by Tony Daniel
Thirty-seven
Fragment from the Fall of Titan
“Fremden, they call us,” said Vincenze Fleur. “Strangers, in German.” He lit a chemical torch and worked away a little more on the so-called snow.
“It ain’t no thing,” replied Pazachoff. He, too, was on the snow-melting detail that Gerardo Funk had put together out of guys in the neighborhood. Funk was a local grist engineer, and it was he who figured it out about the weird snow.
“But it’s our goddamn moon,” said Vincenze. “They’re the strangers.”
“Sure,” said Pazachoff. “Whatever you say.”
“I just wonder why the Broca grist doesn’t translate it over, you know? How come it leaves it asfremden when it overdubs?”
“How the hell would I know?” said Pazachoff. “Ask Funk next time you see him.”
They were quiet for a while, and they burned away at a mound of snow. Every once in a while Vincenze checked to see if the confinement grist that Funk had added to his pellicle was still in place. If any of that killing snow got through it, he was done for. But it seemed to be holding up pretty well, according to the indicator readouts that popped up in his peripheral vision.
“It’s not that I don’t like it,” said Vincenze.
“What?”
“Fremden.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I mean, they could have called us shitheads or something.”
“They probably call us that, too,” said Pazachoff.
“What do you think we ought to call them?”
Pazachoff straightened up, rubbed his back. “How about shitheads,” he replied, then went back to melting.
“My brother’s dead,” said Vincenze. Pazachoff did not say anything. “This shit ate him up last week. Five e-days ago, I mean. He was a good kid. He was practically running this shoe store where he worked. Taking some night classes about law or something. He had a girl. He met her in the class. I haven’t seen her to tell her.”
Pazachoff grunted. He turned his back on Vincenze.
“I was kind of jealous of him,” said Vincenze. He thought Pazachoff might have turned off his communications reception, but he went on talking anyway. What else was there to do? “I mean, he worked his ass off, but I was always the better-looking of the two of us. Plus, I had tricked myself out in these fancy body mods. Got the muscles and everything, and for a good price. I know that guy at the store. But here was my toad of a brother bringing home this gorgeous chick. I mean, she ain’t Sandra Yen, but she was okay, right? And she was all over him: Georgie this, and Georgie that. That was my brother’s name—George. George Pascal Fleur. So I was jealous, but I was real nice to her. I mean, me and George respected each other generally. But he sort of noticed how I was feeling, and after she left he asked if did I think I could have flexed my arms a little more, or did I need more light to show off my rez coating. We sort of got into it, then and there, and George storms out, and I follow him out, yelling. He’s only got basic adaptation, so he can’t stay outside very long, so he’s hurrying away, but I pretend like he’s running from me, and I call him chicken and idiot and stuff. And then, about halfway down the street from the house, he stops.”
Vincenze’s torch went out. He cast aside the handle, and reached into his backpack and got out another. Pazachoff still wasn’t looking at him, but he could tell, sort of by the way the guy was holding himself, that he was listening. Vincenze shook the other torch hard, and it lit up. He turned back to melting the so-called snow.
“George stops, and I figure that he’s had about as much as he’s going to take of my lip, and he’s deciding what to do next. I figure I’ll save him the trouble, and I come after him, giving him hell the whole way. And when I get to him, I give him a big shove. Boy, I was mad. I give him a big shove. And he topples over. Falls right over, like I had pushed a statue. Damnedest thing. And when he hits the ground, he justshatters . Like he was made of glass. Shatters into about a thousand pieces. It was the damnedest thing.”
“Did you sweep him up or anything?” Pazachoff asked. Still he did not turn to face Vincenze.
“I sort of . . . look, I was mad,” said Vincenze. “I guess I tore into that pile of him, of George, I mean. I guess I sort of kicked him all apart . . . that pile of my brother on the ground there.”
“Jesus,” said Pazachoff. “Your own brother.”
“Well, I talked to Funk about it,” Vincenze said. “He told me it wouldn’t have mattered if I had like swept him all up or anything. There was nothing to be done. There was nothing I could do.”
“Still,” Pazachoff said. “Your own brother.”
“You don’t think I haven’t thought about that?” asked Vincenze. “It was like . . . it wasn’t real, or something. Like it was something I had dreamed up because I was so mad. I thought it was just my imagination or . . . hell, I don’t know what I thought. I wished it hadn’t gone like that, though. The last thing he probably heard was me screaming at him like a lunatic. What must he have thought?”
“He don’t think nothing now,” said Pazachoff.
“Do you think it’s true?” Vincenze said. “That we just die? And that’s it?”
“How the fuck would I know?” Pazachoff said.
“I mean, a guy needs closure, you know? I didn’t get any closure. It’s still all open.”
They felt the pressure wave from an explosion, and then two rockets streaked by overhead. A few seconds later, there were more explosions.
“Shit,” said Pazachoff, “here they come.”
“We’d better get out of here,” Vincenze said.
“Where the hell was you planning on going?” said Pazachoff. “We’re surrounded.”
“Shit,” said Vincenze.
