Asimov's SF, September 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I was navel-gazing, which is especially enjoyable when the navel belongs to someone as young and beautiful as Anu. My head rested on her bottom ribs. These days my eyes don't see so well up close, and the blur helped to make the gentle mound of her belly into a kind of magical panorama, with the knot of her sarong like the gate of a mysterious temple in the distance.

  The fantasy landscape heaved, and my face hit the sand.

  "What is that?” she said in her one-of-a-kind voice. She had a contralto like a fast, deep river: exhilarating, but not the type that gets the showy parts.

  I wiped the grit off of my lips, propped myself up on one elbow, and looked around before answering.

  We were abovedecks at my favorite love-nest by the edge of the Consul's hunting reserve, on the shore of a lake so big that you could see the upward curl of its surface to left- and right-spin. I had access to the spot because of my connections at court. The lake was on the down-axis frontier, and the groundskeeper told me that whenever the Consul came here she brought bodyguards to watch out for Sinhal assassins on the far shore.

  "What's what?” I asked.

  She was looking away to left-spin.

  "Those, Rui!” She pointed up at an angle.

  The glare of the glow-tubes made it hard to see. As the landscape curved up into the distance, the dark green pines turned suddenly into crowded villages and fields of rye. Finally my eyes picked out motion: two black spots in the air.

  "Crows?” I asked, standing up.

  "No, they look like people. You can't see?"

  "My eyes aren't as good as they used to be,” I admitted, “but it can't be people.” But as I squinted I saw that they did seem to have human shapes. I realized that my squinting wasn't what was making them easier to see; they were coming closer. Now I could tell that they were angling down sideways with the kind of coriolis you see when a hawk makes a dive at a rabbit. One looked limp as a glove, but the other had his arms spread out like a bird. I barely had time to register any of this before they plunged into the lake at an angle, first one and then the other, close to our shore. The slaps when they hit were like timpani crashes, and the spray reached us on the beach.

  Even if they'd been alive before they hit, it seemed obvious to me that after an impact like that they must be dead. I congratulated myself on not being smashed like a wine grape, which was what could have happened if they'd come in twenty meters up-axis. Even while I was thinking that, Anu dashed out into the water. (Anu was an illegal third child from a merchant family, raised by Christian nuns. If she came across a wild dog shaking a chipmunk, she'd probably box the dog's nose and make it apologize.) I shook my head and waded in after her. We were in up to our thighs when the flying men bobbed to the surface on their own. They were jacketed from head to foot in something black, with bulbous helmets. Space suits? That couldn't make sense, but it was true that they were riding high in the water, as if the suits were full of air.

  A dozen strokes brought me to the nearer one, who was floating face down. When I uprighted myself the water was only up to my neck. I managed to get him turned over on his back, but the tinted visor on the helmet made it impossible to see his face.

  "Tow him to the beach,” I yelled to Anu, and went on to fetch the other one, who'd surfaced face up. He surprised me by moving his arm, but he still seemed dazed, so I got a grip on some of the equipment strapped to his back and started pulling him ashore.

  "Rui, look out!” Anu shouted from the beach, just as an arrow plunged into the water in front of me. I twisted around and looked at the far shore. There was no beach there, just a steep ridge of exposed foundation material. At the top of the ridge a swarm of Sinhal solders were jumping off of horses, milling around, pointing, waving their arms, and brandishing weapons. At this point the sane thing to do would have been to let the second astronaut go on playing his assigned role in the target-shooting exercise. Unfortunately, as I've known ever since I was a pup, I don't act sane around beautiful women. I kept up my kicking and my one-armed sidestroke until I had him back on the sand.

  By that time he was showing more signs of life, so Anu and I left him on his own and concentrated on slinging his dead or unconscious friend over a saddle. After what seemed like a long time messing around, while I imagined arrows sprouting from my back, we got both astronauts onto the horses. The conscious one had to sit on my rented mare sidesaddle, because apparently it's not possible to ride astraddle in a spacesuit. Finally we led the horses up the trail into the forest, with me and the one who was out of action bringing up the rear.

