Fuzzy Nation

by John Scalzi

“Big one, too,” Holloway said. “This one’s the size of the proverbial baby’s fist. And there are three more just this big here on this ledge with me. I pulled them out of the seam like they were apples off a tree. This was the original jellyfish burial ground, my friend.”

  “Infopanel,” Bourne said. “High-resolution imager. Now.”

  Holloway smiled and reached for his infopanel.

  Zara XXIII was in most respects an unremarkable Class III planet: roughly Earth sized, roughly Earth mass, winging around its star in the “Goldilocks zone” that made liquid water possible and life therefore an inevitability. It lacked native sentient life, but most Class III planets did, otherwise they’d be Class IIIa and ZaraCorp’s E & E charter would be void, the planet and its resources held in trust for the thinking creatures who lived on it. Because Zara XXIII lacked creatures with forebrains (or the forebrain equivalent), however, ZaraCorp was free to explore and exploit it, mining the metals and plunging depths for the petroleum that humans had long ago exhausted on their own world.

  But for all that Zara XXIII was mostly unremarkable, it stood out from all the other ZaraCorp planets in one way: 100 million years previously, its oceans were dominated by an immense jellyfish-like creature that survived on algae and diatoms that themselves fed on the unusually mineral-rich waters of Zara XXIII’s seas. When these jellyfish died, their fragile corpses sank downward into the oxygen-starved depths, covering the ocean floors in places for kilometers. These corpses were eventually covered in silt and mud, and in the course of time, weight and pressure compressed and transformed the jellyfish into something else.

  They became sunstones: opal-like stones that did not just catch the light like filigreed fire but were in fact thermoluminescent. The body heat of someone wearing a stone was enough to make it glow from within. Not the garish glow of a light stick at a dance party or a glow-in-the-dark mood ring you’d give your kid, but a subtle and elegant incandescence that warmed skin tones and flattered the wearer. Because every person’s skin temperature was ever so slightly different, even the same sunstone looked different on another person. It was the ultimate personalized gemstone.

  ZaraCorp discovered them while excavating what it hoped was a coal seam and decided the funny rocks kicking up in the hopper were more promising than the coal. Since then the corporation had taken the lessons of the old diamond cartels to heart, positioning sunstones as the rarest of all possible gems: found only on one planet, strictly limited and therefore fetching the highest possible prices. The sunstone Holloway held in his hand was worth roughly nine months of income. Cut and shaped, it would be worth more than he’d likely make in three years as a contract surveyor.

  Which he no longer was.

  “Holy cow,” Bourne said, glancing at the sunstone through the infopanel’s camera. “That thing’s like a jawbreaker.”

  “It sure is,” Holloway said. “I could retire on this baby, and on the other sunstones I picked out of the seam here. And I guess I will, since now I own them and the entire seam.”

  “What?” Bourne said. “Jack, being out in the sun has made you delirious. You don’t own a damn thing here.”

  “Sure I do,” Holloway said. “You deleted my contract, remember? That makes me an independent prospector, not a contract prospector. As an independent prospector, anything I find is mine, and any seam I chart I have the right to exploit. That’s basic Colonial Authority E and E case law. Butters versus Wayland, to be specific.”

  “Oh, come off it, Jack,” Bourne said. “You know ZaraCorp doesn’t allow independent prospectors on planet.”

  “I wasn’t one when I came on planet,” Holloway said. “You just made me one.”

  “And besides which, ZaraCorp owns this entire planet,” Bourne said.

  “No,” Jack said. “ZaraCorp has an exclusive Explore and Exploit charter for the planet, granted by the Colonial Authority. De facto, ZaraCorp runs the planet. De jure, it’s Colonial Authority territory.”

  “Are you having a problem with the word exclusive?” Bourne said. “An exclusive E and E charter means only ZaraCorp is allowed to explore and exploit.”

  “No,” Holloway said. “It just means ZaraCorp is the exclusive corporate entity allowed on the planet. Single individuals are allowed E and E rights on any Class Three planet, so long as they conform to CEPA guidelines and allow chartered corporate entities right of first refusal on purchase of their prospected materials. Buchheit versus Zarathustra Corporation.”

