The Long Run

by The Long Run (new ed) (mobi)

  Trent nodded. "If you wanted to launch a free load, how would you go about it?"

  "I wouldn't. It's a stupid idea."

  "So people keep telling me. But suppose you couldn't use the swatter and you had to."

  "Well..." The woman hesitated, obviously reluctant. "It's still a stupid idea; I'd wait until the swatter was repaired. But if I had to, I'd rig something to bounce the load, hmm ..." She paused. "A single superconducting ring is about twenty-five meters in diameter. I'd want to get the load at least fifteen meters above the ground, maybe five meters in front of the first ring, and then cycle the catapult while the load was still rising. The load would probably crash, but the catapult would survive. I think."

  Elsewhere on Luna that Sunday, a Peaceforcer webdancer named Benny Gutierrez arrived at Luna City.

  A message waited for Trent at the hotel when he returned.

  Passage arranged for January 4, 9:00 a.m. to 4 p.m.; the SpaceFarer ship Vatsayama.

  Good luck.

  Felix K'Hin.

  On Tuesday, Christmas Eve, Lan and Callia went into Jackson Town for midnight mass. The Temples of Eris were an outgrowth of Christianity, and though the birth of Jesus Christ was not the primary religious observance of the Temples, it remained important. Yevgeni went to bed early, and Trent sat alone in his hotel room, letting the Crystal Wind pour through him, retaining what data called attention to itself, letting the rest pass by.

  With a portion of his attention he composed a letter for Denice.

  Dear Denice,

  You will know, by the time you receive this, if the job I am about to attempt has succeeded. The letter will take a while to reach you, for it is going to be sent Federal Express and hand-delivered; I have been away from Earth's InfoNet long enough now that I cannot be sure that any of my old mail accounts are still secure from the DataWatch. Now that the PKF knows that I am alive it's not safe for me to try calling you again.

  If you and I are both still here in February, perhaps we can try again. Luna won't work now, not even Free Luna, but Mars or one of the Belt CityStates are still possibilities. I'm sorry that I have to do this--I know it will be harder for you no matter how it turns out--but I do have to do it. No choice.

  I think of you often--no, make that constantly.

  I love you.

  --Trent

  Just after two o'clock, early on the morning of December twenty-fifth, there was a knock on Trent's door.

  Trent sat on the bed, cross-legged in the dark. "Come in."

  The lights came up as Lan entered, still dressed in the dove-gray suit he had worn to Temple, and sat carefully, back straight, at the foot of Trent's bed. His hair had been styled, swept straight back from his face and tied in the neatest ponytail Trent had seen on Lan since he had known the boy.

  He held a green-bowed, gold-foil-wrapped present.

  "Merry Christmas, Trent."

  "Merry Christmas, Lan."

  "I brought you a present."

  Trent nodded. "I see. I don't have one for you."

  "I didn't think you would." He handed the box to Trent, and Trent turned it over in his hands. "Go ahead and open it."

  Trent untied the emerald bow and unwrapped the foil from the box without tearing it. The box, of hand-carved redwood, was about sixty centimeters long, twenty wide and twenty deep. It was hinged, with a small silver stud that Trent pressed to open it. The redwood box was inlaid with black velvet, and on the velvet lining sat a small pistol completely unlike anything Trent had ever seen before. Trent removed it and looked it over with clinical curiosity. It was small enough to be used as a hideaway, but the barrel's aperture was ridiculously small, smaller than that of a pellet gun. The barrel was extremely thick, about three times the size of a .22 revolver. He placed it back in the box and said, "Thank you very much, Lan. What is it?"

  The boy grinned at Trent. "Hideaway for either pressurized or unpressurized environments. It's basically a small mass driver, a rail gun crammed into a twelve centimeter barrel. It's only.15 caliber, but at top boost the pellet develops four thousand meters per second velocity leaving the barrel. You can drop the boost for target shooting, getting used to the gun, and then kick it up for serious work. At top boost you can knock over a PKF Elite who's running toward you. You probably won't kill him, but that's almost impossible anyhow." Lan paused. "Unless you throw him off a spacescraper."

