Saka laughed until there were tears in his eyes. The last act of the cartoon, in which the Coyote attempted to kill the Roadrunner with a long spear, actually appeared to calm him down some. “They should not have ended with the spear,” Saka said. “A wiser choice would have been the anvil. The anvil is always best.”
“I hope that you and mother can resolve your differences,” Kess said.
His father had been sprawling among pillows, on the rug of their common room; now he stood, brushed imaginary dust off himself. “It seems unlikely, son. Shall we go for a walk?”
“We can talk here.”
Saka nodded. “Very well. Your mother is male now.”
“You knew the Wu were prone to changing gender when you married,” Kess said.
“Truly. And if this were the only point of contention between us, it is likely we could resolve it. We face the world as it is, and all becomes clearer. I could become female, or remain male and reorient my desires toward Gemma’s new form. I am not eager to do either, son, but I could, and was aware I might be called upon to do so, in the course of this marriage.” Saka sighed. “But there have been too many anvils dropped upon my head, and I have run out of inclination to keep dodging. A wiser course, it has come to seem to me, is to find a life without anvils.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Before you’re grown?” Saka looked shocked. “How could you – ah. Yes, I see where this suggestion arises.” He looked tired. “Anvils, one upon another. No, of course I will not leave.”
YOU DID, THOUGH, Kess thought five years later.
He knew himself ungenerous, thinking it. Kess had been seventeen, by then, his parents still apparently friends at least, so far as Kess could tell.
But half a dozen human worlds had fallen to the Wu Li already, by Kess’s seventeenth birthday.
Three floors beneath ground, at the end of a long corridor, they came to another airlock-like door. This time Saka opened the door and left it open. On the other side was a large room with a suite of monitoring instruments: one wall of the room was transparent, and the instruments were all trained on the adjoining room. The adjoining room was about half the size of the one Kess was now in, its walls gray and battered and stained.
Just inside the room was a box of grenades.
Saka propped his multiphase rifle next to a workstation. “We worked here,” Saka said. “Mostly here. Did our planning elsewhere, when we could, this was an ugly place. But necessary.”
“What did you do here?” Kess asked.
“We killed Diamonds,” his father said. “Every Diamond captured in battle ended up here. It wasn’t many – seven, in the last year. We built this adjoining room to hold them – it barely does. We snapped them up in slowtime bubbles, brought them here, and released them. And then we looked for a weapon that would kill them in number.
“We used solvents. We used vacuum. We used gravity generators. We used poisons, and genetic bombs, and sound, and lasers and plasma and –” He sighed. “We learned a lot about them. They are carbon based. They don’t need air, though, at least not enough air to matter. They broadcast on an amazing range of electromagnetic frequencies, and we assume receive on the same frequencies.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “Not that any signals are getting through the shielding around us here.
“You cut one in half,” he continued, “you have two Diamonds, each about half as smart as the original Diamond. They’ll eat almost anything, though none of them died of hunger when we didn’t feed them.
“Eventually we killed every sample. Found several different ways to kill them, most of them suggested by the Source – nothing that we had time to weaponize, unfortunately, nothing I truly think can be weaponized. How is Gemma?”
“Dead,” Kess said. “At the hands of the Wu Li, six days after you left for November.”
Half the population of Tin Woodman had died in the war; in the Domain of Kinderjim, where the fighting continued, it was almost two thirds. Saka stood still, as though he had been braced. “I am sorry to hear it.” He bowed his head. “Ah. Gemma.” He looked back up at Kess. “Would you believe me if I told you I loved Gemma Wu? When we married, when we separated, today?”
“I will believe anything you tell me,” Kess said softly.
“Loving Gemma was like loving a mountain. Gemma did not turn aside, not ever, not for anything. There were times I doubted Gemma loved me, and I know Gemma doubted my love for her.”
Kess knew that was true.
“What held us together,” said Saka, “what made it possible for us to be together, was the utter certainty, beyond life and past any possibility of failure, of our love for you.”
“Gemma judged you less harshly than I did,” said Kess. He hesitated. “The Wu Li don’t seem to know that we are relatives?” It was only half a question.
“They probably don’t,” Saka said. “The language the Wu Li speak has nothing in common with Tierra, or any human language: the relatives of your ancestors, son, went out into the unexplored dark and ran into something that ate them. Whatever the Spacethings are, they changed the Wu Li, enough so that only genetic analysis on captured troops told us something about their history. I am uncertain the Wu Li even quite know they are human.” He gestured toward the transparent wall. “It wasn’t only Diamonds we had in there.” He paused. “We dissected three Wu Li,” he said, as though apologizing. “Dead when they got here, all three. As close to human as makes no difference, given the state of design when their ancestors left Tin Woodman.”
Kess looked at the adjoining room again. It occurred to him that his father might not be telling him the truth: he didn’t see how Diamonds had made some of those stains.
He didn’t ask. As far as he knew his father had never told him an untruth, but he was certain that if Saka had lied to him once, he’d do it twice without hesitating.
