Vigilant lop-3

by James Alan Gardner

  Christ Almighty, I didn’t want to go through that again.

  Time on our hands and we talked, Festina and me… about true things and trite, present business, past desperations, where we were and who we’d once been.

  What it was like to have a link-seed in the brain.

  What it was like to have a flaming red birthmark on the face. Being considered "expendable" because of it. The Explorer Corps called themselves ECMs — Expendable Crew Members. And their rallying cry, if you could call it that, was the thing they said whenever one of their number died: "That’s what ‘expendable’ means."

  Festina told me she’d once killed her best friend. So I showed her my freckle scars. And my scalpel. Which had been returned to me, unlike everything else I’d been carrying. Hospitals are good at baking scalpels clean… especially as a favor to a woman who fondly keeps a memento of her sainted doctor father.

  Festina wanted to touch my scars. So I let her. And she let me touch her cheek… which felt precious soft…

  But mostly we just talked. Doctors and nurses right outside the door.

  I didn’t understand Sperm-tubes. Festina explained what she knew.

  "Each one is a spacetime outside spacetime. A self-contained pocket universe that can travel through the real universe faster than light, without relativistic or inertial effects. The colored tube is the region where the two universes touch each other… where you get spontaneous generation of photons and other particles because of boundary effects. And don’t ask me to explain boundary effects, because it’s all just double-talk for something we don’t understand. Four hundred years since the League of Peoples gave us star drives, and we still know fuck-all about them.

  "If you want another boundary effect," she went on, "it’s that weird-shit hallucination you get as you pass down a Sperm-tube. Supposedly the sensation only happens when you pass from the outside universe into the tube universe and when you go back out again; but it sure as hell feels like you’re experiencing every twist of the tail as you travel along, not just at beginning and end." She gave me a curious look. "What did you feel when your arm went in one end and your hand came out the other?"

  "Not much," I replied. "Like everything was connected normally, except my fingers were on the far side of the room."

  Festina shook her head in wonder. "Admiralty manuals say that once you start entering a tube universe, you have to go all the way inside before you can try to leave again. You aren’t allowed to straddle universes for more than a quantum second. There’s some sort of exclusion principle… which probably means as much as ‘boundary effect,’ considering what you did this morning."

  "I didn’t do it," I said. "The Peacock did."

  "Who’s the Peacock? Whoever generated the Sperm-tube?"

  "I’m pretty sure the tube itself is intelligent… which probably means the universe inside. It’s a conscious entity. It, uhh…"

  I stopped myself from saying the Peacock had talked to me. Festina was looking dubious already.

  "Sentient universes make nice stories," she said. "There’s a tradition of such tales going back centuries: sentient stars, sentient planets, sentient galaxies of dark matter… but that’s all crap for the fic-chips. It’s dangerous to believe in fictions, Faye. Stupid beliefs get people killed."

  "So if you were in a haunted house," I said, "you’d be the one who goes into the attic to prove there aren’t ghosts?"

  "No," she answered. "I’d be the one on the front lawn with a flamethrower. Shouting, ‘Anything sentient better come out fast, cuz I’m burning this place to cinders.’ I don’t believe in ghosts… but I really don’t believe in taking chances."

  An attendant came to the door — a human female in her late twenties, who should have been a woman but was still dragging her heels back at girl. Too goddamned chirpy by half. "Lights out in fifteen minutes, ladies! And here, your last olive oil for the day."

  "It doesn’t even taste like olive oil," Festina grumbled. "There’s a strange aftertaste. You put something extra in it, right? Antibiotics or immunoboosts."

  "What a sourpuss!" the attendant said. "This oil came straight from the synthesizer. I poured it myself. And before you go making harsh remarks about hospital food, all our synthesizers download their recipes straight from the world-soul’s databanks. This is one hundred percent pure olive oil. Extra virgin." She tittered at the word. She would.

  Festina muttered, "Your world-soul doesn’t know dick about olive oil." She glanced at me. "Your people were originally colonists from Come-By-Chance, right? How much do you use olive oil in your cooking?"