  Trent closed the box, put it on the endtable by the bed. "He fell," said Trent evenly.

  Lan sighed. "I know," he said after a moment. "I saw the Peaceforcer recording of it. But seeing they're claiming you killed him, you might as well take credit for it."

  "Thank you for the gun, Lan. I appreciate the thought behind it."

  "But not the gift." Lan closed his eyes briefly, sat still for a moment in the pale gray suit. He opened his eyes again. "Trent?"

  "Yes?"

  "Why do we keep not getting along? I'm trying to like you."

  The words were spoken with such complete honesty that for a moment Trent could not find the correct answer for the boy. "I know you are ... I have a friend, Lan, named Reverend Andy. He preaches at the Flushing Street Temple in New York. He told me once that the problem with the Claw isn't that they're not sincere, but that they're a part of the problem they're trying to solve. When the Unification War ended, Lan, the Peace Keeping Forces were soldiers. They weren't police, they weren't DataWatch, they weren't the secret service they've become today. The PKF Elite exists today, Lan, because the Claw and the Johnny Rebs and half a dozen other organizations like them brought it into existence."

  Lan said abruptly, "Does Callia know you feel this way?"

  "I doubt it. She knows I don't want any killing; it's one of the first things we talked about. Beyond that, no, I haven't talked to her much."

  "I've seen you watching her," said Lan. He looked straight at Trent. "If you wanted to sleep with her, she would."

  "I thought so."

  "You do want to?"

  Trent said simply, "Yes."

  Lan nodded deliberately. "Then why don't you ask her?"

  "Because of a question I don't know the answer to."

  "What's the question?"

  "Lan, she's dedicated. To the Claw, to the overthrow of the Unification."

  Lan nodded again. "So?"

  "Do you think she would sleep with me because she wanted to, or because she thought it was the correct thing to do to keep me focused on the work?"

  "Callia always does what's correct."

  Trent shook his head. "Sometimes that's not the correct thing to do. I--find her very attractive. In several ways. But I refuse to be a part of her job. I'd sleep with her if it was what she wanted for herself. But I think she's forgotten how to think about herself. And that I don't find attractive. It's scary."

  Lan looked down at the bed, at the expanse of bedcover that stretched between them. "You're a very judgmental person, Trent. I really don't like it very much."

  "All that I've said to you is that killing is wrong. How does this offend you?"

  "Trent, sometimes it's not wrong," Lan said sincerely. "Sometimes it's the best thing you can do. Someone--I can't tell you her name, but she's very important in the Claw--she took Callia and me in when we were young, after our mother died and our dad got taken into Public Labor. Callia wanted to join the Johnny Rebs--it's a lot more popular in America than the Claw--but this person recruited us into the Claw instead. Trent, she taught us a lot, that we're responsible for both what we do and what we don't do. One of the things she taught us was that an ideal that's worth dying for is worth killing for. When Sarah Almundsen wrote the Statement of Principles she couldn't have envisioned the Unification turning into what it is today: the Public Labor work camps, the PKF firing squads. If she was alive today, Trent, she'd be with us. If you credit her with the Unification then you must also credit her with the deaths that followed from it; she killed more people than any other single human in all of history. And Sarah Almundsen's a
hero, Trent. I believe that."

  Trent took a very slow breath, held it, exhaled. He sat looking at Lan Sierran, without speaking, simply looking.

  Lan waited.

  "You and your sister," Trent whispered, "wandered out into the world, two nice young people without a thought in your heads. And somebody whose name you won't tell me took you and filled you with eloquent, nicely dressed ideas that translate into actions as horrifying and as evil as anything the Unification has ever done. Lan, killing is wrong. It's always wrong."

  Lan Sierran bit his lip. "I knew," he said after a moment, "that you were a thief. I knew that before we left Earth. But I knew you killed a Peaceforcer Elite, I knew the Peaceforcers said you'd tried to kill people at Spacebase One."

  Trent shook his head. "Lan, I didn't. I didn't kill anyone. I didn't try to."

