by John Barnes
“I didn’t say that stuff—”
“But I did. And you got torqued out of your shorts by it, didn’t you, pumpkin?” She looked directly at the girl. “You see? Look, when you tell someone you play classical music, most of them don’t try to tell you that they know all about that stuff and it’s weird and isn’t very good, because they read an article about it once in Newsweek and anyway didn’t Wagner blow Mad King Ludwig to get Bayreuth built? If you say you paint, they don’t say, ‘Oh, yeah, painting, you get paint on your clothes and you get to stand and look at naked people.’ Or if they do, everyone in the room knows they’re an illiterate boob.
“They take a dump on your particular art because they don’t want to understand it and they especially don’t want to do the hard work of not being illiterate boobs. They’re trying to make a public declaration that what you do isn’t worth seeing so therefore their illiteracy about it makes them all special and wonderful.
“Well, fuck ’em. You’re giving your life to it and for them it’s a chance to show how much they don’t have to know, and pull out their favorite one-liner? Their chance to be smug for a sentence is more important than something you may have put months into? Hurt them. Don’t argue with them, you already know you don’t share any premises; just hurt. Oh, and lose the dork—you can do better.”
That got everyone squabbling, and I quietly slipped out the door, strangely glad I had come, and found Travis by a post.
“If I admit there’s something cool about Jenapha, do I get forgiven?” I asked him.
“Shit, bud, you always get forgiven. Here’s what we kind of thought—maybe you’d like to go to lunch with us, over to some place with decent barbecue? You might have to miss one of the shows this afternoon.”
“Officially I’m not even here,” I pointed out. “I’m on leave. I’m only here because the college lawyers didn’t want all the Western faculty here to be temps and subs, and I didn’t want the guys to have to miss this year. But I’m free to roam around on the loose if I like. Sure.”
Over lunch I told Jenapha Lee that I thought her workshop had been great, and she shrugged. “When art is nice, only nice people make art,” she said. “Or something.” She settled back into staring into space.
Now that all the food was in us, and the table cleared, and there was no large public audience, Jenapha Lee had gone back to smoking importantly and staring out the window, away from Travis. That seemed to make him adore her more. I thought very seriously about slapping one of them and couldn’t make up my mind which.
“So the only awkward moment that happened,” Travis Bismarck said, sitting back and looking relaxed, “was when we asked Brown Pierre how he knew how to do the Hardware Store Killer procedures so exactly, and he told us that he hadn’t killed Susan Glasgow. That led us to a little epiphany, and sure enough, All Thumbs was able to establish that she was alive and well and living off planet, in a pTh’tong n’Wi zoo that she probably thought was a hotel; she’d become afraid, I guess, after Kermit had come close to bagging her a couple of times, and accepted their protection. So they made a brain-dead clone, aged it, shot it in the head, did all those weird things to it, and threw it out the window. One way to keep anyone from trying to kill something is to convince them it’s already dead.” He shrugged. “She’ll come back to Earth, sooner or later, since they’ll need her to be here officially. I was going to ask you, though, John, last night you said Brown Pierre was like a good arsonist?”
“Yeah, my father was an engineer for an insurance company, involved with arson investigations quite a bit. The arsonists they almost never catch are the professionals who walk into the place to be torched, think of what fire would be the most natural one to happen here, and do the minimum number of changes to make it happen. The guy who knows which employee keeps a toaster oven in their office, near a wastebasket full of shredded paper, and heats up that toaster oven while shredding a bunch of documents, then throws it all into the trash can. The guy who knows that the cleaning people use the break room and clean things with a flammable solvent and puts a metal can of that solvent into the microwave in the break room. And then they close the door and they leave and it’s like they’ve never been there.
