by Tim Pratt
I slipped Vicki back onto my finger and knocked on Minna’s door. “Come in!” she trilled. When I entered, she was sitting naked on the edge of her pod, humming and tightening her braids, and she turned her happy smile to me. I tried to focus on looking at her from just the neck up. “Zax and Victory-Three!” she called out. “Look at the squishies!” She pointed at the slugs moving across her own clothing. “Can we keep one?”
I shuddered. “I, ah…”
“I don’t think they sleep, Minna,” Vicki said. “The transition would be too dangerous for them.”
“That is a reason that is reasonable.” She looked at me, wrinkling her nose. “Something bothers you, my Zax. What is the bother?”
“Ah…”
Vicki flashed a pulse of light. The slugs instantly stopped moving, their color shifting to a redder pink, and the ambient illumination in the room dimmed. “I’ve disrupted the ship’s computer access to this room – I sent an error message, and the system is in diagnostic mode, but I don’t know how long it will take. We can speak freely for a moment, though, without being monitored.”
Minna sighed and bent to recover her clothes from the slugs and began getting dressed. “Oh no. What is the secret bad thing?”
“Gladius wants to kidnap the people who live on the ground so he can do experiments on them,” I said. “The groundlings are poor and sick, and Gladius and the other people in these airships prey on them. Just for fun, as far as I can tell.”
“Even the Nurturer-Butchers only did terrible things to us on the Farm in order to increase yield and productivity,” Minna said. “That is bad but to do such things for fun is worse. Hmm. I know we cannot save all the ground people but we can save the ones we can save here and now, yes?”
“I love you two.” I swept Minna into a hug. “You’re both, just, so…”
“We care about you, and the things you care about,” Vicki said. “You care about people being good to each other. I admit, my personal worldview is a bit more pragmatic, but cruelty for cruelty’s sake is as appalling to me as it is to anyone of sound character.”
“If the ground is poison, you remediate. You don’t laugh at the sick things that grow. You don’t harvest them and show them to your friends so they can laugh too.” Minna shook her head. “Ugly bad ways. We have to tear those ways down. We pass through, we are the ones who pass through, and we should leave the places we pass through no worse than they were before we came, and always better if we can.”
My very own ethos, presented in her usual adorably roundabout way.
“Yes,” Vicki said. “Let us review our options. If we disable the ship now, we’ll plummet, and even if we can sleep our way out of imminent death, I know you wouldn’t want to directly contribute to Gladius’s demise, Zax, however directly he might have contributed to the demise of others. Presumably he’ll have to draw close to the ground to collect his specimens, though. I think with Minna’s assistance and some of the Lector’s little treasures we took as spoils, we can make sure the ship lands safely, if a bit bumpily, but never takes off again.”
I shook my head. “I have to talk to Gladius first. I can try to make him understand that what he’s doing is wrong. If I can change his mind, he might go on to change the minds of his people… Don’t look at me like that.” Minna was expressionless, and Vicki couldn’t look at me at all, but I could feel their doubt. “I know that must sound hopelessly naïve, but sometimes talking to people works, and it’s always worthwhile to try. We can leave this world with one act of sabotage, or with an act of education. The first ends with one big bang, but the second could leave echoes and reverberations long after we leave.”
Minna shook her head. “Not naïve, Zax. You are not a spring shoot, or a leaf still wet with dew. You are hopeful, and even hard frosts and rootworm cannot kill your hope.” She stood on tiptoes and kissed my cheek. “You are a beautiful perennial.”
“As she says, of course,” Vicki said. “But do you mind if we prepare an alternate plan, in case you fail to win over our host?”
“Backup plans are good. I’m hopeful, not haphazard. Of course. I…” The lights flickered and then came back strong, and the slugs began to crawl away.
“I’m so very sorry about that, we suffered a glitch in the system.” Gladius’s voice came over some sort of hidden speaker, full of good humor. “Is everyone all right?”
