for a while. Then she said, “D.C. is in the same time zone as Quito.”
“I know. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
Eva said, “Sounds like he’s not the sharpest spoon.”
Alice began laughing, and as she did she felt a great weight drop away from her.
* * *
The JNAIT section of the Olympic Village had been redone by its occupants. In Art Deco.
Once she got over the shock, it looked great.
The flag had caused some trouble at the Olympiad. The old five-rings symbol on a white background had included at least one color of every national flag in the world up until 2051. JNAIT’s flag was a gray calumet on a violet field. The IOC had, grudgingly, added a violet ring, and arranged the six at the corners of a hexagon.
She was still looking at the brilliant flag when she heard Mycroft behind her: “The tobacco pipe is better than my original suggestion. That was a copper penny with Dustin Hoffman’s profile on it. Couldn’t get permission from the estate.”
Alice turned and put her arms around him.
His went around her, not as hard. Just as well, he felt like he could pick up a car and shove it through a wall.
After a minute she said, “Doesn’t someone’s image go into public domain after death?”
“So?” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, public domain is a crime against civilization. Patent and copyright should be nonsalable, permanent, and hereditary. They’re the only form of nobility that is always earned.… Alice, on reflection I’m pretty sure you’re not her.”
She leaned back to look up at him. “I could wait with you.”
He looked at her in wonder.
* * *
There really was lobster tail sushi.
The lobster had just finished cooking when she arrived.
It was incredible.
XXV
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings.
—ROBINSON JEFFERS
1
The scoops were complete. Objects in orbit around Earth had been charted, studied, and in case of doubt contacted. Anything that was working was carefully noted and allowed for. Armatures were deployed, film made ready to spread between them, and clusters of operators assigned to control the sectors.
Power storage was at full capacity. The entity population sorted themselves between the sections they would be staying with. Linkages were severed, and power was fed through the rails.
The section with most of the refined material was kicked backward sharply as the asteroid passed lunar orbit. The section with the hot core, and most of the mass and population, received a much milder push forward.
Forge moved ahead to swing by Earth and return to the asteroid belt, to catch and domesticate another Dinosaur Killer.
Foundry spread multiple wings of monomolecular film a thousand miles across, and dropped to make its first pass outside Earth’s atmosphere, collecting the most expensive garbage in history. Holes opened and closed to avoid touching anything that was at all functional.
Even if it was Chinese.
China had enough problems at the moment.
2
While they waited for the suits to be tailored, May looked over schematics of the modified design. “Crazy son of a bitch,” she said. Not unhappily.
Toby was dutifully checking the news. “What’s he done?”
“Took out a damn heavy pump and an igniter and replaced them with a tank of peroxide. That’ll react on contact with the aluminum carbide in the fuel. He’s doubled the proportion of that, too. Bigger LOX tank, the lifter will have to cruise longer to fill it, but the exhaust energy goes way up. We could have done that.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Too hot for the binder we were using. Trans-polybutadiene. Tough, but there was a chance it’d melt and start coming out in chunks. This guy just said ‘screw it’ and used linoleic epoxy. Basically all one molecule. I hate to think what he had to cast it in, some of it has to have reacted with the aluminum … good God, he used the aluminum carbide as hardener instead of polyamines. And as an alkyl catalyst—well, pseudo-alkyl—for the olefin bonds.”
“Boron trifluoride would perhaps have been a trifle too exciting,” Toby conceded. Not to mention loud.
“So what’s new?”
“Our people have been moved to one of the facilities that America’s hardworking Congressmen have had built in case any of them get caught.”
“I hope they like golfing. Otherwise, great. Anything else?”
“There’s another Chinese splinter state.” Chinese history was composed, in large part, of contests between warlords to see who could massacre more of the population, the winner being awarded the survivors. Multiple tank divisions shooting it out hadn’t been enough to cause a general rebellion against the Mao Dynasty, but when the birthrate dropped close to zero, suddenly nobody had enough troops to round up the deserters going home to their families.
“That’s five?”
“Six, if you count Tibet. Which Tibet doesn’t. —This one’s actually writing a Constitution. Capital’s Kowloon. Briefly known as Hong Kong.”
“Briefly?”
“Briefly for China.”
“What ‘Republic’ are they now?”
