by Jack Dann
“Ah. I thought I saw an explosion.”
“The one who tried to disarm it was killed.”
“So you killed Jackson in return.”
“No, we killed the woman because she threatened us. Any of us would sacrifice our lives for the good of the clade, but all of us would die to save our mother. We love her more than life itself. You should know that we are tracking the cargo train and have calculated its trajectory.”
When Baker had briefly wrested control of the scow from Jackson, he had sent the cargo train on a trajectory that would end in a collision with Epimetheus after three orbits of Saturn, less than 20 hours from now. He said, “I was going to tell you about that. I don’t mean any harm by it. I want to be friends. The cargo train—it’s just insurance, that’s all.”
The woman made no gesture, but children appeared at various levels of the burgeoning greenery. No, not children: they were naked creatures the same size as his pressure-suited captors, so pale and skinny that they seemed partly transparent, like certain deep-sea creatures. They were quite sexless. Their heads were small and wedge-shaped, sloping straight back from skin-covered dimples where their eyes should have been; their ears flared out like bats’ wings; their hands had only three fingers, spaced like a crane’s grab. Four of them gripped the arms of Baker’s P-suit with implacable strength.
“We will kill you slowly for your presumption,” the woman said, “and our defense drones will destroy the cargo train.”
Baker said. “I don’t think you want to do that. If it’s destroyed, the debris will still hit and do just as much harm, but if you leave it be, I can change its orbit once we’ve made a deal.”
The woman shrugged. “It is unlikely that the impact will hurt our mother, for most of her is far underground. But it will damage her energy-gathering systems, and we cannot allow even that. You will change its orbit now.”
Baker said stubbornly, “We can make a deal. That’s why I’m here.”
“No,” the golden-skinned woman said serenely. “No bargains. Change the orbit of the cargo train and we may let you leave. Otherwise we will keep you here, alive and in great pain.”
“You didn’t kill me,” Baker said. “Of course you want to bargain. I want to set up a trading agreement between your clade and my collective. You must have plenty of biological novelties, for instance. In exchange, we can supply you with trace elements, or anything else you might need. I did a little research and I know you deal exclusively with the private citizens who bankrolled this experiment. I bet my collective can offer you better supply contracts. And we can guarantee confidentiality.”
“There will be no trade,” the woman said. “We need nothing. Our mother made this garden. It is all we need. You will do as we ask.”
“I have to be on the scow to do it,” Baker said, “so you’ll have to let me go anyway. There’s plenty of time. I can show you the figures on the trade my collective does with the Titan terraforming project. Think it over. I mean no harm to your mother. I didn’t know she was on Epimetheus. I thought she was here.”
“She is not on Epimetheus,” the woman said, “she is becoming Epimetheus. Think what you will do. I will return soon.”
Cherubs whirled down and lifted the chair and the woman into the air. As she dwindled away, the workers released Baker and vanished into the greenery with unnerving swift silence.
###
The golden-skinned woman did not return for many hours. Baker wasn’t worried; he was sure that she was discussing the offer with her mother, and the longer it took the more likely it was that he could hook them. He found the airlock, but the black sheets had stiffened and would not let him pass. A little way beyond, at the foot of a steep vine-covered cliff, a flash of bright yellow caught his attention. It was Jackson’s P-suit helmet. The visor was cracked around a burn hole; the padding inside was crusted with drying blood.
Baker cradled it, tears pricking at his eyes; although he had not loved her, he had loved the idea of remembering that he had once loved her, and what he was mourning now was that lost part of his life. She had not understood that when she had tried to manipulate him; she had not really understood much of what she had done. The only thing she had been right about was that ordinary humans had no place in the Outer System: here was the proof.
He dropped the helmet and turned back to explore the rim of the freefall jungle bowl. The lush green thickets were full of strange creatures: things like snakes, but with narrow human heads and pale human skin; little black-furred tarsiers with microcephalic human faces; white worms working like mobile fingers through the crumbling soil. The things Baker had thought were birds were more like black-furred bats, with leathery wings as wide as his outstretched arms; when he climbed out along the smooth limb of a tree above the bowl of the jungle a flock of them wheeled and dive-bombed him, spattering him with their dung.
Baker laughed and retreated, crashing unhandily through thick foliage in his P-suit. He was not afraid of anything here. He controlled the cargo train: he had the upper hand. He had thought to threaten Sri Hong-Owen with the destruction of her experimental sites, and although he didn’t understand what the woman had told him, he was certain that his bargaining position was even stronger than he had hoped. His sidekick had been wrong after all. Everything was going to work out. Except for Jackson, of course. It was a pity about Jackson, but after she tried to cut him out of the deal, he really had had no choice but to let her walk unknowingly to her own death.
At last, the golden-skinned woman returned, borne as before through the air on a chair sustained by cherubs. Workers stepped out of the greenery and stood on either side of her chair as the cherubs set her down and whirled away.
“I hope we can talk,” Baker said.
“We have agreed to tell you about us,” the woman said. “Listen.”