“The ones they always catch are the genius-dork bomb builders who have to try to come up with the biggest brightest ba-boom! in history. Because most workplaces don’t contain great big bombs. Unions and OSHA and fire marshals frown on that, you know? That’s what’s so clever about Brown Pierre in your story. If the human race ends up as a bunch of sensitive New Agers being kind to the animals and treasuring their scenery and hiking trails, with no ambitions to accomplish anything else, well, that’s not an unnatural path. Not many people have your taste for danger, or Jenapha Lee’s taste for controversy, or even my drive to be able to say ‘I told you so.’ Out on any hiking trail on any nice day you’ll meet people that’d rather have life just pass them by—or would rather live in the moment and enjoy what they have, take your pick of descriptions. If that keeps becoming the more rewarding course of things … well, no doubt you can figure it out from there. And it won’t look like Brown Pierre is responsible, because it won’t look like anyone is responsible—it will just look like what naturally happens. ‘Well, they had a rule that the last person out would always put the coffeemaker into the cupboard, so it was bound to happen that sooner or later someone would put the coffeemaker away still hot, and all those napkins would fall onto the plate, and catch fire in a cupboard full of paper and styrofoam.’ ‘Well, human beings like being comfortable. At the close of the twenty-first century it was clear that what human beings wanted was a clean, safe, painless version of what they had had during the Old Stone Age, with access to the entertainment of thirty centuries thrown in, and the childish dreams of conquering the universe done went blooey.’”
“Is that proper academese?”
I shrugged. “It’s certainly the way they’d explain it in retrospect. And after a while the words would get shorter and simpler, I think, mainly because no one would be interested in even talking about it anymore. A few long generations and when the last two-hundred-year-old who could remember anything different died, they’d probably abolish every branch of learning that wasn’t amusing. And Earth would have maybe a hundred million happy, healthy granolae named Russ and Katy, who had lots of good ganja, ponytails, and trust funds, and just thought life was, you know, fucking awesome. Dude. The funny thing is, Travis, so far this is the part of your story I’m most inclined to buy. Because when I look around the Colorado mountains, I kind of think we’re there already. Brown is not taking the system any way it doesn’t already know how to go.’”
“In the Eagles song, it’s ‘you don’t,’” Jenapha Lee put in. “Much better meter.”
“So what’s your next mission to save the planet?” I asked Travis.
“Oh, oh,” Jenapha Lee said, “the professor is so embarrassed at my non sequitur straight out of popular culture.”
“Oh, oh,” I said, “you’re so threatened by my erudition and long-term friendship with Travis.”
And, bless her, she laughed. So did I, and Travis looked at us like we were both crazy, and as often happens, that got us laughing again, harder. The waitress came by with the bill, and we paid up, and of course we laughed more in front of her, too.
“Well,” Travis said, “if you’ll forgive me, there’s one more part to the story. So we thought we had it all, and then one bright afternoon, Brown Pierre, who was on a national security parole and required to stay at the facility, very suddenly ran away.”
But you know, he was psychically linked to Lena, and she knew where he was if she got within fifty miles of him, so Jenapha and me and Lena, we bounced all over the place, and three times we picked up Brown Pierre’s trace in five days, and each time he got away before we got in closer. He was running but not hard, not letting us catch him but not disappearing.
Meanwhile Hale phoned to say that the gadget that Brown Pie
rre had been building at Xegon was a Gaudeamus detector, some simple gadget he’d built, basically a direction and range finder on a Gaudeamus pulse. Brown wasn’t moving at random, he was trying to get to each new transmitter within a day or so of when the aliens did.
So we kept our team, trying to follow Brown Pierre, and we put the Irwins on another team, trying to get ahead of him by scrambling to get to the next Gaudeamus inventor before Brown Pierre could.
For a while they kept getting there late, and all the Irwins found was that Brown Pierre would say or do anything to get a copy of whatever contract these guys had signed. That was it. Brown Pierre just wanted to know what every other contract said.
