by Nancy Kress
Kaufman bit back his retort. He didn’t have time to argue. “All right. Wait at the skimmer.”
He circled back. Ann stood just beyond the stockade with two men, one young and large, one middle-aged, small, and potbellied. “This is Solin Pek Harbutin and Camifol Pek Narfitatin, Camifol is a good negotiator.”
“All right. Send Dieter to the skimmer as soon as he arrives. And you’ve got to extract Calin from the ceremony and bring him here right away.”
Ann looked appalled, but she went back into the stockade. Kaufman pulled out his laser gun and began showing the two natives how to use it. Ann had chosen well. They both looked frightened but determined, and they followed his wordless instruction closely.
When Ann reappeared with Calin, Kaufman told him how to post lookouts and repel an attack on the village, if he had to. Ann translated. From the length of her speech Kaufman suspected she was adding edits of her own, but he didn’t have time to investigate.
Magdalena had moved the skimmer closer to the village. She had changed from her gown into a gray coverall, but her hair was still in its elaborate jeweled upsweep. The two natives stayed as far away from her as the skimmer would allow. Since the skimmer sat only six, and one seat was needed to bring back Essa, Magdalena had left her two bodyguards behind. Probably she thought that Kaufman and Dieter would serve as sufficient protection. After what seemed a long wait but wasn’t, Dieter arrived.
“Lyle! What do you plan, how do we get her back? Scheisse, those bastards…”
Kaufman shut him up and explained. Magdalena lifted the skimmer and set off at top speed; evidently she already knew where the Voratur compound was. The two natives clutched the arms of their seats but said nothing. Brave men, Kaufman admitted. By any standard. What if he had to cooperate with totally alien allies: Fallers, for instance? He couldn’t imagine it.
“We’re here,” Magdalena said, decelerating hard. Kaufman suspected she was enjoying herself. She released the door and the four men stepped out.
Kaufman had seen action on two planets and a moon. He had served under that master strategist, Colonel Syree Johnson. He had participated in the negotiations that kept the Belt from seceding from the Solar Alliance in 2159. He had persuaded a SADA general to send the expedition to World that had dug up and decoded the Protector Artifact. Next to all that, negotiations with the marauders barely deserved the name. It took two minutes, and he could have done it alone. Kaufman was a little ashamed of his contingent preparations.
Dieter called out in World to send out the child Essa. There was no response. Kaufman used his laser full strength, wide sweep, to take off the top of the compound’s ornamental gate. Noise from inside, but no one emerged. He fired again, lower, and wood and stone came crashing down. More noise. A minute later the ruined gate was shoved open thirty centimeters and Essa was pushed through it.
She stumbled, got up, and ran wobbling toward the skimmer. Kaufman expected wounds; she had cried over the comlink “oh come quick they’ll hurt me again come—” It was a good sign that she could walk at all. Dieter ran forward and scooped her up, Kaufman covering him with the gun. They all climbed back into the skimmer.
Essa’s arm hung at a strange angle. Broken. Three burns blistered the skin on the same arm. Her face was swollen from crying and contorted with pain. Dieter reached into his pocket and slapped a patch on Essa’s neck. “Ann gave me painkillers. And I think I can splint this arm until we get to Ann … hold still, Essa!”
The girl had started to laugh and babble. The patch had cut in. Kaufman had seen this on the battlefield: sudden euphoria at the abrupt cessation of pain and danger. But soldiers were supposed to contain the euphoria. Essa never contained anything.
Dieter said, “She says they grabbed her before dawn, pretty dose to Gofkit Shamloe, in the cari field, and—hold still, verdammt!”
Kaufman said dryly, “Ask her what she was doing alone in the cari field before dawn.”
Dieter translated Essa’s reply. The tiresome girl still bounced in her seat, ignoring her broken arm now that it didn’t hurt her. “She says she wanted to try out the comlink, to see if the other eight we gave Worlders still worked. She put out an all-frequency call—you know, Lyle, that only means the frequencies we gave them originally, the comlinks were preset. Next thing she knew, she was being grabbed and carried to Voratur’s. They searched her, but she’d already—be still, Essa!”