“Keep your torch lit,” Pazachoff said, “until the last minute.”
“Then what do we do?” asked Vincenze.
Pazachoff finally looked his way. And he was smiling. The light from the torch reflected off the teeth in his big grin.
“We get closure,” he said. “That’s what we do.”
Thirty-eight
Leo watched Aubry softly crying. Probably thinking of her mother, since she just mentioned her, Leo thought. You don’t have to make an A with me, kid. You already passed with flying colors. He reached over and gave Aubry’s shoulder a squeeze.
“Settle in, kid,” he said. “We’re a good twenty hours away from where we’re going. If you want, I’ll show you how to take a pee in these bubbles.”
“My pellicle can take care of that,” Aubry said, sniffing up her tears. “It’s good for three days reprocessing all my body waste. After that—”
“After that, you’d better take a really good dump, huh? I’ve got basically the same setup.”
“I thought Earthlings didn’t use waste management,” Aubry said.
“It’s been a long time since I lived on Earth,” Leo replied. “I was younger than you when we left.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?” said Aubry, her voice getting stronger.
“Sure.”
“How come you’re so short?”
She looked up at Leo, probably to make sure she hadn’t offended him. Leo smiled back at her. “This is on purpose,” he said. “I’m Integument-adapted. Being smaller lets me get into a lot of places a bigger person can’t, as you’ve seen. But I am also adapted for some of the higher-spin-rate bolsas. I can go anywhere on the Met—with complete freedom.”
“You’re high-gravity-adapted?”
“It ain’t gravity, kid, it’s centrifugal force. And I can take about twenty gees without passing out.”
“There’s places in the Met where things weight twenty times normal?”
“Sure. Special processing plants and the like. And garbage compactors.”
“Have you been there?”
“I’m like a rat, kid,” Leo replied. “I go everywhere in the Met.”
“You’re not a rat,” Aubry said. He could tell she was
drifting off again. “More like a leprechaun. Did you ever go to the outer system?”
“Kid,” said Leo, “I haven’t left the Met in twelve e-years, and that’s a fact. I like it here.”
“But before that?”
“Yeah, I lived on Europa for a while,” Leo replied. “But I don’t belong out there. I belong here, in the Met. I’m not going to let the bad guys take this away from me.”
He gestured out at the sluice, and the luminescent air bubbles that surrounded theirs—all headed at breakneck speed to maintain the ecological balance.
“It’s rip as all hell,” Leo said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“It’s . . . rip,” said Aubry. She settled into his arm crook again, and this time she really did fall asleep soundly.
Rip or not, he had to get her out of there.
Thirty-nine
Fragment from the Fall of Titan
Citizens of Laketown, Titan, do not be alarmed. Steps are being taken for your own safety and security. At Systematic time 0:01:01 (128– 13) a curfew will go into effect that will allow six hours an e-day of work time followed by two hours of personal time. After that, you will be expected to be indoors. Violators will be shot. The hours will be in graduated shifts, and will be assigned to you at your workplace.
A new era is upon you. Progress has come to the outer system. Many of you are law-abiding citizens, and you may have wondered how long your corrupt government could stand. Justice has finally arrived. It is my pleasure to welcome you into full Met citizenship, with all the privileges thereto attached.
In compliance with Justice Directorate code JD-31-K19, all free converts must register forthwith. Check your tax schedules for important announcements. Thinking of signing up to become a DIED soldier? See your local recruiter for details.
So ordered,
C.C. Haysay, General, Department of Immunity Enforcement Division
“It’s almost unreadable,” said Thomas Ogawa. “How does he expect us to comply if we don’t have any idea what he’s saying?”
“I think that’s the idea,” Gerardo Funk replied. “Ambiguity in the service of order.”
“Uh-huh,” said Ogawa. “I wanted to thank you for saving my ship.”
“You saved it yourself.”
“I’d never have made it off Titan without your warning,” Ogawa said.
He and Funk were in a bare room with a single light, somewhere in the virtuality. Funk had rigged up this illicit merci channel between himself and the remaining free forces, in ships that had escaped Titan into space. Neither Ogawa nor Funk knew how long the merci-cheat would last, and there was not enough information flow-through to establish much more than two basic iconic presences in this plain room.
Ogawa had been friends with Funk since they had both migrated to Titan from the Diaphany. They didn’t have very much in common. Funk was an engineer, and Ogawa ran a small shuttle service that was doomed to failure as soon as the new Lift completed spinning itself out of material from the rings and down to the surface. For the time being, it was a living, and Ogawa appreciated the freedom it gave him. Maybe that was really what united him and Funk—they both knew what it was like to live in the Met and work for corporations whose employees ran into the millions.
They had been practically the only ones who had taken all the Directorate threats for tax compliance seriously. It had been Funk who figured out what the strange snowstorm really was. And now Ogawa found himself the de facto commander of a tattered “navy” of merchant vessels in space. Funk was the leader of the sad remnants of resistance on the ground. The Met victory had been crushing and absolute, but neither man was prepared to give up just yet. Or ever. To give up would be to return to the lives they had before and the conformity they’d migrated to the outer system to escape.