  Once the trees were around us, it suddenly got quiet. The astronaut said, “Gobble gobble.” Water was still dripping from the chin of his helmet.

  "I don't think we speak your language,” Anu said. She was leading his horse by the bridle since he didn't seem to know what to do with the reins. “Do you speak Portuguese?"

  "Goo goo goo,” the astronaut said, and then a second voice came from his helmet, speaking funny Portuguese: “Muitissimos agradecidos."

  "Don't mention it,” I answered automatically. “Ah, if you don't mind my asking, who the hell are you, why are you here, and why were those Sinhal devils trying to kill us all?"

  "Is your comrade alive?” Anu put in. “Do we need to get him out of his suit to help him?” A faint voice inside the conscious one's helmet translated all of this into pig-grunts.

  "Szemnik will be all right for now,” he said, bending down awkwardly to look at her. The translation sounded like an academician trying to talk and eat water-snails at the same time. “He was hit in the leg, but his suit's applying pressure to the wound. He was going into shock for a while, but his readings are stabilized now. He's getting a rich mix to breathe, and he's warm, so I think he's safer in the suit than out of it.” He turned to me and said, “I'm Hua, and that's Szemnik, as I said. We're here to survey your habitat. We were just supposed to fly along the axis in zero gee, a total of three thousand kilometers, and then climb down at the next set of support cables. As to why your neighbors shot us down, I wouldn't know. They seem to have obtained some proscribed technology, and I don't imagine they get many chances to fire it at a real airborne target."

  While his pedantic echo was giving the cosmological fairy-tale lecture, my horse had slowed down. I grabbed a pine branch and gave the horse a reminder on its flanks, even though I was already getting a side-ache myself.

  Life would have been a lot simpler if Anu hadn't said what she said next. “While we were getting Szemnik on the horse, I saw you do something. You pointed your arm up at the ridge."

  There was a pause even before Hua spoke to his translator. “Did I?"

  "Yes, you did,” she said. She couldn't see him stiffen in the saddle behind her. “One of the soldiers fell down, and there was a commotion.” She glanced up over her shoulder at him.

  "Really?” There was something cautious about his muffled voice, but the translator sounded calm.

  "I think you'd better trust us, stranger,” I said. “Anu has eyes like a demon's, and she knows what she saw."

  He took a breath and said “Okay,” which turned out to be the same word in his own language as in Portuguese. “I'll tell you the situation, and then I'll strongly suggest that you keep this information to yourself.” If I'd had any sense, I'd have interrupted him and told him that three people were at least one too many when it came to keeping secrets. “The man on the cliff was setting up a smartrifle, probably the same weapon they used to shoot Szemnik in the air. Our mission here is peaceful and scientific, but we do have a little light defensive weaponry built into these suits. Those men probably knew that, and I think that was why they wanted to bring us down. If they'd caught us I think they would have very carefully peeled us out of the suits, tortured us for information on how to use them, and then slit our throats."

  Light defensive weaponry. By his standards, that meant a way to point at someone a hundred meters away and make him drop to the dirt (dead? unconscious?) without a s
ound.

  "So you were trying to get across the border,” Anu suggested, “and land in our territory, where they couldn't get you."

  "No,” Szemnik said, “I was heading for an airlock that we could use to get out of the hab.” He said it casually, as if leaving the habitat was like walking out the door of his apartment in the morning. “Splash down in the river, go to the airlock, pop the hatch."

  "You aimed for the river, not the lake?” Anu asked.

  "There wasn't supposed to be a lake, but in this style of hab, when they built an out-hull lock, it was usually at the lowest elevation in the area, to make it as close as possible to the outside. There wasn't any lake on the last survey, but water does tend to flow downhill."

  The Consul's groundskeeper had told me about that. There used to be a marsh, and the horses would always get stuck in it. They drained it and diverted the water into the lake. I felt sorry for the stranger in spite of myself.