Hale called in to tell us that a conventional surveillance team had spotted Brown Pierre in a van, and it sounded like, just maybe, he had a Beowulf built into the back of that van—along with a thirty-horse engine to make power for it. That was in Darby, Montana, and it so happened me and the women were in Hamilton, and the Irwins were in Salmon, Idaho, so we had the sonofabitch in a nice clean rundown, like a runner between third and home with another runner already standing on third and a great big old catcher in his way.
We were half expecting there to be World War Three when we got to Darby, and it was nothing of the kind. There he was, van parked in a little diner parking lot, sitting outside on the bench, sipping a coffee to go and waiting to get picked up. Me and Jenapha Lee got out of our car, and she had her hand on the gun in her purse, and she never needed it; a minute later the Irwin brothers were there to back us up, but it was clear that Brown Pierre was turning himself in.
We called Hale, and he gave us directions. Then we drove down 93 to get onto a logging road outside Sula, not very far away, where an SR-17 would pick us and all our cars up.
It had been bright early morning when we busted him, freeze-ass cold the way the Bitterroot Valley is that time of year, since it’s so high and so far north, but so gorgeous it makes your heart ache. Jenapha Lee drove, like always, and I sat in the back seat and kept an eye on Brown Pierre. But I had to admit I never saw anybody less interested in escaping.
He was looking out at all that deep crisp snow, and the dark green forests on the mountains to our west, and suddenly he said, “I really do believe that people won’t be so stupid that they lose all of this. I really do believe that.”
“You going to tell us about it?”
“Oh, yeah, everything. I’ll even tell it in front of All Thumbs, if you like, though I admit I’m a little afraid of how he’ll react.”
So we flew near two thousand miles, the length of the Rockies, in a bit under an hour, without putting a ripple in anybody’s coffee, and we convened in the Xegon conference room, and all the usual prelims got said and everyone who didn’t know what was actually going on, especially me, made a bunch of wild guesses.
Then, at the meeting, Brown Pierre just stood up and handed it to us. “What I have found,” he said, “is a pattern in the contracts that all these inventors are signing. It’s a pattern in things that are not-mentioned and written-around and not-discussed (except for clauses that seem to be about ‘in the event of things which will go unmentioned but have ample precedent in galactic law.’) And once I realized that was what I needed to look for, in the nineteen contracts I did know of, with nineteen different alien species, I found such language in all of them.
“Now, I’m not a lawyer, but right then I wished I was. Because it seems to me when you get similar but not identical language but it’s always in there—that’s telling you that there’s something important they won’t mention. And I thought—jury nullification. It must be something like jury nullification.”
About half the room nodded. You know what it is, John? I can see you do. Yeah, jury nullification of laws—basically a jury deciding that a law is a bad law and overturning it, as unconstitutional or not in accord with common law or justice—is part of common law, has been for centuries. But it’s usually illegal to tell a jury in the United States that it traditionally had that power, and it’s illegal for a juror to share that possibility with the other jurors, and they’ll keep you off a jury if they know you know about it, and so forth, because lawyers and legislators purely hate the whole idea of jury nullification.
That’s what had made our boy Brown Pierre run out on us. His mind, with that freak turn for consistency, kept looking and looking for an answer to one question: “Exactly what is it we’re not allowed to know about galactic law?”
And he realized that it couldn’t be that we weren’t allowed to know the worst they could do to us—hell, every alien and his eggmates and brothers and clones was telling us that they were considering genociding us and stripping the Earth down to bouillon. It couldn’t be that we weren’t allowed to know their malign intent, and it couldn’t be that we weren’t allowed to know about the availability of cops and lawyers to defend us—they hadn’t done anything to stop our finding out.
And the only reason for keeping the awareness of a particular power out of the knowledge of one player in the game is—you’re afraid they’ll use that power. And it must be a pretty good one to lock it away that tight, the same way that if jury nullification got loose the legal system would fall into tatters (and the strength of the people against the government would explode).
So, Brown Pierre realized, there must be a course of action open to us, which would upset the whole apple cart, and which we weren’t allowed to know about. Something strikingly effective.