“We’re fine!” I called. “Do you have time for a chat, though? After my time on the ground, some civilized conversation sounds like just the thing, and my companion is too sleepy to talk now.”
Minna yawned widely and ostentatiously.
“Of course! Join me on the bridge. The ship will show you the way.”
I slipped Vicki off my finger and onto Minna’s – if something did happen, and I ended up swept from this world, they’d be able to take care of each other here. I followed the pulsing lights on the walls out of the room and down a corridor that hadn’t even been there before. This ship was remarkably configurable, but I’d seen such technology before, and only had to fake being jaded and unimpressed a little bit. I went up a ramp and onto a semi-circular platform that must have been in the top of the bubble. The walls were transparent here, only a few green floating markers and symbols seemingly hanging in the air.
Gladius stood near the front of the platform, behind a smooth white podium that projected an illuminated control panel beneath his hands. He manipulated the elements on the screen deftly, making fine adjustments to sliders and dials that had no effect I could discern. “Zax! Have you ever been on a collecting expedition before?”
“I haven’t.” I stepped up beside him and looked into the onrushing night. I had to approach this subject the right way, or he’d get defensive or outraged and shut me down right away. I wished I knew him better, or knew more about this world – it’s hard to change someone’s mind when you don’t know how their mind got that way in the first place – but I’d have to trust my intuition, luck, and general principles. “The ship said you have a zoo, of sorts?”
A humble nod. “Not one of the grand menageries like the Prefect has, of course. But I keep a few specimens, some breeding pairs from different regions that might yield interesting hybrids, a genuine living howler because sometimes it’s enjoyable to scandalize one’s country relations, and of course a handful of fighting groundlings for the odd summer exhibition. I know some people find the fights distasteful, but it’s obvious that you have to help the poor creatures channel their natural aggression somehow.”
I nodded, keeping my face bland. “Impressive. What do you make of those who say the groundlings could be civilized if their conditions were improved?” Assuming anyone he knew said such things was a gamble, but even the most depraved societies usually had malcontents and idealists.
Gladius raised an eyebrow at me. “You know, I was struggling with your accent, but let me guess: you’re from the Keret Peninsula?”
“Guilty.” I gave a sheepish smile.
“You aren’t involved with the model towns, are you?”
I shook my head. “No, no. I have a cousin, she’s young, head full of ideas and no practicalities, you know, and she’s interested in… all that.”
“Ah, well, cousins. Orbs preserve us from the younger generation.” Gladius shook his head, elegantly doleful. “Of course, it’s inarguable that the groundlings can be trained, but so can rats and hounds. We know the groundlings can learn language, at least well enough to follow commands – I’ve seen that myself – but there’s no reason to believe they have the light of consciousness inside them. They’re just… stimulus-response machines.”
“Do you think so? Surely they feel, and have love for their kin, and other qualities we possess ourselves.”
Gladius shrugged. “Bats, I’m told, are quite loyal to their family groups. I wouldn’t invite one to dinner. The people who chose to stay on the ground instead of retreating to orbit during the Late Unpleasantness – ” (I could hear the proper na
me-ness of those words) “ – were obviously congenitally mentally deficient anyway, and all the subsequent years spent on that rotten land hasn’t made them any better. Wiser men than we have explained how the groundlings and those of us who live above have diverged into separate species, due to the changes wrought here and there respectively. Do we have a common ancestry? Of course, and that’s why so many charitable societies from your softhearted peninsula still drop care packages on the groundlings to improve their lot, much as my mother looks out for the prospects of my most idiot cousin. I say softhearted, and not softheaded, because I am a kind and generous soul. Unlike my late father, who thought your whole peninsula should be cast down to the soil, if you identify with the groundlings so much.” He looked at me to see if I was insulted, I think.
“I’ve heard worse.” I was all equanimity.
