Pock's World

by Dave Duncan

  The station loomed above them, filling the sky.

  “Maybe now we’ll get some answers,” Ratty Turnsole said grumpily.

  * * *

  No, they got no answers. An impersonal voice welcomed them to Ayne 3. It warned them to be careful in the corridors and to ignore any sensation of falling.

  “Don’t you just hate it when a machine bids you welcome?” Millie grumbled.

  In fact Andre detested all talking machinery, but he had forgotten how much fun the energized corridors were, even if one took them with proper clerical decorum, standing upright as one was wafted along. They were circular in cross section, like gigantic wormholes drilled through the nickel-iron, their walls lined with some furry beige substance. With no effort on their part, visitors were swept along with their feet floating just above the surface. The two women went first, followed by Ratty, with Andre bringing up the rear. He recalled Cardinal Trinal jesting that this form of travel made him feel like a corpuscle in an artery and that he should have worn his red robes. Children would always try somersaults or handstands, of course, but the repeller field would keep them from hurting themselves. Now Turnsole tried to touch the surface, probably wondering if it was as soft as it looked. He yelped as he was set to spinning like a top.

  “Just relax and it will stabilize you!” Andre said.

  It stabilized him the wrong way around, so Ratty completed the journey facing backward, looking sheepish but not daring to try to right himself.

  The journey was a long one. The corridor passed unlit side tunnels and several times turned at right angles—then it was important to resist an illusion of falling vertically downward. Eventually the travelers floated into a lounge and were gently set down, held in place by local pseudo-gravity. There was no one present to answer questions, just seating for about thirty people and of course no windows deep in the heart of the probe. A wall screen showed a view of the world floating by underneath. In one corner stood a group of food dispensers and a small podium; in another a heavy metal door blocked the way to the entangler.

  “Where is everybody?” Millie demanded. “Why is there nobody here, answering questions, passing out snacks?”

  “This is hardly appropriate treatment for a blue-ribbon committee,” the senator agreed.

  “You want the scary answer?” Ratty asked.

  “What scary answer?”

  He was trying to hide his nervousness, but his confident air did not deceive Andre. “We’ve been forgotten. Pock’s World has been quarantined, the link is shut down, and nobody knows we’re here.”

  All eyes went to the way they had entered, which was now closed off by a door having no visible handle. They were deep in the heart of a nickel-iron asteroid.

  “Hardly!” Andre floated down on a seat and folded his hands in his sleeves. “We travel by way of Climatal and Pyrus, remember? The quarantine guard will be at Pyrus. What seems like discourtesy may just be an attempt at secrecy. News of our mission has not been made public yet.”

  Yet the absence of attendants did seem foreboding. Even the drab beige decor and the dim lighting were repellent. Andre had not noticed that on his previous visit, but then he had been too young, too excited, too starry-eyed to care. Also, there had been a lot of chattering people in the lounge—and STARS attendants, also, he recalled.

  “Tell us more about Pock’s, Brother,” Athena said. “I know that volcanic soil is very fertile. Pock’s and Prakrit are said to be the only habitable worlds without plate tectonics, but I don’t know why that matters.”

  “I’m sure the natives will be happy to explain if you ask them,” Andre said. “Their language is unintelligible, but STARS will surely hand out translators.”

  Mildred Backet sniffed. “I’m sure it can’t be worse than what they speak on Haven or New Winish.”

  It was, of course. Those tongues belonged to the same language family as Ayne Standard, but Pock’s had been settled from Malacostraca and its various dialects bore no relation to any language spoken elsewhere in the sector. The two roads that Adam’s children had followed to Ayne sector had diverged at least twelve thousand years ago.

  “What are the good points of Pock’s World, Brother?” the senator asked. “It must have some.”

  “Oh, many!” he said. “Its people are a happy, helpful folk. Adversity brings out the best in us, you know. When the clouds part, the scenery is stupendous. Active volcanoes are landscape extraordinaire. Also, the local fauna is so alien to us—or we are so alien to them—that they tend to ignore us. Bugs buzz in your ears at night, but they don’t bite you. There are places where the rain never stops and everything in sight is covered with mold and fungus, except the people, fortunately. Clothes and houses rot because they’re made of Pock’s local materials, but human skin doesn’t. It just gets dirty. Of course any world develops its own diseases in time. You will be immunized against those.”

  Andre decided he must warn them about time keeping. “Pock’s is, of course, a satellite of the gas giant Javel. Javel’s orbital period around the sun is approximately six hundred and fifty days, or almost twice an Ayne year. The translators will interpret this as a year, so an eight-year-old is pubescent. You keep track of years by watching the stars, but there is so little seasonal change that nobody bothers.