  “You’re pulling these so-called cases right out of your ass, Jack,” Bourne said.

  “They’re real, all right,” Holloway said. “Go ahead and look them up. I was a lawyer in my past life, you know.”

  Bourne’s snort came loud and clear through the infopanel. “Yeah, and you were disbarred,” he said.

  “Not because I didn’t know the law,” Holloway said. Which was true, as far as it went.

  “It’s all immaterial anyway, because when you surveyed the seam, you were working for ZaraCorp,” Bourne said. “I deleted your contract afterwards. Therefore discovery of the seam and the fruits of that discovery belong to us.”

  “They might, if I had used ZaraCorp equipment to do the survey,” Holloway said. “But in fact, I used my own equipment, which I bought and paid for, as specified in that contract you deleted. Since I used my own equipment, legally the right to the find vested back to me when you dropped me. Levensohn versus Hildebrand.”

  “Bullshit,” Bourne said.

  “Look it up,” Holloway said. Actually, he hoped Bourne wouldn’t look it up; unlike the other two cases he quoted, he’d made up Levensohn v. Hildebrand on the spot. He was about to get kicked off planet anyway. It was worth a shot.

  “I am going to look it up,” Bourne said. “Trust me.”

  “Good,” Holloway said. “Do that. And while you’re doing that, I’m going to get busy excavating this seam. And when your security goons show up and try to roust me from my seam, I’ll be absolutely delighted, because then I can sue them, you and ZaraCorp under Greene versus Winston.”

  Holloway couldn’t see it, but he knew Bourne had stiffened in his chair. Greene v. Winston were fighting words at ZaraCorp because, among other things, the decision had sent Wheaton Aubrey V, ZaraCorp’s previous Chairman and CEO, to San Quentin for seven years.

  “Greene was overturned, you hack,” Bourne said, tightly.

  “No,” Holloway said. “A narrow and limited exception was carved out of Greene in Mieville versus Martin. That exception doesn’t apply here.”

  “The hell it doesn’t,” Bourne said.

  “Well, I guess we’ll find out,” Holloway said. “It’ll probably take years to work through the courts, though, and ZaraCorp will get all sorts of bad publicity while it does. We all remember what happened the last time. Also, just so you know, I’ve been recording this little conversation of ours. Just in case you get it into your head to suggest to DeLise and his security goons that they should toss me off this ledge when they find me.”

  “I resent that implication,” Bourne said.

  “I’m glad to hear that, Chad,” Holloway said. “But I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

  Bourne sighed. “Fine, Jack,” he said. “You win. Your contract is undeleted. Happy?”

  “Not in the least,” Holloway said. “If you deleted the old contract, then I have the right to negotiate a new contract.”

  “You get the standard contract just like everyone else,” Bourne said.

  “You talk as if I’m not standing next to a billion-credit sunstone seam, Chad,” Holloway said. “Which I own.”

  “I hate you,” Bourne said.

  “Don’t blame me,” Holloway said. “You’re the one who deleted my contract. But my demands are simple. First, I don’t want to be fined for this cliff collapse. It was an accident, and I know when you sift the data you’ll see that for yourself.”

  “Fine,” Bourne said. “Done.”

  “And I want a one perc
ent finder’s fee,” Holloway said.

  Bourne swore. Holloway was asking for four times the standard finder’s fee. “No way,” Bourne said. “No way. They’ll fire me for even thinking about approving that.”

  “It’s one lousy percent,” Holloway said.

  “You want ten million credits for blowing up a cliff side,” Holloway said.

  “Well, it might be more than that,” Holloway said. “I can see six more sunstones in the seam from where I’m sitting.”

  “No,” Bourne said. “Don’t even think about it. The most I’m allowed to authorize myself is point four percent. Take it and we’re done. Leave it and we’re going to court. And I swear to you, Jack, if I get fired for all of this, I’m going to hunt you down and kill you myself. And steal your dog.”

  “That’s just low, stealing someone’s dog,” Holloway said.

  “Point four percent,” Bourne said. “Final offer.”

  “Done,” Holloway said. “Write this up as a rider to the contract neither you nor I contend was ever stupidly deleted by you. If it’s a rider, I don’t have to fly into Aubreytown to approve it.”