  The groundskeeper's cottage is also a semaphore station, and he'd already noticed the commotion from his tower. By the time we showed up, there was already a squad of cavalry prancing around. Officers started arriving and asking everyone questions, and when a higher-ranking one came, he would invariably chew out his predecessor for not handling the situation correctly, then start asking the same questions over again. It started to rain. I remember someone with epaulets and a gold-braided fez leaning over Szemnik, peering into his helmet visor, and tapping on it with his knuckles.

  They sent for an ambulance for the two mystery men, and for me and Anu they even rounded up a spare mail buggy. It was fast, and strung as tight as an E-string, and the driver pushed his team harder than I'd have dared with a four-in-hand. It was dark by then and getting cold enough to make our teeth chatter even if we hadn't been crashing over potholes. I was shocked, shivering, jittery, and tired, but Anu shucked her wet sarong, pulled the lap rug around her shoulders, and asked if she could be invited over to my seat.

  * * * *

  Anu and I got wreaths put around our necks, which raised some eyebrows because she was a Christian. Everyone was comfortable with a story involving the bloodthirsty Sinhala making trouble on our down-axis border, and they would have reacted just as satisfactorily if the propaganda event had been about the baby-killing, crucifix-kissing Vieghs on the up-axis side. But a Christian heroine taking sides against the Sinhals was confusing. They solved that puzzle by emphasizing that Rui, the nice, orthodox Hindu, was the one who brought Szemnik in while a “hail” of arrows (I only remember one) fell in the water around me. The newsmongers made it sound like Anu, the cultist, was my faithful servant, acting under my orders. What I'd found out was that she wasn't helpless or innocent—wasn't anything like I'd thought she was.

  Szemnik got put in a private sickroom in the palace, and they shepherded me and Anu in for a carefully supervised ceremonial visit. He smiled and clasped my arm, but even though his grip was firm, I couldn't help noticing the smell from the infected wound on his leg. The Consul granted Hua and Szemnik titles, which was obviously a way of drawing them closer to herself.

  My head was in a muddle that week. I saw an augur, but he didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. I'd never had so much trouble managing a simple love affair—or the end of one, which should have just meant that it was time for the rooster to chase after a new hen. I'd been off my game ever since the strange experience at the lake. I was like the card shark who reads a pile of sutras, and from then on he misses every trick because he's too busy thinking about the thirty-one planes of existence.

  Szemnik's leg eventually had to be amputated, but after that he seemed to get better.

  I saw a lot of Anu during the hubbub about the Outsiders, but I didn't get a chance to see her alone until a rehearsal for a long program of Brahms songs, which the Consul's husband loved. Kid stuff, especially compared to the symphonies, but the Consort loves his sentimental late-romantic bonbons, and our patrons call the tunes. The night before the rehearsal I couldn't sleep. I felt as nervous as if the rehearsal was a big audition. In the morning I splashed water on my face and studied my receding hairline in the mirror. Was I making a fool of myself with such a young woman?

  It's four or five kilometers from my quarters to the hall, and normally I'd take a cyclo, or even a hansom if I was in a hurry, but I was up so early that I decided to walk. When the public corridor opened up into the dizzying cavern of the Plaza da Constituicao, I felt like a little boy showing up with his slate for his first day at school. No matter what I think about the musical tastes of the ruling class, the building always reminds me why they care so much about preserving culture—and making sure everyone sees them do it. When you see the way they maintain a file cabinet full of Pergolesi scores, you know they'll also do a good job of maintaining the lower-tech parts of a creaky old space habitat, so you can go on breathing in the style to which you've become accustomed. I waved to the guard in his twentieth-century tuxedo, walked through the gates, and set my violin case down on the steps of the giant Rhinemaidens fountain, intending to have a good long smoke to calm my nerves. The glow-tube light filtering through the skylights was just beginning to brighten. It was bitterly cold, which suited my mood.

  A fly landed on the steps and spoke to me.