“The Keret Peninsula.” Gladius shook his head. “I can’t imagine what it must be like, to grow up with dirt under your feet, even if that dirt is cleansed and raised up three elevations above the ground itself. No wonder you feel sympathy for the groundlings. Those model towns, though… trying to make groundlings into people? It’s a waste of everyone’s time. You might as well put a chicken in a ball gown and expect it to dance.”
“The groundlings are people, though.” I kept my voice light. “Or so my cousin says. Whatever mistakes their ancestors may have made, they were just like us, once. She says they’re sick, and they labor under difficulties we can’t even imagine, but if you scour off the dirt, and treat the injuries and illnesses, the differences disappear.”
“I’ve never met a groundling who was anything like me.” Gladius shuddered. “Your cousin can waste her life however she wishes – finding ways to pass the time is the hardest thing, I always say – but I do find those missionary types tedious. Fortunately they hold no sway in the cloud cities, just in the lower settlements, like your home province. I swear, I think sometimes being closer to the ground spoils the brain, no matter what the scientists say about how low the radiation levels are these days.” He coughed. “No, ah, offense.”
“None taken.” I know enough to recognize a lost cause. Gladius’s snobbery was his armor, and his need to feel superior was probably his greatest driving force. He even had to look down on his country cousins and those soft wretches from the Keret Peninsula in order to feel secure in his own importance. “I’m just as alarmed as you are by the ideas espoused by my more radical acquaintances – I just can’t show it quite as openly without risking war with my cousins, and who wants to be frozen out or served the worst portion of the feast at a family gathering?”
“Ha, yes, we have to coddle the delicate ones sometimes if we want a proper meal, don’t we?” Gladius slapped me on the shoulder, and we were friends again. “Is that Minna one of your cousins? I ask, because she strikes me as a bit…”
“Earthy?” I said.
Gladius’s eyes widened. “I would never be so harsh as that! But, as you’re the one who said it…”
“She’s a darling girl,” I said. “She just doesn’t see things as clearly as you and I do. I try my best to protect her, of course.”
“It’s our duty as gentlepersons,” Gladius said. “Thank you for the stimulating conversation, Zax. I can’t remember the last time I had a talk with any teeth in it. We stand on ceremony and politeness more in the cloud cities than you lot in the peninsulas. How invigorating.”
“I feel the same way.” The thing was, on a certain level, I liked Gladius. He’d been kind and generous to us, and he wasn’t even stupid, exactly. He’d been shaped by his world and his upbringing, as everyone is, but they had shaped him into something vile and reprehensible. Some people could grow beyond such conditioning, with the right guidance. I feared Gladius wasn’t flexible enough to change easily, and I certainly wouldn’t be around long enough to take him by the hand and guide him to a better worldview.
That left Vicki and Minna’s Plan B. “I’d better go check on Minna, and make sure she hasn’t gotten into any trouble.”
“Quite, quite. The ship tells me she requested a tour. I believe she’s down in the propulsion room now. The lights there are quite pleasing. So sparkly. Sometimes I look into them and imagine I’m one of our ground-dwelling ancestors, staring into a fire and seeing gods and portents and monsters.”
“I’ll go down and join them.” I paused. “Thank you, Gladius, for picking us up. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Of course I did. I am a gentleperson.” He gave me a jaunty wave and returned to his board.
I followed the lovely ship’s light downward, imagined the contents smashed to bits on the ground, and started trying to come up with Plans C, D, and E.
Engine Room • Metal Rain • Gladius Touches Down • A Rescue • A Common Language
The engine room was beautiful. Minna stood on a shining silver balcony bordered by delicate fluted railings, looking into a sphere of white light six meters in diameter, with a coruscating spiral of purple, blue, red, and indigo ribbons of energy in the center, spiraling upward, except sometimes they seemed to be spiraling downward instead. “It’s a closed timelike curve,” Vicki said. “See how the spiral vanishes up at the top of the sphere and reappears again at the bottom? It’s remarkable, a continuous closed flow of energy. I have no idea how this engine sustains itself, but it does, and, moreover, it supplies all the ship’s power and propulsion. Our friend Gladius has remarkably advanced technology, beyond anything I ever saw in my world, despite his moral simplicity. How did your talk go?”