  “Already done,” Bourne said. “Transmitting now.” The MAIL icon on Holloway’s infopanel came to life. He picked up the infopanel, scanned the rider, and approved it with his security hash.

  “Pleasure doing business with you, Chad,” Holloway said, setting down the infopanel.

  “Please die in a fire, Jack,” Bourne said.

  “Does this mean you’re not taking me for a steak at Ruby’s?” Holloway asked, but Bourne had already cut the connection.

  Holloway smiled to himself and held up the sunstone in his hand, turning it in the sun. Even in its uncut, dirty state it was beautiful, and Holloway had held it long enough that his own ambient heat had worked into the heart of the stone, making its filaments glow like lightning trapped in amber.

  “You’re coming with me,” Holloway said to the stone. ZaraCorp could have the rest of them, and would. But this was the stone that had just made him a very rich man. It was a lucky stone, indeed. And he had someone in mind to give it to. By way of apology.

  Holloway stood up and slipped the sunstone into his pocket. He looked over at Carl, who was still lying on the ledge. Carl crooked an eyebrow at him.

  “Well,” Holloway said. “We’ve done all the damage we’re going to do around here for today. Let’s go home.”

  Chapter Three

  Holloway’s skimmer was roughly halfway back to his home when his infopanel alerted him that his house was being broken into; the emergency alert system’s movement alarm had been tripped.

  “Crap,” Holloway said. He jabbed the AUTOPILOT function on the skimmer; the skimmer skewed momentarily as it acquired signal and pathing from Holloway’s home base. There was no traffic here—Holloway’s survey territory was deep inside a continent-wide jungle, far away from any population centers, or indeed any other humans—so the course was more or less a straight line to home over the hills and treetops. Autopilot engaged, Holloway picked up his infopanel and clicked through to the security camera.

  Which showed nothing; Holloway had the camera on his work desk and generally used it as a hat stand. His view of his house—and whoever was currently inside it—was being blocked by a stained porkpie hat he’d worn for amusement’s sake during his second year of law school at Duke.

  “Stupid hat,” Holloway said. He kicked up the gain on the security camera’s microphone and held the infopanel speaker against his ear, on the chance the interloper might talk.

  No luck. There were no voices, and what little else he could hear was being washed out by the sound of the skimmer engines and wind rushing through the open cockpit.

  Holloway clicked his infopanel back into its cradle and looked down at his skimmer instrument panel. The skimmer was moving along at a leisurely eighty kilometers an hour, a safe speed in the jungle, in which birds were liable to burst out of the trees and smash themselves into the vehicle. Home was another twenty klicks out; Holloway knew that without checking the GPS data because he could see Mount Isabel off to his right. The hill’s eastern face was chewed away and the four square klicks in front of it fenced off and stripped bare of vegetation where ZaraCorp was doing what it euphemistically called “Smart Mining”—strip-mining but with an ostensible commitment to minimizing toxic impact and to restoring the area to its pristine state when the mining operations ceased.

  At the time ZaraCorp started mining Mount Isabel, Holloway had idly wondered how an area could be restored to a pristine state once ZaraCorp had mined everything of value out of it, but this was not the same thing as him exhibiting actual concern. He’d been the one who did the original survey of Mount Isabel; the small sunstone patch that first drew his attention was exhausted in a matter of weeks, but the mount was a good source of anthracite coal, and the relatively rare rockwood tree grew on the mount and down its sides toward the river. He’d gotten his quarter of a percent out of the find—a decent-enough sum—and had moved on.

  Holloway’s critical eye guessed that Mount Isabel had another year or two left in her before she was mined down to a molehill, at which time ZaraCorp would airlift out its equipment and drop in a clutch of terrified summer interns, who would hurriedly strew bags of rockwood seeds on the ground—this counted as “restoring the area to a pristine state”—and who would also pray that the fence winding around the perimeter of the mining area held up while they did it.

  The fences usually held. It was rare these days to lose an intern to a zararaptor. But fear was a fine motivator.

  A loud crash came out of the infopanel. Whoever was in Holloway’s house just dropped something breakable. Holloway swore and pressed the button that would enclose the skimmer cockpit, and then opened the throttle. They’d be home in five minutes; the birds in the treetops would just have to take their chances.

