Federations

by Orson Scott Card

  “By rejecting citizenship, they identify themselves as a threat to peace among all sentients, and they will be treated as such.” Standard operating line. It sounded the same as the first time I heard it.

  “Better get the bombs ready,” I said. “The Humpties aren’t going to go for it.”

  “Bertie, I can count the number of sentient species that have not affirmed on one hand.”

  “You’ll need two hands after tomorrow,” I said with a sigh. “You’ll be damned lucky if they can even come to a consensus by then. They debate the names of their children for two years after hatching.”

  “We’re persuasive,” she said, sounding almost defeatist in tone. I had won most of the arguments and that hadn’t changed. She had won the fistfights.

  “Oh, I know that. Now you’re telling me things I already know.”

  “Think about my offer,” she said. Her eyes pleaded in a way her voice could not. She slipped away leaving me to think about those eyes more than I wanted to at the moment.

  I settled into my crate as the Redshirts marched back in to take up the guard. My energy reserves were running dangerously low thanks to the cellular restructuring, so I did what comes naturally in such situations. I took a nap.

  I was awakened by a brutal kick to my now fully human ribs. I felt one of them break, and then the tingling as my swarm jumped into action, knitting bone back together. I had been tipped out of the crate onto the bay floor. Adam was standing over me.

  “So are you the Ghost of Christmas Future?” I asked, groaning.

  “Shut up,” he said, and kicked me again. Enough of that and my crippled swarm would not be able to keep up.

  “I know she was in here. What did you talk about? Don’t lie. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

  “How bad you are in the sack,” I said, just barely bracing myself in time for the boot. The pain, while severe, was worth it. In the good old days, there were few things I took more pleasure in than needling Cadet Adam. Perhaps in retrospect not the greatest of habits.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” He abruptly slumped to the floor beside me. I tried to calculate my speed versus his, and whether I could grab his neck and snap it before he could call for aid, but the math was not in my favor, something my swarm helpfully confirmed.

  “She orders me to wear your face sometimes,” he whispered.

  Hmm. Kinky.

  “There’s this empty space in her bed and I can’t fill it no matter what shape I take. I’ve tried everything. Toys. Enhancements. I even decanted into doubles and had a threesome with myself.”

  Ugh.

  “She’s never satisfied,” he continued.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  “Because I can’t tell anyone else.” He shrugged. “And you’re a dead man walking.”

  Something took over me, some impulse that was so unfamiliar I had forgotten the word for it at first. Pity, is that you? Can’t say that I’ve missed you. Your sister Self-pity has kept me plenty company, thanks.

  I proceeded to explain the peculiarities of Lewyana’s g-spot and several sexual techniques that I had developed over the course of a dozen relative years in her bed. He listened with a kind of dull eagerness, like he didn’t want to admit I was teaching him anything useful.

  “All you’re lacking is time,” I said. “In some ways, you’re a better match for her than me.”

  “How so?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.

  “You don’t ask too many questions,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut and preparing myself for another blow, but it never came. When I opened them, he was gone.

  I waited, ticking off the hours until the affirmation deadline. Instead of screaming wordlessly and flailing about uselessly, I passed the time asking the Redshirts questions I knew they couldn’t answer. I attempted to teach them how to play gin rummy. It would have been easier if I had had a deck of cards, I suppose. Also, if the Redshirts had more than a pea’s worth of brain cells.

  Just when I was beginning to doubt my people skills, and a few minutes after the deadline had passed, the neuter returned. Ne sprayed some kind of pheromone from a spherical canister, and the Redshirts fell to the ground limp.

  “No decision from the Humpties then?” I asked.

  “Worse than that. They’ve refused.”

  “Huh. I thought for sure the promise of a chicken in every pot would do it for them,” I said, not bothering to explain the historical reference. “So when does the bombardment begin?”

  I noticed that Kav’s elegant hands were shaking. “No bombs. She’s ordered a disassembling swarm. The U.P. council considers this method more ‘humane.’” The neuter spat the word “humane.” I would have too. I did, not so long ago, probably. The details of that final argument were buried as deep in my hardbrain as I could manage. It had not just been painful for Lewyana. I wish I could say I had discarded her offer but even now, it was on my mind.