  "Not at all," I admitted. "Our cuisine tends toward cod cheeks, potatoes, and kidney pie."

  "Oh but in fancy restaurants," the attendant said, "in the fancy restaurants… well, in fancy restaurants you still get cod cheeks, but they’ve got a parsley garnish."

  "Hmmph." Festina glared at the midget beaker of oil she was supposed to swallow. "On Agua, we understood olive oil. Good olive oil. Fried in it, poured it over salads, dripped it into every batter, made olive bread… and our synthesizers never produced crap with this aftertaste. If you ask me, your recipe database has a bug in it. And you unenlightened clods don’t know olive oil well enough to tell the difference."

  All right, Festina-girl, those are fighting words. I reached out with my link-seed up to the North Orbital Terminus, to the ships docked there. Greetings in the name of Xe. Might I converse with a ship-soul not native to Demoth?

  A dozen yes’s — not the spoken sound of ship computers saying, "Yes," but an amiable knowledge of ships willing to talk. Xe’s name opened doors… something to think about another time.

  I want to compare your recipe for olive oil with the one used by Demoth’s world-soul. Is that acceptable?

  More yes’s — I wasn’t asking for confidential information, was I? Every ore-hauler and passenger liner in orbit had its synthesizer database programmed from its home planet; and the planetary databases themselves would have been initialized from the master one on New Earth, official reference point for synthesizers throughout the Technocracy. On a staple like olive oil, the databases should all agree. Then I could rag on Festina she was just being a baby. That our olive oil was the same as everyone else’s, down to the last molecule, and let’s have no more of this "Agua cooks better than Demoth" malarkey.

  Download and compare, I ordered our own world-soul. A pause. From the world-soul. Not for processing but for something else. I got the queerest impression the world-soul was deciding whether to lie to me… like when you catch kids making a mess, and you can see on their faces, they’re wondering if they can fib their way out.

  Then the responses on the comparison. Different. Different. Different.

  The Demoth formula for olive oil didn’t match a single ship in orbit.

  Holy Mother of God.

  Quick comparisons: the foreign ships all agreed with each other. Demoth was the odd recipe out. It had unexpected extra ingredients, several long-chain organic molecules the world-soul claimed were not indexed in the biochem database.

  Lord thundering Jesus.

  Sometime since Homo saps came to Demoth — since human foods got added to the Oolom computer banks — the recipe for olive oil had been corrupted. Or reprogrammed. And our ways of cooking used so little olive oil, no one had ever raised a fuss.

  Coincidence? Not blessed likely.

  Access backup archives, I ordered the world-soul. The yearly backups we took of all standard databases. Find the year our olive-oil recipe deviated from initial settings.

  The answer came back bolt-fast… too quick for the world-soul to have loaded and checked the off-line backups. It already knew the answer.

  The change came the year of the plague.

  What caused the change? I asked.

  The answer appeared in my head, almost as if it’d been spoken aloud in cover-your-ass computerese.

  The database was reprogrammed by a user with sufficient permissions to make
the modification. Dr. Henry Smallwood.

  I left Festina without spilling a word of what I’d just learned. One mumbly good night, then I scuttled off toward the isolation room that held my assigned bed. Me thinking all the while.

  Dads was a humble country doctor. He didn’t have permissions to tamper with standard databases. That took passwords, retinal identification, secondary confirmation from government authorities, oversight by a team of programmers and biochemists. Synthesizer recipes had diamond-hard security, tighter than any other data on the planet… because if a fumble-fingered programmer accidentally changed the formula for sugar into strychnine, you could kill a million people in the time it took to make supper.

  But.

  Suppose the world-soul was telling the truth. That somehow, twenty-seven years ago, Dads had reprogrammed the formula for olive oil. Changed it to include something extra, with the teeny aftertaste Festina noticed.

  Something that cured the plague.

  So when synthesizers all over the world produced olive oil, they manufactured the cure.

  And olive oil got chosen specifically because our cooking never used it. If it changed, no one local would notice the difference.

  My father hadn’t tripped over a cure. Somehow, he’d imposed a new medicine on the world.

  Wow. Way to go, Dads.

