by David Weber
It was like Dvorak to come straight at the question, Ushakov reflected.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “From what Vlad told us before he left, it’s unlikely many more of our kind will react as Cecilia did. Not at this late date. If we were going to, there should have been signs earlier, as there were in her case. But I’d be lying if I told you I can guarantee that.”
“About what I thought,” Dvorak said. “And I know you don’t lie, Pieter. But I also have to tell you there was some discussion about this point at the Cabinet meeting right after the Ghilzai fiasco. I’m sure you’ll understand why what happened in Naya Islamabad has a lot of my fellow secretaries’ knickers in a wad. There’s a lot of concern, and Charlie Mussett mentioned that—”
“That Longbow and I have been … less than eager to submit to examination?”
“That’s exactly what he mentioned.” Ushakov could almost hear the shrug at the other end of the phone. “Howell stood up for you guys. He had your backs—exactly the way you frigging well deserve for all of us to have them. But it’s been fifteen years, Pieter, and most of the ‘breathers’ don’t know you guys the way Rob and I do—the way Howell does. Cecilia’s made them … nervous.”
“Of course she has.” Ushakov let his friend hear an audible sigh and shook his head. “And rightly so. And Doctor Mussett has a point. We have been avoiding him on this.”
“I know,” Dvorak said quietly.
“I won’t pretend I’m pleased by the notion of … complying with Doctor Mussett’s request. That seems to be a general characteristic of vampires.”
“Really?” Dvorak’s tone was desert dry. “I wonder why that could possibly be?”
Ushakov snorted in amusement and shook his head again.
“As I’m sure you understand, Vlad has always avoided anything remotely like a scientific exploration of his nature and capabilities. Of course, up until very recently—by his standards of ‘recent,’ at any rate—that ‘examination’ probably would have been carried out by, oh, the Church authorities, and the consequences if they had determined a way to destroy vampires would have been … less than desirable from his perspective, shall we say?”
The slight but unmistakable emphasis he’d placed on the word “they” was not lost on Dave Dvorak.
“Pieter—”
“There’s no need for explanations or apologies, Dave,” Ushakov said gently. “I would vastly prefer, even now, to avoid what Vlad described as ‘exquisitely polite vivisection by the breathers,’ but the reason he described it that way was because he knew this moment would very probably come. As he says, we’ve all ‘come into the light’ now. The existence of vampires has been scientifically demonstrated and recorded for posterity, and it will never be possible for us to simply disappear again. More than that, Vlad understands that a technological, scientific age will want answers, and that which we fear the most is that about which we know the least. And much as we all hope there will be no more Cecilias, we can’t know that, nor can we know there will always be another vampire at hand to restrict the damage another Cecilia could do. So I suppose it’s not simply understandable that you ‘breathers’ want to comprehend our nature but morally indefensible for us to refuse to share that information with you when just one of us in Cecilia’s state could wreak so much carnage.”
“I hate it, but you’re right,” Dvorak said after a moment. “And as much as I hate it, I can’t tell you how grateful I am you’ve reacted this way.”
“It would do me very little good to react any other way,” Ushakov pointed out with a slight smile. “Besides,” the smile vanished, “Vlad left me and the others here to protect humanity. I can scarcely fulfill that directive by refusing to help humanity understand us … and learn how, if necessary, to protect themselves against one of us. Holy water, crucifixes, wooden stakes, garlic, and communion wafers seem unable to do the trick. Who knows? Perhaps science will discover a weapon religion has not.”
. VII .
AURORA, MINNESOTA,
UNITED STATES
“So you’ve decided which one you want?” Lewis Freymark inquired, looking at his daughter Jacqueline across the supper table.
“Really?” Janice Freymark smiled at their next to youngest. “Finally!”
“Don’t pick on me,” Jacqueline replied with a smile of her own. “It wasn’t an easy decision with so many makes and options to choose from. Besides, it’s my very first car, and I’m buying it with my own money, so I have a perfect right to spend however long I want to thinking about it.”
“Yeah, but do you have to take months?” her younger brother asked. Lewis Alexander Freymark was only thirteen, nine years younger than Jacqueline. He hadn’t experienced the Shongair invasion firsthand, for which his parents were profoundly grateful. And he had every iota of the typical kid brother’s attitude.
“I have not taken ‘months,’ pipsqueak.” Jacqueline’s tone was repressive, but her eyes twinkled. “I’ve only taken about one month. Well, okay—one and a half, if you’re counting. Which I’m not.”
“Gee, Dad always said you weren’t great at math, but I thought for sure you could count!”
“You are so going to regret that one,” Jacqueline promised.
“Come on! Admit I got you!”
“I shall do nothing of the sort.” She elevated the pert nose she’d inherited from her mother with an audible sniff, and Freymark pointed a finger at him.
“Don’t expect me to sympathize when she starts looking for somewhere to hide the body, young man,” he said. “Although,” he lowered the pointing finger and grinned as he extended his fist across the table for a fist bump, instead, “you did get her.”
“Riiiight!” Lewis Alexander said with a huge, infectious grin of his own that sent a fleeting jab of pain through his father as Freymark remembered the brother Lewis Alexander would never know.