  Then my swarm notified me that their full functions had been restored. I queried for my emergent friends and received only dull, quizzical responses. It would take me a decade to encourage them back into existence. But maybe I would have that time now. I would never have them back if I agreed to Lewyana’s proposal. With my disposition, I’d never have children; my A.I. were as close as I was going to get.

  “If you like,” I offered, “I’ll knock you out and you can pretend that I used villainous spyware to overwhelm you and your swarm. Adam will believe it and Lewyana will pretend to so you’ll get away fine.”

  Kav shook nis head. “I want out. I’m not sure I was ever really ‘in.’ I figured my only hope for escaping the U.P. was to join the Corps. It’s the closest thing to unrestricted travel. Nobody wants to go anywhere anyway. Everyone looks the same. Watches the same vids. Lives in identical houses. Sameness, everywhere. That’s the U.P.” Kav shook nis head again. “They’re talking about discouraging the nongendered, you know? Some on the council think it’s too nonconformist. We don’t think like the gendered, they say.”

  “Good for you on that point,” I say. “But I was only partially kidding when I was described how bad it is out there. There’s little comfort where I am going. Are you sure you’re ready for that?”

  “Honestly?” Kav laughed. “I’m sick of being comfortable.”

  “Right.” I cracked my knuckles. “Let’s go kill some Fuck U.P.s then.”

  Command Comm centers hadn’t changed a bit since I’d last been on deck. Most of it was automated, tied into swarms, but there were the token data stations for the sentient crews. Adam was concentrating on a scroll of info-dense code, but Lewyana was waiting for us in the center of the deck.

  “Kav, you’re one stupid bitch,” Lewyana said. Ah, I thought, so that explained the hands. Hard to erase every single trait of gender.

  “Lewyana!” Adam said, interrupting what I am sure was about to be a fabulous soliloquy on why the Humpties had to die for the good of everyone else. Blah blah blah, heard it. “I can’t shut down his Swarm.”

  ::NEED? ASSISTANCE| HELP | SUPPORT ?::

  Where the hell have you been?

  ::TOOK REFUGE | HID | CAMOUFLAGE | AMONG CADET KAV’S SWARM IN FINAL MOMENTS::

  News so fantastic I could kiss my AIs if they had a corporeal form. I settled for a giddy laugh instead.

  “I don’t care,” Captain Lewyana said. “The disassemblers are in the atmosphere already, and I can still knock this asshole flat.”

  The climate became frigid as her Swarm drew on ambient energy to hypercharge her muscles. Nasty trick, and I was almost prepared for it, but she moved too quickly for me. She always got in the first blow. I was sent sprawling. My vision was awash with Swarm biodamage warnings.

  I’ll take you up on that offer of help now.

  :: HUZZAH FOR US ::

  “Lewyana!” Adam cried out. “He’s harboring an AI!”

  I noticed Kav flinch at the claim from the corner of my eye just as I felt the surge of
energy from my Swarm’s glucose factories. The room grew cold enough for our breath to turn into fog. I swung back. The blow connected, just barely, but all I wanted was to make contact. My swarm lived up to its namesake, rushing into her systems, kicking in the doors and generally being right bastards under the command of the Artificial Intelligence Gang. I really needed to come up with a better name. Hmm—the Notorious A.I.G?

  Lewyana’s eyes rolled into the back of her head as my friends wiped the meat blob clean of any trace of her mind pattern. From there, it was a short hop to Adam.

  He didn’t go down so easily. Nanoengineers are prepared for my tricks. “Fuck off,” he said, executing a swarm command override.

  :: OUCH ::

  My swarm began to drop individuals by the hundreds, error lines crowding my field of vision. I dropped to my knees. When my vision cleared, Adam had me by the throat. Damned human throat. So easy to choke. I should have gone with that berserker model.

  :: ASSISTANCE REQUIRED ::

  Um, yeah.