“Knock her out,” Lyle said. “Here.” He handed another patch to Dieter, who hesitated. But Essa began jabbering again at the top of her lungs, and Dieter applied the patch. Instantly Essa slumped in her chair.
Kaufman said, into the welcome silence, “What else did she say?”
“Only that they searched her, but she’d hidden the comlink insides back in her neckfur, and they didn’t find them. They asked her many questions about Gofkit Shamloe, what supplies we have there, what weapons I have, and when she wouldn’t answer, they hurt her. I don’t know what she finally told them.”
“Everything they asked,” Kaufman said. But it didn’t really matter. He turned to Magdalena to tell her to lift off.
She stood frozen, staring at Essa’s arm. The break, the burns … Kaufman looked again, but that’s all there was. Marbet had said that Magdalena had endured much worse. If the rumors about her were true, she had caused much worse. Then why …
It took a moment until Kaufman understood. This was a child. Essa looked very small slumped in the chair, her smooth flesh blistered in ugly painful burns, her young bone brutally cracked. A captured child. Like Laslo. Who, his mother was using every ounce of her inner energy to believe, was still alive and unhurt by his own capture.
“Magdalena…” Kaufman said gently. “Magdalena, take the skimmer back to Gofkit Shamloe.”
He thought he might have to repeat the instruction, but Magdalena turned instantly and started the engine. Everyone sat. Kaufman turned his head back to Dieter.
Dieter said, “Magdalena, bitte … you are going the wrong way.”
Kaufman lunged out of his seat. He was too late. Magdalena had circled the skimmer, soared above the Voratur compound, and fired. A proton beam—how the hell had she gotten a civilian skimmer fitted with a proton beamer! The compound vaporized. Gone.
“Lieber Gott!” Dieter cried. The two natives looked at each other fearfully. Kaufman seized Magdalena by the shoulders and turned her around.
“You had no orders to do that!”
“I don’t take orders.” Her frozen look had vanished, replaced by a coldness as complete as Kaufman had ever seen. “Now those pathetic little villages won’t have to be afraid anymore. They’re safe.” She turned back to her controls and sent the skimmer down to normal altitude.
Kaufman sat down again. Well, she was right. Gofkit Shamloe and its fledgling trading partners were safe now. All Kaufman had to do was convince Ann that he’d had nothing to do with it. Ann, and the rest of three villages.
If shared reality had still existed, Kaufman realized, all humans would now be declared unreal. Shared reality was gone, thanks to him. Worlders would not get excruciating head pain because of this massacre. But Kaufman couldn’t believe it was going to endear humans to Worlders, either. Ann had tried to show them that humans weren’t all violent. Now Enli and Calin and the rest would think that even the humans on their side were dangerous, treacherous, untrustworthy, unpredictable.
And they would be right.
A comlink shrilled, and for a moment Kaufman thought it was Essa’s, possibly still stored in her dense, dirty, matted neckfur. But the comlink was Magdalena’s. She put a privacy link in her ear and listened. By the time the message—probably stored since she answered nothing into the link—was finished, they’d reached Gofkit Shamloe. Magdalena set the skimmer down.
“That was my informant at the tunnel,” she said quietly to Kaufman and Dieter. “He just came through from Caligula space. The coup d’etat succeeded. General Stefanak is dead, half of Lowell City is destroy
ed, and Admiral Pierce controls the Solar Alliance Defense Council.”
“What do—” Kaufman began, but Magdalena cut him off.
“Things should have settled down a bit by now. I’m leaving immediately for the tunnel. You can come, or not, to get Capelo at the same time. This skimmer is returning to my shuttle in ten minutes.
“So decide if you’re coming with me.”
FOURTEEN
THARSIS, MARS
Stavros Ouranis’s land hopper was designed for short jumps around Mars, not for traveling the ten thousand kilometers from Lowell City to Tharsis. The hopper looked, to Amanda’s eyes, like a deformed plane. Made of ultralight plastics, it had huge wings, necessary for flight in the thin air, and a small fuselage, much of which was taken up by stored fuel and air-conversion equipment. Both breathable air and the jet engine depended on a judicious mixture of liquid oxygen in the tank and CO2 from the Martian atmosphere. Even so, they would need to stop every place possible for refueling. The hopper carried a maximum of four not-too-heavy people.