  "I believe you. I hoped," said Lan seriously, "that you would be different. More committed. And it turns out," he said, with what he plainly considered a telling point, "that you're just a common thief after all."

  Trent stared at the boy for a moment with very real offense, held back the reflexive anger with genuine effort. "I," he said with icy self-control, "am a brilliant thief."

  * * *

  25.

  To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjecture.

  --Anatole France, La Revoltè des anges, 1914 Gregorian

  The next morning when Trent rose to go on the stakeout again, Lan was already awake and dressed, waiting for him.

  "I want to go with you."

  "Suit yourself," said Trent shortly. "You won't like it."

  They sat in the nearly complete darkness, from the moment when Trent turned the engines off at just before 10 a.m., until about 10:10.

  Lan said, "You just--sit here and watch rolligons go by?"

  "And crawlers. About one crawler for every eight rolligons."

  "I'm bored."

  "Audit a book. Or take a nap."

  Lan turned on his handheld, and the holofield sprang into existence just below the level of the chameleon's front viewscreen. Trent did not ask Lan what he was auditing, and Lan did not volunteer the information. Just before 11:00 a single rolligon ghosted through the pass beneath them; Trent did not think Lan noticed.

  About 11:15 Lan put his handheld aside. He did not turn it off. "I'm bored."

  "Take a nap."

  Lan, sleeping, took up three quarters of the chameleon's bench seat. He was a light sleeper, shifting positions every few minutes. Trent found it almost impossible to attain the state of reverie that had marked his earlier stakeouts. Even without running the data from his optic nerve through his inskin the glare from the handheld's holofield was bright enough that Trent could see the interior of the chameleon without difficulty.

  Trent gazed at Lan with a complete lack of expression. Lan's head rested against the glassite of the side window and his feet were in the well that was intended for Trent's feet. In sleepy attempts to get comfortable, Lan kicked Trent in the shins repeatedly. Trent finally propped his feet up on an empty spot on the instrument panel, and leaned back against the left hand sidewall of the crawler, arms crossed over his chest. On Earth it would have been an impossible position; even in one-sixth gee it was not comfortable.

  Noon.

  At 1:22 a Peaceforcer rolligon slowly moved along the bottom of the gully, forty meters away from the chameleon. The time flickered into Trent's awareness; two hours, twenty-eight minutes since the last one. Since beginning the stakeout Trent had waited as long as three hours and as little as twenty minutes between Peaceforcer rolligons.

  He watched the rolligon disappear into the distance.

  Suddenly he couldn't take any more. His shins hurt where Lan had kicked them and even in one-sixth gee his buttocks had gone numb from the position he sat in.

  "Lan." Trent reached over and shook the boy's shoulder. "Lan, wake up."

  Lan's eyes flickered open for an instant and then closed again. He didn't move a centimeter.

  "Wake up," Trent repeated. He dropped his feet down to where they belonged. He felt his heel strike Lan's shin and smiled. He thought about kicking Lan again just to get even. Instead he lifted Lan's legs and shoved them over onto Lan's side of the cab.

  Lan's eyes opened and stayed open. He glared at Trent. "What are you doing?"

  "This chameleon," Trent said, "isn't big enough for you to stretch out like that. If I was a midget maybe you could stretch out, but I'm not a midget. Stay on your own side."

  Lan sat up straighter and pulled his right knee up to his chest. He rubbed his shin. "You kicked me in the shin and you woke me up from a good dream," he said.

  "I'm really sorry about that."

  "I was having this great dream about a three-armed boy."

  "A three-armed boy?"

  "Yeah." Lan turned his head to meet Trent's eyes. Even sitting up and on his own side of the cab, there was barely a hundred centimeters separating them. Trent could smell the soap Lan had showered with that morning. "A great dream."

  Trent was not sure he wanted to know. "About?"

  Lan smiled slightly. "What would you dream about doing with a three-armed boy?"

  Trent stared at him blankly. "I don't think I'd dream of doing anything with a three-armed boy."

  Lan held Trent's gaze for an instant longer, then looked away. "Too bad. Would you dream of doing anything with a two-armed boy?"

  Trent didn't answer.