  A wave of cold washed over us as someone’s swarm sucked the air’s ambient heat. I squeezed my eyes shut for the skull-crushing blow, but instead, I could breathe again. I opened my eyes. Kav stood over what was left of Adam’s corpse, staring at nis blood-soaked hands.

  I felt another little stab of Pity, but I told her to get lost. I had a planet to save.

  I took a seat at my old control station. The memories came flooding back. Years ago, during the incident that convinced me to tell the U.P. to kiss my ass, Lewyana had pressed a holobutton and bombs had set off tectonic activity. In a matter of hours, four billion sentients had died in the worst earthquakes ever recorded. That was how the U.P. dealt with nonconformist threats.

  If it had been bombs again this time, the Humpties would have been screwed, but I knew a thing or two about swarms. I had, after all, grown my AI friends very carefully. The controls and defenses in place in the disassembler were stronger than I had ever seen, but my friends had spent a million generations learning their way around a swarm.

  I handed over 60% of my hardbrain’s processing capacity to the AIs. They squeezed inside, ranting and sharing data so fast it made me dizzy. For a brief second, I worried that they would overwrite me completely and take over. But they calmed down and we got to work, cracking codes and hacking back doors in the swarm net. We stopped the swarm only half-way through the disassembling process. I pulled up a spycam onto the data station and looked out on a world that had suffered more chaos in the past hour than it had in the past fifty thousand years. I guess a little evolutionary pressure on the survivors might not be a bad thing, in the long run. But my work was absolutely ruined. I had a record of the Humpty culture as it was, but not a complete one. It would have to do.

  Kav was in tears. “I was too late.”

  “Get used to it,” I said stiffly. “We’re the bad guys and we almost never win. In fact, not to be a downer, but all I did was buy them a little time. The U.P. will be back here soon and the next time, the Humpties won’t dare refuse.”

  “Why do you even try then?” Kav asked, nis voice breaking.

  I gave Kav the same speech my culture archivist friend had given me during my recruitment. “One day, some U.P. citizen is going to wake up and feel hollow inside. And they’ll go digging on the net, and they’ll find a hidden datastore I put there, rich with cultural history and practices. And maybe they won’t be a direct descendant of the original species, but with swarms, it won’t matter. They can change as easily as their ancestors became U.P. standard. They’ll sneak off, and the culture will come back from the dead, if only just for a little while before the U.P. stamps it out again.”

  “This has happened before?”

  I nodded. “It has and it will again. We archivists tend to the process like a garden. We harvest the seeds and plant them in the net. Sometimes it takes a thousand years for them to take root, but when they do, they grow into one hell of a blossom.”

  Kav sniffed and wiped at nis eyes. “That’s so . . . bleak.”

  “I never said it wasn’t.”

  Ne stared off into the middle distance. “There’s a new voice to my swarm,” ne said. “Is that . . . ”

  “Sorry—I guess my friends laid eggs.” Which explained the unexpected help in the fight. I was a little disturbed by the news. AI didn’t replicate, they were too complex, or so said the conventional wisdom.

  :: HA HA HA I CAN HAS MULTIPLICITY ::

  Quiet, you.

  “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back now,” Kav said, tone halfway between a statement and a question. “Not without purging my swarm of a sentient mind.”

  “You kind of passed the commitment point a few klicks back,” I said.

  The lights dimmed as the ship’s systems began to falter. Tied as they were to the captain’s now-deceased Swarm, I was surprised it had lasted as long as it did.

  :: WILL LAND SAFELY | WITH RELATIVELY LITTLE HARM | ONLY A FEW BRUISES | ALMOST CERTAINLY 0 FATALITIES ::

  I turned back to face Kav’s tear-stained face. “Thanks,” I said.

  “For what?” Kav asked. “Leaving the U.P. I could handle, but harboring an illegal AI wasn’t . . . ” Kav paused. “I didn’t plan for that.” Another pause. I listened to the AIs chatter as they merrily hacked through the ship’s systems. “I guess I should thank you too.”

  “My turn to ask ‘what for?’ ”

  “Without you, I don’t think I would have been able to do it. The U.P. would have forced me to change, eventually, and I can’t go back to who I was.”