“To go need two days,” Konstantin told Amanda, “because…” His English failed him and he made motions with his hands.
“We have to zig-zag,” Amanda said, and Konstantin nodded.
“For to fuel, you know. Splendid.”
The first day, Amanda listened to the news in English. It was difficult to sort out. Admiral Pierce was now in command of the Solar Alliance Defense Council; that much was clear. But some places seemed to be fighting back. At least according to the newscasts that abruptly started, ended, and reappeared at a different frequency. Other newscasts said the entire population of Sol System was relieved to have Stefanak gone and someone in power “with the people’s best interests at heart and the will to win this terrible war.” There may or may not have been a resistance movement to Pierce on Earth. The Belt was definitely in resistance, but the Belt stations and outposts had always been among Stefanak’s biggest supporters. Except that another newscast said the “dissident elements” in the Belt had been identified and arrested and now “freely elected representatives fully support Admiral Pierce’s efforts to focus the Solar System on winning the war with the Fallers.”
It was very confusing. Amanda listened for hours, while Nikos flew to another of Mars’s small domed cities, landed, and went through the airlock to arrange for refueling. She would have gone on listening indefinitely, except that Konstantin had other ideas.
“Not news now, Ah-man-dah,” he said in his wonderful accent. They were alone in the hopper; Nikos and Demetria had gone out to get fuel and food. “Now to talk at me.” He turned off the radio.
Amanda thought that was pretty rude—he hadn’t asked her, after all—but he was smiling at her and she found herself smiling back. His teeth were white and even against his red lips and honey-brown skin.
“We to find your father,” Konstantin said, and when he stated it, Amanda could believe they would. “I think very much at your father. At his work. Look!”
He flipped open a handheld and brought up a directory. Amanda saw tide after tide of her father’s papers, listed in both English and what she presumed to be Greek. Konstantin selected and brought up one on the tiny screen. “Look … your father at Protector Artifact. Setting prime one, directed-beam destabilizer, inverse-square law, short range, destabilize atomic numbers above seventy-five.”
“Your English is much better when you talk about physics, Konstantin.”
“Is physics. Is your father. Setting prime two, shield against setting one and setting three. Setting prime three, destabilize, wave, inverse-square law, short range. Setting prime five, shield one planet. Is Protector Artifact. Setting prime seven, destabilize one planet, atomic numbers above fifty. Setting prime eleven, shields one star system. Setting prime thirteen, destabilize one star system. Like Viridian.”
“I know this,” Amanda said. Konstantin ignored her, rushing on.
“Two Protector Artifacts at one star system … fabric of space to destroy. Look!” He pointed dramatically at the Greek on the notepad screen, pure gibberish to Amanda. At least half of the paper seemed to be equations.
“Konstantin, are you saying you can understand my father’s papers on the Protector Artifact? Really?”
“I do physics. Not like Dr. Capelo. Little physics. I to try … look!”
He brought up another screen, as incomprehensible to Amanda as the first. But she could read the look on his face. “This is your work? You’re working on the same thing as my father?”
“Little physics,” Konstantin said solemnly, “very little. Calabi-Yau spaces. Flop transitions.”
Amanda couldn’t tell if “little physics” meant his physics was minor or if he meant that he was working at quantum level. Nor did she have any way of reading the mixture of Greek and mathematics he pointed to so proudly. She did know that her father had worked out what happened to proton beams when they hit a Faller ship equipped with the beam-disrupter shield.
As Amanda understood it, the beam had its probability of path altered, so it disappeared into a Calabi-Yau space, where its energy was used to effect a flop-transition to the shape of that tiny dimension. She knew, too, that if both Protector Artifacts, the human and the Faller, were brought together in the same star system and set off at setting thirteen, the large three-dimensional universe would also undergo a flop transition. The wave would spread outward at the speed of light, changing all the fundamental particles, and everyone would die. Amanda knew her father had proved the math of all this. But that was all she knew.