“I’ve got a couple of ships loaded to the gills with chemical explosives. We’ve got your jamming gear on board, too,” Ogawa told Funk.
“And theMary Kate is ready?”
“As ready as she’ll ever be. So where will you be?”
“Muñoz Park.” Funk glanced at Ogawa over the table and grimaced. Ogawa had always thought his face looked rubbery, and now it was practically hanging from his bones like a stretched and deflated basketball. “I have something else to tell you.”
“What?”
“It’s going to be more like five hundred.”
“We said four hundred maximum.”
“I know, Tom.”
“Do you remember how big my hold is? We’ll never cram them all in there. And even if we could get them in standing up, do you remember that little factor called acceleration? G forces?”
“I understand, Thomas,” said Funk. “But each and every one of them has said he or she wants to take his or her chances.”
“Uninformed consent, if you ask me.”
“They know what they’re getting into, Thomas. And what they’re getting away from.”
Ogawa shook his head. But what was he going to do? Turn away people who wanted to escape? He would have to figure out something.
“When?” he asked.
“One hour,” Funk replied. He would have to figure out somethingvery fast . Or just hope for the best.
Exactly fifty-nine minutes later, Funk flashed him the codes that would get theMary Kate and the two decoy ships through the planetary defenses, and Ogawa began his dive. The other ships—old freighters that would never make it far from Saturn in the evacuation that was to follow—homed in on what Funk thought was Met Command and what they hoped would be old Haysay himself.
“How the hell did you get those codes?” Ogawa wanted to ask Funk. But after the codes filled up every free particle in his ship’s grist matrix, Ogawa knew the answer. These codes were free converts, and very likely they were friends of Funk’s. He seemed to know every stray bit of programming on Titan.
The decoy ships began their dive, and Ogawa angled in right behind them, nosing as close as he could to their reentry envelopes. When they were a kilometer over the city, he threw theMary Kate into a screaming turn, pushing to the edge of his own reinforced skeleton’s structural limits, and then some. The “then some” broke one of his arms, but Ogawa piloted with mental commands and using his hands was strictly a backup system. He set his body’s pellicle to healing the arm as quickly as it could. Fortunately, nothing else failed, and theMary Kate turned thrusters down and burned through the pressure dome covering Muñoz Park. The trees caught fire from the pure-energy flux of the ship’s engines and, the moment the heat was off them, froze in whatever charred state they had just been in. The ship set down with a thump, the hold swung open, and five hundred people emerged from the shelter of a nearby underground accessway. Some of them were Titan-adapted, and some wore pressure suits. They formed into groups of ten or so and took the shape of five-sided stars, with one person being a “tip,” another a “side” and so on. Each “side” lined up with another “side” in the hold, and each “tip” was in contact with two others. In this way, the refugees quickly packed themselves into Ogawa’s ship. He had to hand it to Funk. The guy sure as hell made sure everyone was briefed and ready. Or maybe one of Funk’s convert friends had come up with the packing arrangement. It had the look of algorithmic thinking to it.
Within thirty minutes, everyone was in. Ogawa said a quick prayer and blasted off, incinerating the remainder of Laketown’s formerly most beautiful park.
The decoy ships had more than done their job. The Hebrides section of downtown was a blasted, flickering ruin. Excellent. He ran a check on planetary defenses.
Shit. They were back up. Shit.
If he made a break up the gravity well, he would be detected and blown out of the sky. TheMary Kate was fast, but nothing in comparison to Titan’s ground-based rocketry. It was designed to track and kill anything from a ten-kilogram meteor to a straying asteroid. You needed such a system when you were this close to Saturn’s rings. At least twice a year, some major shit penetrated the atmosphere
and fell out of the sky, brought from the rings by gravity perturbations and the workings of chance. Like theMary Kate , the interception rocket engines ran on small bottles of anti-matter—positrons, mostly—but the rockets were unmanned and didn’t have to worry about killing anyone by accelerating too rapidly.
So Ogawa couldn’t go up. Maybe he could hide in the fault zone a thousand klicks to the north, or even under Lake Voyager. There was no reason his ship couldn’t survive a dunking in liquid methane. But all of this would defeat the purpose of coming in the first place. Five hundred people were depending on him to get them off this rock. What could he do? They were trapped. Hiding was not really an option.
“We’ll have to surrender,” Ogawa said. “What else can we do?”
He’d been speaking to himself, and was very surprised to hear a voice answering him.
“They couldn’t have gotten a proper cipher up and running this quickly,” It was a female voice.
“It must be a modification off some hardware they brought down with them. No one on this moon would knowingly collaborate.”
“What about the bank?” said the first voice.
“Well, yes, there is the bank.”
“Who the hell are you?” Ogawa said. He turned theMary Kate into a parabola that he hoped would keep him low enough for the time being to avoid a rocket launch.
“We’re the former cipher keys to the Titan Rocketry Shield, of course,” answered the male voice. “No real time for introductions. We’re complementary keys. You can call me Ins and her Del, if you’d like.”