Saka’s tap pushed credentials for a video feed to Kess. Kess accepted and scanned over the feed. Over two hundred camera angles were available; the base was all but covered in video inputs, external and internal, from molecular cameras that were much too small for the invaders to locate and destroy.
Saka indicated an angle for the bunker entrance.
Kess now saw the approach of forty Wu Li troops. Following behind them came eleven Diamonds, three of them very large.
“Let’s try to look unimportant,” Saka suggested. “Maybe they’re low on ammo.”
Kess shook his head in amazement. “Now? Here? You’ve never been funny, Dad.”
Saka grinned at him. “‘Laughter is the best medicine,’” he quoted, “‘unless you actually need medicine.’ Young people are wrong about a lot, in every generation. It’s how we know civilization is progressing, when they start laughing about the right things.”
THE MAIN DOOR to the outer holding area opened to the Wu Li without difficulty. One of the Wu Li entered the holding area, where the weapons had been stacked beside the stasis fields.
He looked things over and retreated.
Several minutes later a waldo entered the room. Saka indicated a better video feed, and Kess brought it into foreground.
The waldos were Domish manufacture, which Kess found interesting. “Subverted,” said Saka. “Their computing science is better than ours – much better, I think.” The waldo approached the stasis fields, turned off three apparently at random. Three bodies in various states of decay were shown. The waldo reactivated the fields.
“In a hurry,” Saka observed. “Expecting Domish forces, perhaps. Should have checked them all.”
“What would it have found in the others?” Kess asked.
“In nineteen of them, the bodies of my human and K’Ailla coworkers.”
The waldo inspected the three stacks of weapons at some
length. Finally three more waldos entered, and the four of them began removing the weapons, one at a time. Several minutes passed while the waldos skittered in and out of the holding area, taking the rifles and hand weapons and various explosives out into the field outside the bunker, stacking them well away from the waiting Spacethings and Wu Li.
“If an attack is going too well, it’s an ambush,” Saka said.
The next time two of the waldos were near the third stack at the same time, the stack exploded. The fireball blew the stasis fields off their stands, destroyed the waldos, and sent a rain of debris up through the doors and out through the bunker doors.
Kess heard the explosion, from three hundred meters away and two levels down.
On the field outside, the Wu Li barely flinched. The Spacethings did not move at all.
They sent the surviving waldo back in when the smoke and flame had cleared. The stasis bubbles were unharmed, the remaining weapons destroyed.
The waldo spent the next hour cleaning up the mess of the explosion, dragging shards of destroyed weaponry out into the field outside the bunkers.
Six of the Wu Li troops entered the holding area now. The Diamonds stayed put, out on the field.
“The military still wonders if the Wu Li are in charge, do they?” Saka asked.
“Some do. Humans,” Kess admitted, “not any K’Aillae.”
Saka shook his head wearily. “Humans,” he said quietly, as if he himself was merely a disinterested observer.
The Wu Li troops came to the first airlock. The display had no sound – it appeared the Wu Li were arguing with the air. Finally five of them pulled back out of the holding area, and a single Wu Li undogged the door. The explosion blew him into pieces too small to see.
Saka grinned and said cheerfully, “Anyone can be a minesweeper once.”
AT THE NEXT SEALED door, no Wu Li came forward. A single small Diamond approached the door. It climbed upon the door, its shape slowly deforming until a thin layer of Diamond covered the hatch.
“Those hatches are airtight, by spec,” Saka said. “I think that Diamond’s trying to find out if they’re Diamond-tight. We had one try that in the enclosure.” Kess looked at Saka. “Well, the enclosure is airtight. And liquid tight, and acid tight, and poison tight, and the Diamond died that way, a flat layer sealed to the door.” Saka hesitated. “Pretty sure it died that way. We blew it up a bit to make sure. No one wanted to open the door before it was in shards.”
The Diamond on the video feed pulsed and crawled around the edges of the hatch for twelve minutes. Then it oozed down to the corridor floor, reformed legs, and skittered away.
They watched it come back through the holding area, up onto the field.
“Look here,” Saka said, “deaf and mute. Base shielding is doing what it’s supposed to; the Diamond can’t reach the surface. It had to go outside to tell them what it had found.”
The Wu Li milled about as the Diamonds seemed to consult, all of them drawing a little nearer to one another. The second largest Diamond, about the size of a large bear, moved a little away from the others and settled to the ground.
“I’m a bear, I’m a bear,” Saka whispered.
All of the Wu Li, and the remaining eleven Diamonds, entered the base and came forward.
“Get ready, son,” Sakamoto Modyan said, and there was no amusement in his manner now. “We’re in for it.”
“I’ve probably been in more firefights than you, Dad.”
“You saw me kill that Diamond chasing you, yes?”
Kess sighed. “This is already more information than I need.”
“First time I ever fired at the enemy,” Saka told him.
“Okay.” Kess stared blankly forward. It would have surprised him to be told how much he looked like his father, in that moment. It had been an interesting last hour, as last hours went.