###
Sri Hong-Owen wanted to become truly immortal, the woman said. She had used cloning as a first step, although she knew that it would not be enough. Clones are exact genetic copies, but personality is determined by a combination of genes, environment and experience. A clone would have to have been subjected to every single one of her own experiences to become a perfect copy. Even so, she experimented with the effects of various types of memory downloads and artificial-reality scenarios on the personalities of female clones, and then she had created the clade and its habitat, and given it over to the charge of her daughter clones. The clade valued knowledge, not things. Its treasure store was in its self-regulating ecosystem and the genetic diversity it had fashioned from a genome library derived from a few plants and microorganisms and from Sri Hong-Owen herself; every animal in the habitat was derived from her by gengineering and forced evolution. Given the right conditions, the clade could persist forever.
Meanwhile, Sri Hong-Owen reshaped herself.
She developed vacuum organisms which turned sunlight into electrical energy with almost one-hundred-percent efficiency—the ring of dish flowers around the habitat were an early prototype. They were forming a blanket across the surface of Epimetheus, and Sri Hong-Owen’s modified body was growing through the moon’s icy crust like blue mould through cheese. It was already the largest organism in the Solar System, larger even than the mycelial mats which underlay Earth’s temperate forests, and which she now somewhat resembled. Copies of her original body were cached here and there in that mass, and there were more than a hundred copies of her brain, all sharing the same sensory inputs, the same thoughts. They were as alike as possible. Eventually the mycelium would completely embrace the moon. It would grow thrusters which would subtly alter the moon’s orbit, slingshotting it repeatedly through Saturn’s gravity well until it gained enough velocity to escape to the stars.
“Probably Vega,” the golden-skinned woman told Baker. “There’s a ring of debris around Vega twice the size of our Solar System, millions of comets and planetoids and asteroids. She will fill it with clades like ours, and then move on to other systems where plan
ets failed to form. She is the first real transhuman, but there will be others—those who sponsored her work, to begin with.”
Baker smiled. He did not believe half of what he had been told. He said, “If she is truly immortal then she must value her life immensely.”
“What are you to her? She could fill the galaxy. In time, she could fill a million galaxies. Planets are unnecessary. We have evolved beyond planets. We have evolved beyond the human form. We can make ourselves over into a thousand kinds of organism, all fitter for life in space than mere humans. The tweaks are a first step, lungfish on the shore of space. We will go much further.”
“My collective has already made over a tented crater on Rhea, much as this one has been transformed. Other collectives are making homes in planetoids, mining comet heads . . . There are many different ways of making a living, and no need at all to depend on trade with anyone on Earth. Trade with us instead. If you had time to look at those figures—”
“All of you are still human,” the woman said. “We have evolved beyond that.”
“She’s right,” someone else said, and a second golden-skinned woman came into the clearing with an elegant motion that was half-walking, half-swimming. She held something between her small breasts with both hands.
“You’ve decided.” Baker said. “That’s good.”
“We’ve decided,” the woman said, and released what she held.
It flew straight at Baker on a blur of membranous wings, a tiny bat with a wasp’s long abdomen. He tried to knock it out of the air but it was too fast and his pressure suit slowed him. It dodged his clumsy blow and caught at his hair with claws. Something sank into his scalp, pushing between the sutures of his skull, and black pain swept the world away.
###
When it came back, the two golden-skinned women were looking down at him. Baker pushed up and gingerly touched the top of his head; hundreds of hair-thin wires with sticky-tagged ends came loose, slowly falling to the ground around him. He said, “What did you do?”
“Evolution is cruel,” the first woman said. “Those forms which are less successful will die. Perhaps we will keep some of you, out of sentiment. And Baker, while he lives, needs help, of course.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Baker said. He felt quite calm, as if he had entered an artificial reality and could leave any time he wanted. “I thought evolution was all about change, but you do not want to change.”
Suddenly, he felt his sidekick at his back and a warning twinge in his head like a cold needle in his core. Ordinarily, he would have welcomed its return, but there seemed to be something wrong with it; it was fierce and strong and silent.
He said, “You did something to me, didn’t you? Something with those wires, something to my net.”
The second woman said, “We are a new kind of evolution. The body changes at will, and the mind lives on.”
“Tell me what you did!”
“After a little while,” the first woman said, “you won’t ever worry about it.”
Baker said, “You want me to think like you? Is that it? Listen, you can’t last forever in isolation. People need other people.”
“That is why we will send you back,” the first woman said. “You can only think in the old way. Although we love him dearly, that was always Berry’s trouble.”
Then the sidekick seized Baker. He couldn’t move. His body felt bloated, unmanageable, fiery hot, a pupa melting and changing inside the carapace of the P-suit.
The wires had downloaded new programs into his net and reactivated his sidekick: now his sidekick was changing him. Part of his personality fell away, falling from his mind into darkness as icebergs calve from a glacier.
At last the work was done and the world came back to him. His sidekick was at his back, stronger than ever, his mentor and his friend.
They all gathered to watch him go, workers, cherubs, human-skinned snakes and crabs, naked monkey-things which tended the gardens, all one family, one flesh, one thought, one clade.