  “Pock’s turns on its axis roughly once every fourteen of our days. The interpreters call this a fortnight, or sometimes a half-month. You get bright week followed by dark week.”

  “You don’t mean,” Millie said, “that it has seven-day nights?”

  Andre was amused by her woebegone expression. “And seven-night days! Yes, I do. But it’s not so bad, because the world goes around Javel in close to one of our days. During bright week the sun is in the sky all the time and during dark week it isn’t, but Javel rises in the west every day and sets in the east. Javel is huge! It subtends an angle of thirty degrees. If its lower edge is on the horizon, the upper edge is a third of the way to the zenith. Javel gives plenty of light, believe me. You don’t miss the sun.” The Devil would not have found it hard to deceive pagans into worshiping the great planet.

  “So the interpreters refer to one rise and set of Javel as a day. The day officially begins when the world enters the planet’s shadow, and eclipse lasts about two hours. ” He looked around at their faces and laughed. “You won’t be on Pock’s long, so I suggest you don’t worry about it.”

  “Which will we have—day or night?” Athena asked, frowning.

  “That depends where we are on the world. And Pock’s is small enough that a moderate air trip can put you in a different longitude.”

  Director Backet and he had their backs to the door. Ratty and Athena were facing it. When Andre saw them register shock, he twisted around to see who had arrived—one man, large and imposing, with a bush of curly blond hair. His tunic was as blatantly close to indecent as the senator’s and probably as absurdly expensive. He was grinning.

  “I’m happy to that see you accepted, Athena.”

  Fimble looked furious. “Linn! Is this all your doing? Is this nothing but a cruel hoax?”

  The newcomer’s amusement vanished as he noted Ratty. “Hoax? Rather call it conspiracy to geocide, but it was none of my doing.” He walked around to take the seat next to Athena. “STARS invited me, and I suggested your name, that’s all. I didn’t know they would be stupid enough to include a sleazy muckraker like Ratty Turnsole.”

  Ratty wore the grin now. He looked delighted. “I couldn’t sink much lower than being in the company of Linn Lazuline, now, could I? Do you know this person, Brother Andre? Do you, Director? Friend Lazuline is the richest man in the sector. He has fingers in every shady deal on seventeen worlds.”

  “You keep your lips welded shut, Turnsole,” the newcomer said, “or I’ll see you spend the next hundred years in jail.”

  The reporter was blissfully undeterred. “He also owns more lawyers than all the judicial systems put together. He rarely follows through, though.
I showed his paw marks on the psychobed factory they uncovered in Tugrik. He blustered and threatened, but he didn’t dare file suit.”

  Ignoring him, Lazuline looked to Andre. “I know who you are, Brother. A brilliant choice for delegate.”

  “Hit him up for a donation!” Ratty’s tones conjured visions of snakes slithering. “A billion’s a nice round sum.”

  “Friend Lazuline,” Andre said, “has contributed to the Annatto Mission for many years through the Lazuline Foundation.” He saw no need to mention that the Foundation had tripled its donation after the Saint of Annatto nonsense. “Do you know Friend Backet, Director of Health and Population Studies for the Sector Council?”

  Mildred said, “Do call me Millie!”

  “I hope you will call me Linn.”

  Athena Fimble broke in angrily. “Let’s see if we can actually discover some facts about this fact-finding mission. Why did you not come up on the same shuttle as the rest of us?”

  Andre wondered why she was so suspicious. Was she hinting that she would have refused to travel with Lazuline?

  Linn studied her for a moment. “Because I was in Lagan when they called me, working on a hundred-million-libra takeover. It probably cost me fifteen million to close the deal soon enough to come. I flew up directly, just got here.”

  “You didn’t start this story of a Diallelon cuckoo just to help STARS in its political troubles?”

  “Me?” he scoffed. “Even Mudslinger Turnsole has never accused me of being a STARS racketeer. I am no friend of STARS. Its tariffs are obscene. No, I told you. Sulcus asked me to serve on the team he was raising. I said I would if you would.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because your reputation is that you can’t be bought and STARS is capable of buying almost anyone else.” Lazuline glanced around the group. “They certainly won’t buy Brother Andre there, and they can’t buy me.”

  “Don’t you feel all cozy when he endears himself like that?” Ratty asked Backet, who had flushed at the implication.

  “I was about to add, Friend Ratty, that they won’t fool you, which is something. As for—”

  Athena interrupted. “You believe the Diallelon report is a fabrication?”

  The financier laughed aloud. “I’m certain of it. They’re fighting the Mongo Bill, trying to scare people. Any evidence they show us will be faked. It’s a monstrous, age-old fraud.”