Konstantin must be the smartest boy she’d ever met.
She said shyly, “Are you at a special school for physics?”
“I go at university to physics.”
A college student! “Are you in your first year?”
“Yes. First year by English, history, all that. But I go at university graduate student to physics. I go at Dr. Claude Dupuis.”
“I’ve heard my father say that name. He’s famous.”
“Your father, yes,” Konstantin said. “We to find your father. At you. At I, too. I to meet Dr. Capelo.”
“Yes, of course you can meet him. I’d like that.” To her great embarrassment, Amanda felt herself blush.
“You very pretty, Ah-man-dah,” Konstantin said gravely. “I can to kiss you?”
“No!”
“Okay. Sometime, maybe. I like you very lots.”
“Well, I like you, too,” Amanda mumbled, intensely uncomfortable. To her relief, Nikos and Demetria returned, squeezing into the tiny space with a heated canister of food and making a great deal of noise.
* * *
It came accompanied by singing, as always. Somehow, in Amanda’s dreams, the brothers chanting the Holy Office on Mars had gotten mixed up with her father’s kidnapping on Earth, so that when General Stefanak grabbed Daddy and threw him into the black car, the air was filled with the plainchant of Matins: Benedicte, Deo gratias … “Don’t worry,” Father Emil said to her as she stood frozen at her father’s bedroom window, “God will provide, or else Admiral Pierce will,” and she turned to him in indignation to see that blood gushed from him and had spattered all down the front of her mother’s yellow dress.
“Ah-man-dah,” Konstantin said gently. “Ah-man-dah, stop to sleep now. Stop to sleep.”
She woke clutching his arm. Nikos and Demetria snored in their chairs. Outside the hopper, the sky was just lightening to the deep rose of dawn. The hopper smelled foul; no one had been out of their s-suits for two days. “Wh-where are we?”
Konstantin grinned. “We to Tharsis. At evening we come. You to sleep. Look!”
He pointed to the horizon. Amanda saw a high gleam of metal: the struts of a dome. They were parked at the Tharsis spaceport. Aunt Kristin was here, and Uncle Martin, and they would know what she should do next. Adults would be back in charge.
“Not to cry, Ah-man-dah.”
“I never cry!”
“Womans to cry,” Konstant
in said with great authority. “Mans not.”
She scowled at him and stood up in the tiny space. “Can we go now? Will you wake up Nikos and Demetria?”
“Nikos not to go by you and I. They here. Father of Nikos want hopper. Very angry. He to come at Tharsis.”
“And Demetria?”
“Demetria to come by me,” Konstantin said, sounding shocked. “She not to stay by Nikos here alone!”
Amanda reached for her helmet. If Nikos’s father was coming to the hopper, she would just as soon not be here. Konstantin had radioed his own father two days ago to assure him of his and his sister’s safety. Although Amanda hadn’t understood the Greek conversation, Konstantin’s tone had been affectionate.
Still, it was odd to her that Konstantin’s father would just let Konstantin go roaming around Mars, even if he was eighteen, in charge of his sister. Daddy never in a billion years would permit that. And there was Nikos’s father, angry about the hopper, but Konstantin hadn’t said he was concerned at all about his son. It was very weird. There were more weird people in the world than she had ever suspected before all this terrible stuff started happening to her.
Konstantin woke Demetria, who protested angrily. Konstantin silenced her with a sharp word. Why should he be in charge when Demetria was only a little younger, just because he was a boy? Amanda decided not to ask this, even if she could have found English that Konstantin could understand.
The three of them went through the airlock onto the dawn plain. The sun was just breaking above the horizon, hard-edged in the thin air. They caught a shuttle bus to Tharsis, where soldiers demanded their passports. Amanda had already shown Konstantin the forged passport the Life Now people had given her … when? Only a few months ago, but it seemed like years. Salah and Lucy and the others never appeared in her dreams, only Father Emil and the good Benedictine brothers. Brother Meissel … No, don’t think about it. Think about Aunt Kristin, and a hot bath.
“We to find your aunt?” Konstantin asked, inside the dome. “Where?”