Toby shook his head, grinning. “They’re the ‘Empire of Kwangtung,’ and they’ve got an heir to the Ming Dynasty as Son of Heaven. Richard Chu. Software genius, Caltech. Before my time. Last year he was chief recordkeeper for the Hong Kong Director of Imports and Customs. He’s alre
ady suggested a dynastic marriage between his great-granddaughter Julia and Martin Windsor. They’re both fifteen.”
“Which one’s Martin?”
“Duke of York’s youngest son. Quiet type, hasn’t thrown up on any rock stars or anything.”
“What, is he adopted?”
“He’s got the Windsor nose. I’m thinking mutation. —Saw a story earlier about the DHS. Looks like the director got the same bug the attorney general came down with.”
“Any idea how he picked it up?” she said dryly.
“Might have something to do with that guy they caught in the JNAIT hangar last week with all the magnesium powder. New director’s someone I never heard of before. Keith Danton.”
“Danton is not a felicitous name for a guy in politics.”
“Well, as long as the Speaker of the House doesn’t start channeling Robespierre—which I admit is not unheard of—he should be okay. —He’s pulled everyone off random-harassment duty and aimed them at plausible suspects. Did an end run on the media uproar by announcing he was establishing a Profiling Division.”
“Sounds sensible. This guy got appointed how?”
“Apparently by being the only one on the list who showed up at Attorney General Frost’s selection meeting. Everyone else called in sick. Severe aches and pains.” Toby cleared his throat. “Idiopathic neuralgia.”
May bit her lips to keep from laughing, and finally got out, “So he got the job by having none of the qualifications of anyone else who ever held it.”
“Seems as if. —Any more surprises on the spaceplane?”
“What, you mean aside from little stuff like increasing the delta vee by about twenty percent? Yeah, I’m the pilot and I still have no idea what’s in the cargo module. I wonder what unscrupulous character gave him that idea?”
“He did spend all that time in prison,” Toby pointed out with a straight face.
May looked swiftly around the room, then said, “It won’t help to put away all the magazines, I can take off my shirt and whap you with that.”
“So my evil plan is working,” Toby said.
May took off her shirt and whapped him with it.
Not much progress got made for a while after that.
* * *
May took shorter showers, so she got out first to answer the phone. It was Yellowhorse. “Evil Genius Enterprises, do you have an account with us?” she said.
“Last I looked I was the plurality shareholder,” he said. “From your calm demeanor I gather you haven’t heard the latest word on the asteroid. I just got an alert. It’s divided. Most of it apparently went back for more rocks, but the smaller part spread a sail and swept a hell of a lot of crud out of orbit. It’s decelerating pretty smartly. It’ll have to take at least one more pass to reach a circular orbit. Maybe two, depending how low they intend to go. It’ll be between one and two weeks. If it’s going to LEO, the U.S. will have enough time to put up their bird.” His voice dropped to the tone of the emcee of a Hallowe’en fair: “How are things in your town?”
Still reeling from repeated shocks, May said, “You might have had the decency to use a dramatic pause after you said it divided.”
“Sorry,” he lied cheerfully. “Want me to call back? I could open with ‘Watch the skies!’ And I played the soothsayer in a prison production of Julius Caesar, so I can do a great hebephrenic babble. Want to hear?”
“I’d rather eat a lizard.”
“Well,” he said, his voice now low and confidential, “I might know a guy.”
May stood silently staring at the wall, mentally renewing her mighty oath to get the better of this man in repartee someday. She didn’t resist as Toby took the phone from her.
“Hi, Mycroft,” Toby said. “What did you say to her this time?” There followed a long pause as the entire conversation was repeated verbatim—which could be disturbing for an original participant to hear, as Yellowhorse would accurately reproduce timing and intonation. Toby had told her he’d always done that, too. She could follow the recitation from Toby’s reactions: “Heh.… You’re the general partner.… Huh!… Heh.… Very thoughtful of them.… Oh geez, that’s all we need.… Don’t do that!… Well, she’s right.… As opposed to?… You would. —Is that it?… No, she’s just opening a package from Haiti. Ordered this little wax doll. We already have a book on acupuncture.” (May grinned and hugged him from the side.) “I assume most of the rest of the world is running around in circles screaming?” He nodded a few times, then said, “How should I know? They’re your tailors. I think we’re good to go when the rest is.” He looked at May, who nodded. “Yep,” Toby said. He nodded a couple more times in silence, then said, “Okay, see you at the hangar.” He signed off, handed May the phone, and said, “Three days.”