“Gladius is very… set in his ways. I don’t think I made much of an impact, unfortunately.”
“It was good of you to try,” Vicki said, and to their credit, sounded sincere.
Minna pointed at the spiral of ribboned light. “Victory-Three thinks if we throw a chair or something into that spinny thing, we can probably break it and crash the ship.”
I winced. Vicki must have noticed, because it said, “Don’t worry, there’s no surveillance in here. The very nature of this engine makes electronic observation impossible. We’re not even really observing the engine directly ourselves, because just our attention would cause the spiral to collapse into de-coherence, so what we’re seeing is a projection of one possible set of…” Vicki trailed off. “Well, just trust me. We can talk freely.”
“Surely the engine is protected from that kind of direct sabotage?” I said.
“You’d think so,” Vicki said. “But apparently not. I suppose Gladius and his people never considered the possibility that anyone with ill intent would make it this close. I queried the ship, and while its defensive and offensive capabilities are formidable, they’re all firmly directed outward, and down. The engine is very delicate, and any amount of disruption should ground the ship.” Vicki paused. “Throwing a chair into it would be very bad for the chair, though. What do you think? Should we cripple the ship, when we can do so without risking our own lives in the process?”
“I think we have to,” I said.
A huge magenta slug came wriggling into the chamber, and Gladius’s voice emerged from it, slightly fuzzed with distortion – the impact of the engine on its workings, I supposed. “We’re just dipping down toward the plateau now. Looks like there are a few specimens in one of their fields, doing something agricultural with wooden sticks or what have you. They’ll do for our first pass. Here, I’ll transluce the hull so you can see the collection process.”
The white around us went clear, and I clutched instinctively at the railing while Minna gave a little wail. We were close to the bottom of the ship, apparently, and it looked like one misstep would send us plummeting down through the clouds. Then we dropped further, and the land rushed up at us, frighteningly fast. What first looked like the slope of a mountain revealed itself to be a field on the edge of a cliff when the ship shifted its orientation and began to drop straight down. There were humanoid figures in a field of waving grass or wheat or something, hacking at the soil with ha
nd tools, and they took no notice of the ship, even as we drew near; it must have been cloaked or camouflaged in some way, and I knew from experience how silently it could fly. We skimmed over the ground, low, and Gladius said from the slug, “I’m going to send out the manipulator beams and scoop up that one with the funny woven hat.”
“Now, Minna,” Vicki said.
She bent, scooped up the wriggling slug up in her arms, and hurled it directly into the heart of the engine.
The slug sizzled when it struck the ribbons, and flashed away to vapor that stank of salt and oil, but it did some damage in the process. The ribbons, which had flowed together so smoothly, came disentwined and lashed around wildly like whips. One hit a section of the railing just a meter away from us and sliced right through the metal, leaving a molten smear on the balcony floor before it snapped away. I grabbed Minna and hauled her back toward the exit as the ribbons spat bright flashes of energy and then went suddenly dull. The hull flickered to an opaque, metallic gray, and we stumbled and fell into each other as the ship struck the ground at an angle, probably digging a furrow into the field as it lost its momentum. Once it rumbled its way to a stop, we struggled upright. I hoped we hadn’t struck any of the people working there. Killing them in the process of trying to save them was not a desirable result.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
Minna said “I think so,” and then the ship’s hull vanished – was it some sort of field, and not real material at all? We were sitting in the churned dirt now, crushed plants beneath us. Suddenly objects began to rain down around us – more slugs, now gray or black, and a chair shaped like an egg, and small unidentifiable metal objects, and boxes and bottles and bits of cloth… and Gladius, who floated down gently, with some sort of golden glowing harness strapped around his chest and waist.