  And I believed it, pure as gospel. It felt like the truth… even if it didn’t make sense.

  With thoughts jumbling as I entered my room, I nearly didn’t notice there was already someone lying on my bed.

  "Hi," said Lynn. She picked up a bottle from the nightstand. "Fancy some wine?"

  "The family drew lots," Lynn explained as she poured. "Who would keep poor Faye company in quarantine? I won."

  "You always win when I’m not there to watch you."

  "Not always. Only when I want to." Now that we’d gone all respectable, my other spouses seemed to forget Lynn was a dab hand at picking pockets back in Sallysweet River. Show-off stuff, not actual theft — she’d lift someone’s wallet, then give it back. "Oh, you dropped this." She learned to do it to impress me, at a time when I was only ready to laugh at rudeness. Lynn was still precious good at sleight of hand and could cut to the ace of spades in any deck… or draw the short straw whenever she felt like it.

  "So how are you doing?" she asked.

  "Uninfected, thanks. Which means you got lucky. How could you be so witless, sneaking into hospital when I might have the plague?"

  "How do you know I sneaked in?"

  I just gave her a look.

  "Fine, I sneaked in." She handed me a glass, filled with what smelled like a nice ice wine. My favorite. "We figured you’d need company."

  "You wanted to check up on me."

  "Of course. We worry."

  I held up my glass in a toast. She did too, then we both took a sip. Lovely stuff… which I know is not the proper way to describe wine, but I leave that "Impulsive, with overtones of blackberry" talk to Winston. He was the one who made the wine we were drinking; in the bad old days, Winston brewed a wicked bathtub gin.

  "So how’s it going?" Lynn asked.

  "The plague’s back, I’ve got a pocket universe following me around, and my father was not what he seemed. How was your day?"

  "Vicki washed the cat in the toilet."

  "You win." I took another sip of wine.

  "How was it, going back to Sallysweet River?" Lynn asked after a while. "Appalling? Cathartic?"

  "Easy in, easy out," I answered.

  "Ahh, Faye, the story of your life." Lynn smiled. "You’ll have to do better than that when you see Angie. She’s rare keen on this birthwater-angst business. Why not practice your evasions on me?"

  "Well, if you want evasions…" I spun around to get comfortable on the bed. Since Lynn’s lap was there, I laid my head on it. "The tourist stuff gave me dry heaves. I lived in fear people would recognize me, but they didn’t. And I avoided all the old places, except the ones that aren’t there anymore."

  She stroked my hair. "Last time I visited, the stores were full of your father’s picture. What did you think of that?"

  "I think you’re trying to drive me into a Freudian episode."

  "You have so many episodes, dear one, how do you expect me to keep track?"

  I snapped my teeth at her hand. She didn’t flinch — Lynn never flinched when I came at her, in play or for real, she just let it happen — so I kissed her palm instead. "What do you remember of Dads?" I asked.

  She shrugged. The shrug made her lap bounce a bit beneath my head. She said, "I remember his beard shrinking, instead of growing…"

  "That was my Ma’s fault."

  "It’s still what I remember. I was fifteen. Deathly conscious of appearances." She grabbed my hand and gave it a quick kiss… as if something else had just crossed her mind, God knows what. "Let me think," she said. "I remember how he was so much shorter than you."

  "Everyone was shorter than me."

  "True." Lynn herself only came up to my chest — a bony, short, brown woman who would never catch your attention if there was someone else in the room. My polar opposite… which had made for treacly conversations at a certain age, both of us saying how much we’d rather have each other’s body.

  Took me a while to realize she really meant it.

  "What’s the last thing you remember about Dads?" The question had just popped into my head.

  "The last thing?" Lynn closed her eyes. She was still stroking my hair. "Sharr Crosbie and I were down at the mine offices…"

  I sat up right sharp. "What were you doing at the mine?"

  "We’d been shopping together when somebody beeped Sharr. Said Mother Crosbie had been in an accident, hurt her leg. So we caught a ride up to the mine; Sharr wanted to see that her mother was all right, and I went for moral support." She eased me back onto her lap. "Don’t wrinkle your brow, dear one — you liked Sharr too, once upon a time. Before you decided to blame her for everything."