“Well,” Kess said after a pause, “you’re going to get to fire at them some more in a few minutes.”
“Son,” Sakamoto Modyan said, “It has been a joy to see you, and I wish you were somewhere else.”
Kess laughed for the first time since his pod fell from the sky. “So do I, so do I. I don’t suppose you have any jokes, any Trentist humor, appropriate for our final moments together?”
Saka stared at him and then he laughed. “There is always the parable of the bear! But let’s prepare first.”
THEY WASTED NO more Wu Li on the doors. Their surviving waldo planted explosives at each hatch, and blew the doors out of their tracks, and the Wu Li and Diamonds worked their way downward toward Kess and Saka.
They came at last to the long corridor, nearly sixty meters long, from the last airlock to the control room.
OUT IN THE holding area, one of the twenty-three stasis bubbles faded away. A small civilian waldo with a spray applicator pushed a body off of itself, and moved forward and made its silent way toward the large double doors leading outside.
The massive bunker doors slid closed, just fast enough to prevent the charging Diamond standing guard outside from making it through. Its impact, and those that followed, didn’t move the doors the slightest faction of a centimeter.
The waldo started at the foot of the bunker doors, and began spraying a clear sealant along the edges.
KESS WU’S HEARING was far better than that of unreconstructed humans. He watched the Wu Li and Diamonds on the base’s video feed, but now he could hear them approaching as well. Sixty meters of corridor and one remaining hatch separated the control room, Kess and his father, from the invaders.
Kess hauled the box of hand grenades out into the corridor. Standard issue, they’d kill Wu Li with no problem, but wouldn’t do much with even a wolf-sized Diamond. Slow them down, some.
Saka was inside the control room, doing something at one of the workstations. Kess didn’t even bother to ask – knowing his father it could easily be a task important, or one trivial, and Saka would perform either activity with the same focus.
“Well, this is bloody interesting,” Saka said. “Come look at this.”
Kess ducked inside the control room. Saka pointed at a pair of holos, floating in mid-air. A map of some sort, a diagram of –
Saka leaned over Kess’s shoulder and pointed. “Look at that line!”
Kess did. The diagram made no immediate sense to him. It showed a –
To Kess’s surprise, his father kissed him on the cheek, and then stepped back. The kiss froze Kess for a second – he straightened from the display –
Behind him the door to the control room closed.
Across Kess’s tap, Saka said, It’s a weather map of the planet November on the day of Firefall. Worth your time, I assure you, after the explosion there is a fascinating example of chaotic dampening.
Kess walked to the door and tried it. It wouldn’t open.
THERE’S ENOUGH AIR in control for one person, for fifty hours. Or two people, for twenty-five hours. Saka sighed. But there’s no guarantee of rescue in twenty-five hours.
Kess could see Saka in the video feed, the other side of the door, with his rifle and the box of grenades. He’d lowered his faceplate and Kess could not see his face.
I told you we failed, weaponizing any of the Source’s suggestions. It’s true. We found a poison that works well, but it disperses in open air too quickly to kill even the smallest Diamond.
Kess found his heart abruptly pounding, as though he were a child before the implantation of his tap, unable to control his own body. Open the door, Kess said. Please. Please, Dad. We’ll chance the twenty-five hours together.
Seal your combat suit, Saka instructed him. Let it filter the air you breathe. I don’t think any traces will get through that lock, but better to take no chances. The poison
kills humans even faster than it kills Diamonds.
On the video feed, Kess saw the invader waldo planting an explosive on the door at the corridor’s end. Two of the Wu Li were closer to the door than they should have let themselves be –
The shaped charges on Saka’s side of the door went off. The door was blasted out of its tracks, blown in bits down the corridor toward the Wu Li and the Diamonds behind them.
When the smoke cleared, only a dozen Wu Li still stood: but still all ten of the Diamonds.
They charged Saka, standing alone sixty meters away. In the video feed Kess watched them come.
SAKAMOTO MODYAN’S TAP touched Kess’s one last time.
Domish Naval Intelligence, United Earth Intelligence, and the Ambelray Police are all trying to prove that they are the best at gathering intelligence. As a test, a bear is released in the Forest of Final Dawn, and each of them have to try to catch it.
UEI goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After six days of extensive investigation, they conclude that bears do not exist.
DNI go in next. After two weeks with no leads they set fire to the forest, because the animals have it coming. But still there is no bear.
Finally Ambelray Police go in. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten sunbunny, and the sunbunny is screaming, “Okay! Okay! I’m a bear! I’m a bear!”
The joke transmitted in a small fraction of a second. There was time for Kess to watch Saka take another step, bringing his rifle up, before Saka’s tap added, Everything your mother and I ever did, was for you. Live for us.
Sakamoto Modyan charged to his death, yelling, “I’m a bear, I’m a bear!”
Gray smoke erupted from the ceiling, along the length of the hallway.
Gray smoke fell in the holding area.
Gray smoke fell throughout the base, on every level and in every room.
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 9