  I had been planning up until that point to bring up the idea of nim swapping back to female, but decided against it for the time being. I had thought there was some chemistry between us, but maybe I was wrong. I sure as hell have been before.

  :: BRACE FOR IMPACT IN T MINUS 10 ::

  “Better hold on to something,” I said. “It’s nothing but bumps and bruises from here on out.”

  “Goodbye, comfort,” Kav said wistfully.

  The impact was rough, but we lived through it. And a hell of a lot more after that too. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll find another data cache and learn how things ended for us. But first, you need to look through those files on the Humpty culture. Ask yourself: Is this who you really are? Ask yourself, and don’t be surprised at the answer. Never stop looking.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN

  ALLEN STEELE

  Two-time Hugo Award winner Allen Steele is the author of the novels Orbital Decay, Lunar Descent, Chronospace, Spindrift, and many others. Over the last several years, he’s been focusing on writing and expanding his Coyote milieu, of which this story is a part. The most recent novel in the Coyoteverse, Coyote Horizon, came out in March, and will be followed by Coyote Destiny.

  Steele is also a prolific writer of short fiction, with four published collections, and a new one—The Last Science Fiction Writer—on the way. His stories have appeared in the magazines Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, Science Fiction Age, and in numerous anthologies.

  “The Other Side of Jordan” is a simple tale of love lost and found, played out upon a galactic scale, with aliens and cosmic megastructures aplenty, not to mention a nice-sized helping of that good old sense of wonder.

  Jordan and I broke up on the docks of Leeport, about as lovely a place as you can have for the end of an affair. It was a warm summer evening in Hamaliel, with sailboats on the water and Bear—the local name for Ursae Majoris 47-B—hovering above the West Channel. We’d gone down to the waterfront to have dinner at a small bistro that specialized in grilled brownhead fresh from the fishing net, but even before the waiter brought us the menu the inevitable arguments had begun. There had been a lot of those lately, most of them about issues too trivial to remember but too important to ignore, and even though we settled the matter, nonetheless the quarrel caused us to lose our appetites. So we skipped dinner and instead ordered a bottle of water
fruit wine, and by the time we’d worked our way through the bottle, she and I decided that it was time to call it quits.

  By then, it had become apparent that we weren’t in love. Mutual infatuation, yes. We had the strong passions that are both the blessing and the curse of the young, and Jordan and I never failed to have a good time in bed. Yet desire was not enough to keep us together; when it came right down to it, we were very different people. She’d been born and raised on Coyote, a third-generation descendant of original colonists; I was an émigré from Earth, one the gringos who’d managed to escape the meltdown of the Western Hemisphere Union before the hyperspace bridge to the old world was destroyed. She came from money; I’d been a working man all my life. She was a patron of the arts; my idea of a good time was a jug of bearshine and a hoot-and-holler band down at the tavern. She was quiet and reserved; I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, even when it was in my best interests to do so.

  But most important—and this was what really brought things to a head—she was content to live out the rest of her life on Coyote. Indeed, Jordan’s ambitions extended no farther than inheriting her family’s hemp plantation—where we’d met in the first place, much to her parents’ disapproval, since I was little more than a hired hand—while having a platoon of children. I was only too willing to help her practice the art of making babies, but the thought of everything to follow made my heart freeze. After five years on Coyote—fifteen by Earth reckoning, long enough for me to have allegedly became an adult—I wanted to move on. Now that the starbridge had been rebuilt and the Coyote Federation had been tentatively accepted as a member of the Talus[1] , humankind was moving out into the galaxy. There were worlds out there that no human had ever seen before, along with dozens of races whom we’d just met. This was my calling, or at least so I thought, and the last thing I wanted to do was settle down to a dull life of being husband and father.

  So we broke up. It wasn’t hostile, just a shared agreement that our romance had gone as far as it could go, and perhaps it would be better if we no longer saw each other. Nonetheless, I said something that I’d later regret: I called her a rich girl who liked to slum with lower-class guys, which was how I’d secretly come to regard her. I’m surprised she didn’t dump her glass over my head. But at least we managed to get out of the restaurant without causing a scene; a brief hug, but no kisses, then we went our separate ways.