“So, what did you pick?” he asked, turning back to Jacqueline with a smile that hid his own flash of grief.
“I’m going with Franklin’s Rapier with a second-tier upgrade option,” she said.
“Going to be a little pricey,” he mused, and she nodded.
“Really wish I could go first-tier, but I don’t think I can quite swing it now that I’m out on my own.” She shrugged. “And second-tier is still gonna be great!”
“Yeah, it is,” he agreed.
The horrible days of reconstruction immediately after the invasion were a thing of the past, not just here in Aurora but pretty much around the world. There were still places that wasn’t true—like Pakistan, which had actually managed to get worse following the demise of the Ghilzai regime—but anywhere the Planetary Union’s writ ran, the pre-invasion distinction between the “First World” and the rest of the planet had become a rapidly receding image in people’s rearview mirrors. The standard of living only a minority of nations had been able to afford before the Puppies’ arrival was now the baseline, the starting point, for the invasion’s survivors and their children. In fact, they’d actually achieved something very like a true post-scarcity economy.
There’d been some changes in how the economy worked along the way, of course. For example, prior to the invasion, Freymark was one of the people who would’ve had serious reservations about total government ownership of the principal means of production. Under the new economy, however, that was the basis for the planetary currency. In one of his few nods to U.S. chauvinism, Howell had decreed that the new currency would be called the planetary dollar. He’d also decreed that it would be backed by something a lot more concrete than the notional value of a fiat currency, though. And what backed it was the fact that the planetary government owned the deep space infrastructure, including all the Lagrange point printers and the entire resource extraction infrastructure. That was a concrete, quantifiable asset and the amount of dollars in circulation was pegged to its extent and expansion.
Every adult citizen of the Planetary Union was entitled to free education and
free healthcare—a lot more practical with post-invasion medical tech than it would have been previously—and a monthly stipend to pay for other needs, like food, housing, or anything else they chose to spend it upon. The MS was pegged to a basket of commodities provided by the private economy and was more than sufficient to maintain someone in relative comfort with access to public entertainment. It was not, however, sufficient to finance something like Franklin Motors’ Rapier. Anyone could save up for a major purchase by economizing in other areas of his life, but the majority of people had jobs to bring in extra income. An awful lot of them—like Jacqueline, actually—were employed in the booming virtual-reality field. Given the uptick in leisure time and income, entertainment was in greater demand than ever before, although the majority of the PU’s member states had enacted legislation limiting the total number of hours per week any of its citizens could spend in VR. Most of them allowed people to “bank” hours—up to a point, at least—but there’d been some nasty experiences when post-invasion level virtual-reality became available.
Another huge chunk had jobs in the public sector, working directly for the PU, one of its member states, or a local municipality. Others were self-employed consultants, fashion advisors, physical fitness coaches, or provided any number of personal services to a human race which was far more affluent than it had ever been before. But there was also, somewhat to Freymark’s surprise, a robust manufacturing sector.
It wasn’t quite like any manufacturing sector he’d ever imagined before the invasion, however. Instead, companies—or individuals—created copyrighted designs for consumer goods and either rented printer time from the government or owned their own private printers—many of them in near-Earth orbit, but more of them conveniently located on the planet’s surface. The only physical limiting factor on production was printer speed, really, and something like Jacqueline’s Rapier could probably be printed out in no more than an hour or so, so most of the entrepreneurs involved followed the same pattern as Franklin and printed only after an order had been placed and paid for. Managing production flow so that someone didn’t get tired of waiting an entire two or three days, sometimes, could be a little tricky, but the real battle was in marketing. In finding the tweak that would appeal to the broadest customer base and then convincing those customers that they really, really needed your product and not some other inferior piece of junk.
Before the invasion, Freymark had been accustomed to auto manufacturers beginning design of the next year’s model even before this year’s had hit the showroom floors. Now things like the Rapier were individually customized to the buyer’s requirements—for a suitable upcharge, of course—and “next year’s models” were being introduced on a daily basis, literally. And quite a lot of “last year’s models” were being traded in for their reclamation value when the latest, newest, best, brightest, shiniest version became available, and someone just had to have it.
He didn’t know how the system would ultimately evolve, but he’d been more than a little surprised by how well the human race in general appeared to be adapting to it. By any pre-invasion standard, there was an awful lot of conspicuous consumption going on, but apparently the need to be productive truly was hardwired into the human psyche. It might be that fifteen years simply wasn’t long enough to eradicate a “need” which had been created by grim necessity, but he didn’t think so. He thought it went deeper than that.
And then there was the never-forgotten threat of the Hegemony, the Sword of Damocles hanging over humanity’s collective head. A certain froth—normally he preferred the term “scum”—had floated to the surface, arguing that simply because the Shongairi had been nasty, genocidal monsters, there was no reason to assume the Hegemony as a whole would feel the same way. He didn’t have a lot of patience with that viewpoint. In his opinion, a lot of them were from the side of the mental tracks which just had to prove its superiority by adopting a contrarian position. That, after all, demonstrated their intellectual fearlessness and willingness to think outside the box. On the other hand, in his more charitable moments, he acknowledged that as yet Earth had no firsthand experience with the Hegemony as a whole. The Shongairi might not be as typical as most folks assumed, and it was possible—possible—that the critics of the anti-Hegemony viewpoint might have a point. That, however, was the sort of mistake one only got to make once, and as his father had said, the one virtue of pessimism was that any surprises would be pleasant ones.