  "Rui Santos? Don't smash me; I have a message for you."

  I took my pipe out of my mouth, and then I must not have said anything for a while, because it asked again, “Are you Rui Santos?” The voice was high pitched, just like you'd expect from a fly.

  "Yes, I am.” I looked around to make sure there wasn't someone in the plaza playing a trick on me. “You're from one of the Outsiders."

  "Szemnik.” Every time it talked, its wings buzzed up and down in a blur.

  "Are you really a fly?"

  "No, I'm a machine. I was supposed to be used as a stealthed nonsentient air-to-ground vehicle, but Szemnik decided he needed a sentient agent. I'm his partial Kurzweil. I booted up this morning. I have limited volition, and part of his knowledge from his most recent upload, which was last year—plus information that he transmitted to me verbally after he made me."

  "I don't understand."

  It cocked its head at me. “I'm a machine that knows the most important things he knows, and I think more or less the way he would. I have to tell you some things that Hua and the Consul don't want you to know."

  Of course I knew better than to believe that it was a machine. Szemnik must have thought the Republic was a bunch of cavemen, if he thought I'd accept that. It's true that we don't have the amounts of metal that we'd need for building our own factories and spaceships, but that doesn't mean we're ignorant savages. I'm no academician, but I know that a machine has certain limits. Our orchestra's grand piano is an amazing machine, with a small fortune worth of steel in its harp and its hundreds of strings, but it can only play eighty-eight notes, and it can only play the notes the pianist tells it to play. But in any case the fly did know things that only the Outsiders knew, so I had to accept that it did and knew the things it did and knew, without knowing what it really was.

  Hua had lied, the fly told me, when he said that he and Szemnik were on a survey mission—or at least he'd left out part of the truth. There'd been an earlier survey mission, forty-six years ago, carried out by a “probe"—which was another kind of golem like the fly, but much bigger. The probe saw that one of our glow-tubes was dead—as it has been for centuries, which is why we don't live in a steam bath like the Vieghs and Sinhala. It went on up-axis into Viegh, and it saw that their crop patterns had changed. Their wheat fields weren't producing as much wheat anymore. It landed to collect a sample (and I pity any farmer, even a Viegh farmer, who was there to see the thing come down out of the sky).

  When the probe got back, the Outsider academicians analyzed the sample. The wheat was infected with some kind of mold or fungus called a wheat rust. The rust liked the warmer temperatures in Viegh better, so it was only slowly spreading into the Republic. There was a deb
ate about it in the Outsider senate. (Yes, the Outsiders apparently had a republican form of government just like ours. The way the fly described it, the senate actually made the decisions, but I assume that was either because the creature was naive or because it was afraid it would be punished if it described the way a republic really works.) Their senate decided that it would be too expensive to fix our Republic's broken glow-tube any time in this century, but they could get rid of the wheat rust more cheaply, by releasing a kind of yeast that would kill it off. That was the main reason for Hua and Szemnik's mission.

  "Why is Hua keeping all of this secret?” I asked the fly.

  "Hua's gone native, and he's in bed with your government,” the fly squeaked. “I know Hua. He wasn't happy before. Now he's got his title, obsequious servants . . . goes hunting all the time, chases women. Your government doesn't want the yeast to be deployed, and that's okay with Hua."

  "Why don't they? It seems like the cure would be a good thing for us. The Vieghs already have the rust, and if the crud spreads to our fields, maybe we'll get short on food too. We'd be in a worse position than we're in now, and right now it's all we can do to keep the Vieghs from crossing the border, burning our cities, and raping our women."

  "Yes, but it's the Vieghs who are infested right now, and, if the cure works, they're the ones who will benefit. No more famines."

  "Huh—and they win the next war."

  "The humane thing to do is to release the yeast. Anything else is just delaying the inevitable final equilibrium while increasing the amount of suffering. The rust is spreading into the Republic, just not as quickly, because of the colder climate. It'll get here in fifty years, maybe a hundred at the most."