“Finally!” She gave him a smooch, then said, “What did he say about the world response?”
“I quote: ‘The Pope disapproves, Russia has mobilized, Japan has gone on triple shifts, and France has surrendered.’”
She snorted. Then she said, “You didn’t laugh at that?”
“I got too used to him. Besides, when he’s On, you can’t laugh because you miss the next three jokes.”
“Yipe. That must have gotten awfully old.”
“Now and then. The trouble is, the crazy sonofabitch puts genuine information into some of this stuff, so you can’t just stop listening.” He stopped and thought about what he’d just said. “Oh good grief.” He went to the screen and switched it on. After some rapid keywork, he said, “The Vatican has denounced the ‘attack’ on China, Moscow is calling up reservists, Tokyo has passed another New Economic Plan in emergency session, and President LeFavre has announced his nation’s willingness to work with the nanomachines to redress their grievances. He did it to me again!”
Trying not to laugh, May asked, “What did he say when you confirmed?”
“‘Bring your towel, and put the fish in your ear.’ Literary reference.”
XXVI
All this and Heaven too.
—MATTHEW HENRY
“Fish?” said Alice. The odd random comments were getting obtrusive.
“Literary reference,” said Mycroft Yellowhorse. “Douglas Adams.” He did some things to the phone, but nothing that she considered sufficient retribution for taking them away from a limp drowse. Then he said, “They’ve got copies at the mall.” He set it down, scooped her up, and carried her to the bathroom.
“We’re stopping so we can go buy a book?”
“I don’t want to use up my entire repertoire at once.” He stepped into the shower and set her down.
“More of the same suits me fine,” she said, and flinched unnecessarily as the water came on already warm. As he began lathering her up, she said, “Does that shared-sensation thing work when there’s two girls with you? I mean, do they get it from each other too?”
He paused, eyebrows raised. “You’re decadent after one day?”
“No, obsessive after thirty-three years.”
“It wasn’t a criticism. ‘Anything done for the first time releases a demon.’”
“Huh?”
“Literary reference. Dave Sim.”
“I know that name!” she said, pleased at having finally caught one.
He stood up straight, put on an expression of delight, and clasped his hands together by his jaw. Then he jumped and barked like a seal—she had grabbed. “No fair!” he said.
She let go. “He was on the Inappropriate list when I was in school. Misogynist.”
“He wasn’t,” Mycroft said. “He was just walking wounded after a bad marriage. Some things you never recover from.”
“Still in the denial stage?”
“Turn.” He began washing her back. “I grew up with that Five Stages of Loss business. I consider all touchy-feely terms invalidating. It’s like being a teenager and getting described as ‘going through a phase’ when you try to get taken seriously as a human being. ‘Denial, anger, bargaining, sorrow, a
cceptance.’ Know what their real names are? Shock, defiance, cunning, torment, and apathy. I grant you, the woman who originally named the conditions was just observing and reporting the phenomena she saw as best she could, and she was helpful, encouraging, and respectful. But everyone since then has tried to shove the bereaved along, like it was a procedure. That way they don’t have to deal with them as people. It’s why, ultimately, every drug prescribed for any strong emotion produces apathy. That’s the desired condition of a nonentity.”
“I think you may be overgeneralizing from your own history.” They’d done a lot more talking than she’d expected. The bots had to be why neither of them had white hair yet. She wasn’t sure when she’d turned red; they’d been distracted.
“I freely acknowledge that I am the sort of person who looks at those charming Currier and Ives prints and wonders how many inhabitants of the snowbound houses are, at that moment, being forced to resort to cannibalism. That being admitted, consider how the selfsame touchy-feely people have always refused to deal with what had been and was being done to hundreds of millions of little girls just like you.” When she went rigid, he put his arms around her and said into her ear, “You never let yourself go past defiance. And you were right.” She relaxed and leaned back against him. “You’re wiggling,” he presently accused.
“You obviously like it,” she pointed out.
“You had weeks to take the edge off, you know.”
She nodded. “And I did.”
“This is what’s left? Merciful heavens.”
* * *
Later, out of the shower and toweled dry—the air-circulator arrangement was clever, but better suited to solo washing—she said, “I’m going to be worrying while you’re up there.”
He paused and studied her face. “You don’t get dizzy upside down,” he mused. “The 40-V seats up to fifteen. I think we can fit a suit in three days. Sound interesting?”
“You want me to come?”