He looked straight at All Thumbs. “Are you authorized to kill me to prevent this knowledge becoming general?”
“I will choose not to. My word of honor.”
Brown Pierre took a deep breath, and said, “As far as I can tell, it’s implicit in all these contracts that if we invoke the right of armed self-defense, even once, it voids all the outstanding contracts.”
There was a very long pause. Then there was the sound of two three-fingered hands clapping, slowly, over and over. All Thumbs was applauding.
Remember The Rakehells of Heaven, John? The rules for colonizing other planets in there? The very last rule was the one that said that a planet was to be regarded as too advanced and civilized, fully equal to human, and therefore off-limits to conquest, if it had a demonstrated ability to repel a state-of-the-art invasion. In other words, if you can defend yourself, we don’t have the right to take your stuff and kill you.
That’s what it was, but even simpler. The galactic government is a weak federation—it has to be, with, jeehoozus, 89,0000 species. Nobody wants it to have the power to raise taxes or conscript troops or anything of the kind. Which means no one wants it to enforce anything against anyone who shoots back.
If we just started shooting, it turned out, at any species, no matter how ineffectively, all contracts with all species were torn up. The Earth had been sold many times, but we could take it all back.
Brown Pierre giggled, suddenly, and sang, very off-key, “All we are saying, is give war a chance.”
So sometime soon, John. Don’t quite know when. But we’re doing some things to lure the pTh’tong n’Wi into bringing Susan Glasgow back for a visit—we faked up a genealogy for her that might give her a claim to being a hereditary empress. They’ll probably tell her it’s a shopping trip. And when they come to take possession of the property … they’re getting surprised.
We were standing in one of those small-county-sized parking lots that you find all over the eastern edge of Kansas, in the deep amber sunlight under the fierce blue of the late-afternoon sky, looking down toward the river through the black latticework of the tree branches. We shook hands, Travis and me, and he said, “Watch for me when something weird happens.”
“Always have, always will.”
I got lost on the way back to my hotel and nearly missed the evening performance as well, a very interesting student-written musical about Vietnam, which, I realized, must have ended two or three years before the student had been born. Parts of it crossed over the
line into bad taste, in my opinion, and parts of it were dull and flailing, but enough was really good so that I felt very comfortable being its advocate and defender at every cocktail party I staggered through that night. By the end of the evening I was feeling, a little smugly—well a lot smugly—that Jenapha might be proud of me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
On January 28, 1998, at about noon, large, bright, apparently burning objects fell over Hanna, Wyoming, and Breckinridge, Colorado. Lay a ruler on the map between those two points and you will see it extend south to touch Albuquerque—which is to say, Kirtland AFB.
The Wyoming fireball passed close enough to a passenger jet so that the pilot reported feeling some turbulence. The Breckinridge fireball was so bright and trailed so much smoke that numerous residents reported it as a plane crash somewhere in their own immediate neighborhoods. No trace of either fireball was found on the ground.
Newspaper reporters in small towns across Colorado and northern New Mexico discovered, across the next week, that many people recalled seeing odd flashes and lights in the sky on that day; but then, in that part of the country, people see strange things in the sky almost every day.
I was staying that night in the Oxford Hotel, which is a block from the downtown Tattered Cover in Denver. The Ox is an old railroad hotel with way too many stories and interesting features to allow it to get into this book at this point; we’re almost done, after all. But from a lounge copied from the saloon of a 1930s ocean liner, to a superb seafood restaurant, to several good ghost and celebrity stories, it’s got everything you want in a downtown hotel, and I wasn’t paying for it, and I could charge stuff to my room. The host bookstore was wonderful too—the Tattered Cover is two bookstores, one downtown and a larger one by the Cherry Creek Shopping Center, that collectively are one of the very largest bookstores in the United States, and they want people to read more than most missionaries want people to convert. It is often a very nice place for writers, though they do seem to think we were all grown in the same vat that supplies Fresh Air and the New York Times book review section.