  I started to protest, then stopped. The blasted link-seed wouldn’t let me lie to myself. I hated Sharr; I had no reason to hate Sharr; I blamed her for things she didn’t do. "Go on," I told Lynn. Nestling down warm against her.

  "We got to the mine infirmary, and your father was already there, looking at Mother Crosbie’s ankle. Saying it was only sprained, not broken. He put it into a foam-cast just to keep it safe for a few days, then gave her a talk about staying off the leg, making sure she had good circulation to the toes, blah, blah, blah."

  "This was in the infirmary?" I asked.

  "Where else?"

  The infirmary was a single-room dome clustered in with Rustico’s other outbuildings, all above ground. "How did Dads end up in the mine when the cave-in happened?"

  "You don’t know?" Lynn’s hand stopped stroking my hair for a moment. "My own brother carried a copy of the report over to your compound."

  "Which he gave to my mother. Who went into shrieking hysterics and tried to scratch my face to ribbons." I closed my eyes, remembering. "She screamed it was all my fault for leading a life of sin. God’s revenge or something like that… not that she spent much effort believing in God, but she devoutly believed I was utter dirt."

  "You believed it too," Lynn murmured softly. "We all look forward to the day you change your mind."

  Not a direction I wanted the conversation to go. "The point is," I said, "I never heard the exact details of Dads’s death."

  "You actively avoided finding out. Because you knew it would be more fun having Freudian episodes thirty years later."

  "Twenty-seven years. I could tell you the number of days, but that would be showing off."

  Lynn pretended to tweak my nose. "What a one you are. If I tell you what happened that day, do you promise to get over all your psychological traumas in the blink of an eye?"

  "Yes, Mom-Lynn." I took her hand and squeezed it to me.

  "Then here’s what I know… and I was on the spot through the whole thing. Not undergr
ound, of course, but I was plunk there in the infirmary when they started bringing up survivors. I heard all the details…"

  Lynn’s story.

  Dads was talking Mother Crosbie through the care and maintenance of sprains, when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence. "Damn!" he said. "They’ve hit a…"

  ("Hit what?" I asked. "And who’s they?"

  "He must have meant the miners," Lynn replied. "The official explanation for the cave-in was they’d broken into a pocket of natural gas."

  "But how did Dads know?"

  Shrug.)

  The next thing Lynn knew, Demoth was shaking. Not hard — just a teeny tremor, like the rumble when an ore-wagon goes by. Considering the number of ore-wagons trundling around the mine’s upper compound, Lynn didn’t realize anything was wrong till Dads sprinted for the door. Seconds after he left, alarms went off full-hoot in the classic SOS pattern: three short, three long, three short.

  Lynn’s parents were both miners. She knew the signals meant "Cave-in."

  Mother Crosbie shouted, "Damn it!" and tried to hobble out of the infirmary — scrambling to help whoever’d got trapped down the mine. Sharr made it to the door first and barred the way: "No, no, too dangerous"… which was just a scared daughter talking, because Sharr didn’t know bugger-all about what’d happened, any more than anyone else did at that point.

  Mother and daughter squabbled for a bit, Sharr in panic, her mother going on about how other miners might need her; then the company nurse barreled into the room and said everyone was deputized to help him get ready to receive wounded. Sharr’s mother let herself be persuaded she’d be more help in the infirmary than limping underground, slowing down the rescue teams. They all began to set up cots, break out medical supplies, that sort of thing… as if they were doing bed duty at the Circus again.

  When everything was ready, they waited.

  The first survivors arrived half an hour later. "Like a bomb going off," one said: a tunnel wall had blown clean out, cutting off half the afternoon shift on the other side of a thousand tons of rubble. The casualties arriving at the infirmary had broken arms, legs, ribs… but they’d still been standing on the lucky side of the explosion. At least they hadn’t been trapped. Now anyone who could dig was down in the caved-in tunnel, frantically using lasers and ultrasound powderers to flake away the rock-fall, aiming toward those who’d been walled in.