  The headlights of a Peaceforcer rolligon appeared in the distance and Trent sat forward, peering through the viewscreen. "Damn. Damn the evil bastards."

  "What's the matter?" Lan shifted slightly, leaning forward to look at the rolligon. His shoulder brushed Trent's.

  "A rolligon went by five minutes ago. Now here's another one. Why can't these people be regular? Their whole world is regimented, and the only time I ever want them to do something by the clock they come bopping along whenever they feel like it." Trent settled back in his seat. "You can't trust Peaceforcers to do anything right."

  Lan did not reply. Trent, sitting motionless in the gloom and watching the rolligon, could feel Lan watching him. When the rolligon's headlights had finally faded into the Lunar dust, he turned his head toward Lan, but the boy had already looked away.

  Lan pulled his legs up, sitting tailor fashion and, Trent noted, taking up more than his half of the seat again. The boy reached behind his head and untied the scarlet-black ribbon that held back his long brown hair. Lan ran his fingers through the pale brown strands of his hair, not noticeably neatening them, and retied the ribbon.

  Trent decided that a two-person chameleon wasn't big enough for two people.

  "I'm bored," Lan announced for the third time. He looked at Trent expectantly.

  Trent dropped his leg back into the well and turned to face Lan. "What do you expect me to do about it?"

  Lan sighed. "You can't think of anything to do?"

  "You didn't have to come today, Lan." Trent shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "You could have stayed at the hotel. That would have been a good idea."

  The boy reached out a hand and stroked the material of Trent's shirt with one finger. The touch was so soft Trent couldn't actually feel it. Lan grinned at him. "I can think of something to do." Lan's hand slipped down, curling around the side of Trent's waist. He was so close Trent could feel his breath as he spoke. "I can think of lots of things to do."

  Lan leaned forward and Trent put one hand in the center of his chest and pushed him away. They stared at each other.

  "I don't think so," Trent said.

  Lan relaxed and the distance between them widened to an enormous twenty-five centimeters. "No?" he said.

  "No."

  "Oh, well." Lan didn't seem particularly hurt or offended. The boy shifted over to his own side of the bench seat and said, "I've got another good idea then."

  "What's that?" Trent asked warily.

  "Have you ever blown anything up?"

 
"No. Well, yes. Two safes. To open them."

  "I brought some blasting plastic with me. Let's ambush the next rolligon and slaughter the Peaceforcers in it."

  Trent stared at Lan. "You're as crazy as a bird. Killing is wr--"

  "Wrong," Lan chimed in. "I've heard you say that. A lot. But if we don't kill them now we just have to kill them later."

  "You don't just have to kill anyone. Besides, no one is supposed to know we're here. You think killing a truckload of Peaceforcers is going to go unnoticed?"

  "Maybe," Lan said hopefully. And after a moment, "Are you sure you don't want to fool around?"

  There was a short silence.

  "I'd rather not," Trent finally said.

  "Why not?"

  Trent tried to think up a good answer. "Well," he said, "I don't habitually sleep with boys."

  "Oh? You don't habitually do it. Does that mean you do it sometimes?"

  "Well, no," Trent said. "I don't do it at all." He paused. "Actually, I've slept with Jimmy Ramirez, a friend of mine on Earth."

  Lan looked optimistic. "Really?"

  "But we slept. I mean, that was all. It was cold and there was no heat. And only one bed; the Temple Dragons never had enough of anything."

  Lan leaned back on his side of the seat. "You don't kill people and you don't have sex with boys." He examined Trent curiously. "Honestly, you're the craziest thing I ever saw."

  Trent said, "You mean you never saw one of those guys who ties up balloons into the shapes of animals?"

  Two more bodies arrived that evening.

  Callia Sierran was conspicuously silent to Trent for the next three days. The fourth morning was December the 30th, with only one day remaining in the year, only three days before the boost was set to go. Callia was awake and dressed, waiting patiently for Trent in the main room when Trent got up. Trent ignored her, made a thermos of coffee and fried two eggs. He toasted bread while frying the eggs, put mayonnaise on one piece of toast and mustard on the other, and waited.