“You are one of us now,” they said. “A different flesh but one of us. Our faithful servant. You will divert the cargo train because you know that no harm must come to our mother. You will guard our brother now and forever.”
He did what they wanted.
He was one of them.
###
His collective finally found him on Dione. He and Berry were staying in the only hotel in a raw construction town, the first stage of an ambitious plan to tent the Latium Chasma, the fissure which cut a deep groove across the northern half of the sub-Saturnian hemisphere. The hotel could not supply the kind of luxury that Berry was used to; after only a few days he told Baker that he wanted to move on.
Baker was returning from the port. He always transacted business in person; even deeply encrypted phone lines were not to be trusted. He had arranged transport to one of the garden habitats that orbited Titan, a tourist place where people went to use telepresence to explore the storms which were resurfacing the giant moon. He was sure that Berry would like it: gardens reminded him of the happy days of his childhood, in the garden of his mother.
They jumped into Baker’s capsule just before it pulled out of the station, a young woman and an older man. The young woman wanted to know if he recognized her. “We slept together to seal the contract,” she said, her eyes searching his face. “You were always my favourite. You must remember.”
Baker tried to be polite. “I do not know you,” he lied. “I am sorry.”
The young woman touched the man’s arm.
“Ralf is a lawyer. We filed a bond here. If you need privacy to talk we can provide it. We know you logged a flight with two passengers. One was an old friend of yours. Vera Flamillion Jackson. We know where you went, but we don’t know what happened. Please tell me. Whatever happened to you can be reversed, I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t think so. You want your slave back. Don’t deny that you think of him as your property. Well, he isn’t. He is one of us, now.”
And so on, a tide of anger rolling over Baker, submerging him so completely that he no longer knew if he or the sidekick was speaking. He came to himself in the atrium of Berry’s hotel suite. The entry phone was flashing but he ignored it.
“Well, it’s time we moved anyway,” he said to the air, as he moved through the rooms to the private pool where Berry floated.
The sidekick was fading at his back, as beneficent as the warmth of the sun; before it vanished it told him with approval that he had done well. And then he saw Berry, floating pink and naked in steaming water amongst palmettoes and bamboos, a tray of food on his hairless chest, sucking on a drink bulb, and the unfortunate incident didn’t matter anymore.
Berry spat the straw from his mouth and said, “You’ve been away. I don’t like it when you’re away.”
“I’ve arranged a new place for us.”
“Oh, that. Good. Can’t stay in one place too long. That’s the secret.”
“Do you think she might need us one day? Do you think we might be allowed to return?”
Berry bent his head and sucked up the last of the margarita mix with a rattling noise. When he looked up, there were tears swelling in his eyes. He said, “We’re nothing to her now. We’re too human. You’re here to serve me. By serving me you serve the clade. That’s all you need to know. Now help me out. My skin’s wrinkling.”
“Of course,” Baker said, and went to get the oils and unguents, filled with boundless unqualified love for his master.
SOLDIERS HOME
William Barton
William Barton was born in Boston in 1950 and currently resides in Durham, North Carolina. For most of his life, he has been an engineering technician, specializing in military and industrial technology. He was at one time employed by the Department of Defense, working on the nation’s nuclear submarine fleet, and is currently a freelance writer and computer consultant. His stories have appeared in Aboriginal SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing, Interz
one, Tomorrow, Full Spectrum, and other markets. His books include the novels Hunting On Kunderer, A Plague of All Cowards, Dark Sky Legion, When Heaven Fell, The Transmigration of Souls (which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award), and Acts of Conscience; and, in collaboration with Michael Capobianco, Iris, Fellow Traveler, and Alpha Centauri. His most recent novels are White Light, in collaboration with Michael Capobianco, and the new solo novel, When We Were Real. In the vivid story that follows, he tells the compelling story of a heartsick and battle-weary veteran of an unimaginably strange high-tech future war who returns to an abandoned space colony, one that has been drifting lost and deserted among the stars for generations, to face again some old and implacable enemies, and to reaffirm the truth of that old saying about how You Can’t Go Home again . . . or perhaps to learn that maybe you can—but only if you’re willing to pay the price.
###
The stars belong to no one. They lie against the empty black in drifted clots and jagged heaps of meaningless white light. Nothing to pin your hopes on, just brilliant dots strewn at random across the void, an empty stage where we live and die, and nothing more.
I stood on the lip of a gaped-open docking platform, toes of my boots hanging over the abyss, watching the taxi back away from the ruined habitat I’d chosen, hard vacuum freezing cold in my eyes, crisp nothingness on my skin. The taxi was already no more than a black splotch against the stars visible only by the intermittent red twinkle of thrusters and the pale, tenuous blue exhaust of its field modules device.
It grew small against the sky before turning away, ghost-light covering its outline, hesitated for an instant, then vacated its place among the stars, though I could still hear the pilot superimposed over the datawarren chatter in my head. I dropped his channel, then pushed away the rest, dropping it outside my shield, standing still, in utter silence.