  * * *

  As the skimmer approached his home, Holloway dropped it into CONSERVE mode, which dropped its speed significantly but also made the skimmer almost silent. He stop-hovered the craft a klick out and reached for his binoculars.

  Holloway’s house was a tree house—or more accurately, a platform anchored across several very tall spikewoods, on the edges of which stood the modest prefabricated cabin that was his living quarters, and the two sheds in which Holloway kept his surveying and prospecting supplies. Power was supplied by solar panels held aloft by a turbine kite, connected to the compound’s power plant, on which was also attached Holloway’s moisture collector and waste incinerator. In the center of the platform was a parking space, with enough room for Holloway’s skimmer and one other craft, provided it was small.

  It was that space Holloway was looking at. It was empty.

  Holloway relaxed a little. The only easy way into Holloway’s compound was by skimmer. It was possible that someone could have approached by foot and then climbed up, but that person would’ve had to be either very lucky or very confident. The jungle floor belonged to zararaptors and the local versions of pythons and alligators, any of which looked at the soft and slow human animal as an easy-to-catch, easy-to-eat snack. Holloway lived in the trees because all the big predators were on the ground, save the pythons, and they didn’t like spikewoods for reasons the name of the tree made obvious. The spikewoods also made climbing them a challenge if one were taller than half a meter, which any human would be.

  Regardless, Holloway scanned the platform and through the foliage to look for climbing cables and the like. Nothing. The other option would be that someone dropped in from above, from a hovering skimmer, which then took off. But Holloway would have been pinged about any traffic within a hundred-klick radius when he set the autopilot. He hadn’t been.

  So: Either there was a super-awesome ninja assassin lurking in his cabin, knocking over pottery, or it was just some dumb animal. While Holloway wouldn’t put it past Bourne to put a hit out on him, especially after today, he also doubted that Bourne could shake out a compet
ent assassin on short notice. The best he would be able to do was some of the less intelligent ZaraCorp security types, such as the aforementioned Joe DeLise. They (and particularly DeLise) wouldn’t have bothered with sneaking up on him.

  Chances were excellent, then, that this was a dumb animal; probably one of the local lizards, in fact. They were the size of iguanas—just small enough to avoid impalement on the spikewoods—vegetarians, and dumber than rocks. They would get into absolutely everything if you gave them a chance. When Holloway first came to Zara XXIII and had his treetop compound built, the place was infested with them. He’d put up an electric fence at first, but discovered that waking up every morning to the sight and smell of barbecued lizard depressed the crap out of him. Then another prospector told him that the lizards were utterly terrified of dogs. Carl arrived shortly thereafter.

  “Hey, Carl,” Holloway said to his dog. “I think we got ourselves a lizard problem.”

  Carl perked up at this. He very much enjoyed his role as solver of lizard problems. Holloway smiled, took the skimmer off STOP-HOVER mode, and went in for a landing.

  Carl was out of the skimmer as soon as Holloway turned off the engines and opened the cockpit. He sniffed happily and headed off in the direction of one of the storage sheds.

  “Hey, dummy,” Holloway said to Carl’s tail, which was whipping back and forth. He walked over to his dog and whacked him gently on the flank. “You’re going the wrong direction. The lizard’s in the house.” Holloway pointed in the direction of the cabin. He looked at the cabin at the same time, catching the image of the cat staring at him through the window over his work desk. Holloway stared back at the cat. It took him a second to remember that he didn’t own a cat.

  It took him a second after that to remember that cats didn’t usually stand on two legs.

  “What the hell is that?” Holloway said, out loud.

  Carl turned at the sound of his master’s voice and saw the cat thing in the window.

  The cat thing opened its mouth.

  Carl barked like a mad dog and bolted toward the cabin door. His lack of opposable thumbs would have brought him up short had Holloway not installed a dog door after he’d gotten tired of being woken up in the middle of the night to let Carl out to pee. The dog door’s locking mechanism picked up the proximity signal from the chip in Carl’s shoulder and unlocked the door roughly a quarter of a second before Carl jammed his head and body through it, bolting effortlessly into the cabin.