For the vast majority of human beings, the threat of the Hegemony was taken as a given, and that focused a great deal of creative effort on ways to help mitigate that threat. Quite a few engineering and research firms had sprung up, offering both collaborative and competitive designs to the Planetary Armed Forces and building prototypes using their own printers or rented government printer time, and recruiters for the PAF itself had pretty much as many volunteers as they could use.
“So, which of the second-tier mods are you planning to add?” he asked his daughter now.
“I’m going with the Apollo package and adding a full VR HUD plus the level six counter-grav and the full manual control option.”
“You really think you need transatmospheric capability, Honey?” Janice Freymark asked, raising her eyebrows.
“I probably don’t need it, Mom, but it’d be handy to have. For example, that convention on the Othello Platform. Next time, I’ll be able to hop into my own car, scoot up to orbit, and have it available once I get there instead of having to use public transport or carpool. And it’s only another thousand bucks or so.”
“I’m a little more leery about that manual control option, especially with the counter-grav you’re talking about, young lady,” Freymark said. “That kind of acceleration and velocity can get away from you in a hurry if you’re flying by hand and relying on the Mark One eyeball.”
“Oh, Dad!” Jacqueline’s eye roll reminded him of a much younger daughter. “First, I’m a really good driver—you know that as well as I do. Second, that’s why I want the full VR HUD. I don’t have any intention of flying by eye! Besides, Franklin won’t sell a manual control without a mandatory backstop AI override.”
“That’s true,” he acknowledged. “On the other hand, wasn’t it just last week some idiot boy child managed to hack around his backstop and kill his fool self?”
“That was a boy child,” Jacqueline pointed out, ignoring a rude sound from Lewis Alexander. “And I believe you were the one who pointed out to me years ago that one of the few immutable rules is that stupidity is ultimately its own punishment.”
“Yes. Yes, I did.” He smiled at her, then shrugged.
“Your money; your car; your decision,” he said. “I assume you’ve at least taken your design for a test drive, though?”
“Only in VR, so far, but Franklin has an option. For an extra two hundred, they’ll print the car and let you drive it for a month while you decide whether or not it’s what you want. If you decide it isn’t, they’ll take it back, no questions, for reclamation, and you can swap it for another model of equal value, if you want to. Or even upgrade the one you already bought by paying the difference. Not a bad deal.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said thoughtfully, and looked at Janice. “Weren’t you looking at one of Franklin’s designs last week, Honey?”
“The car I’ve got is perfectly fine, Lewis.”
“Didn’t say it wasn’t, but your birthday’s coming up. So, weren’t you looking at one of them?”
“Well, yes. I was looking at the Cirrus. It’s not as flashy as the Rapier, but it’s nice. And it’s got some nice mod packages.”
“In that case, why don’t you and I hop into the Net tomorrow and take a test drive? If you decide you really like it, then maybe I’ve got your birthday covered early!”
“Way to surprise somebody with a gift, Dad,” Lewis Alexander pointed out.
“Silence, undutiful child!” his mother said sternly. “Don’t interrupt your father when he’s giving me exa
ctly what I want for my birthday!” She glowered at him for a moment, then relented and looked around the table. “So, who’s ready for dessert?”
. VIII .
BIOLAB THREE, SPACE PLATFORM BASTION,
L5 LAGRANGE POINT
“Hi, Uncle Pieter!”
Pieter Ushakov looked up from the book reader as Maighread Dvorak—Doctor Maighread Dvorak now, actually—walked into the comfortable, if sterile, waiting room. She’d changed a lot from the huge-eyed nine-year-old he’d met in the North Carolina mountains, he thought. She was never going to match her father’s or brother’s towering inches, but she was five inches taller than her mother and she moved with a springy, athletic grace. She was twenty-four now, he realized, although she’d begun the antigerone treatments early enough that she looked like someone scarcely out of high school, and according to rumors, she and her sister—both avid soccer players—were more than capable of holding their own on the soccer pitch against Vice President Olatunji. Now she crossed to him with rapid strides and threw her arms around his neck.
“It’s so good to see you!” she said, hugging tightly.
“Hello, Maighread,” he replied, just a bit less effusively, and put one arm around her to hug back.
“Not too crazy about this, are you?” she asked sympathetically, standing back with her hands still on his shoulders.
“I believe one might reasonably put it that way.” He quirked a smile at her. “Still, if I must submit to being poked and prodded, at least there will be a friendly face involved. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Uncle Pieter.” She squeezed his shoulders briefly, then stood back and shoved her hands into the pockets of her traditional white lab coat. “I hope you’ve marked your calendar for the wedding?”
“I will most assuredly be there,” he said, smiling more broadly. “That is, I’ll be there unless you think the fearsome vampire’s reputation will frighten off your young man?”