  The others exchanged glances. Ratty said, “Why do you think that?” just as Andre began to ask, “Do you really—”

  Andre began again, louder. “You truly believe that STARS intends to wipe out Pock’s World just to further its own political ends?”

  Linn turned a carefully sincere regard on him. “Believe? Yes, I believe exactly that. STARS has committed that same atrocity many times and gotten away with it. The funniest thing about belief, Brother, is that the more absurd the story people are required to believe in, the more strongly they will hold to their belief. No offense intended, but to an unbeliever your own faith seems like a perfect example. No doubt my tenets seem equally illogical to you. If you look at it rationally, the whole Diallelon scam is utter rubbish. Cuckoos, we are told, are artificial hominin species created out of our own—for reasons unknown, by persons unknown, at places unknown, starting at least twenty-five thousand years ago. They have an irresistible instinct to invade human-inhabited worlds, take them over, and destroy the Homo sapiens residents. That last bit I can accept, because there is evidence that our sapiens ancestors disposed of earlier hominin competitors with the same single-minded fanaticism. We deal with rivals within our own species in much the same way. But the cuckoos themselves are a mirage.”

  Director Backet broke the silence. “You cannot prove those allegations! You expect us to believe that you are right and everyone else is wrong?”

  Linn’s smile was brighter than a billion suns. “Not everyone else, Millie, just a lot of people, those who have swallowed the STARS propaganda without questioning it. It cannot be true! Where do they keep coming from, mm? The original cuckoo men, and all the more recent variations—the Soldier Ants, the Zombies, the Ghouls. They’re bogeymen, all of them! Whenever STARS’s monopoly is threatened, it invents monsters and burns another planet. Jibba, Malacostraca, Sweven, and a line of cinder worlds all the way back to Earth itself. We know of six sterilizations for certain and likely at least another four. That’s a world every three thousand years, and God knows—begging your pardon Brother—what else has been going on in other parts of human-occupied space, outside the tiny corner of it that we know.”

  Andre could not let this blasphemy go unchallenged. “In several cases the Church supported the sterilization. Are you suggesting that Pope Benedict was deluded into calling for a crusade against the Soldier Ants?”

  Lazuline glanced at the others as if measuring his support. “People who believe in one superstition are easily convinced of another, Brother. Only believers in God are frightened of devils, or witchcraft. Rational minds scoff at them all. Yes, I think he was hoodwinked. Either that or bribed.”

  “You believe that popes cauterize worlds without checking their facts?”

  “Albigensians? Hussites? Huguenots?”

  “Let’s stay with cuckoos. Benedict saw the evidence for Jibba. You will forgive me if I believe him before you?”

  “He saw something, Brother,” Linn said patiently, “or his representatives did. But STARS always insists that any world infected by cuckoos inevitably goes dark, and once the mutants have seized control they set out to infest more worlds, so an infected world must be destroyed as soon as possible! Whatever evidence was reported to your esteemed Benedict was incinerated with the alleged cuckoos. We have to take it on faith now.”

  Andre shivered as he sensed the overpowering presence of evil. “What I take on faith, Linn Lazuline, is that Diallelon abominations are the work of Satan and that anyone who defends them is doing the devil’s work.”

  The lights dimmed and brightened again. Control said, “Your attention, please. Entanglement is the safest form of transportation in the galaxy. You may now proceed to Climatal 2 Station, en route to Pock’s World. The door presently illuminated leads to the link cubicle, which will transmit you directly to your destination. Your journey will take no time at all, because the BERM in this station is maintained in a state of entanglement with an identical BERM in Climatal 2 station. Any change in one is instantaneously recorded in the other. Please enter the door one at a time and follow instructions.”

  “What’s a BERM?” Athena asked.

  “That’s the Bose-Einstein Reference Mass,” Millie said.

  Everyone rose. Linn moved toward the door, which had slid open, but Millie cut him off, scurrying ahead of him with unseemly haste. She stepped through, and the door shut behind her.

  “What’s her hurry?” the financier said.

  “She’s leading,” Ratty said cheerfully. “She is our leader. She just can’t talk as loud as you can.”

  The door slid open again, revealing an empty corridor.

  “Why don’t you go and keep her company?” Linn said with distaste. “With luck the entangler will malfunction.”

  When the reporter had complied, Linn gestured for Brother Andre to go next. He was unsubtly trying to gain a private word with Athena Fimble.

  When Andre’s turn came, the hem of his robe caught in the door. It opened again a fraction so he could pull it free.

  He heard the woman say, “…and I meant no!”

  “Think about it, darling. Where else could we be so—”

  The door closed.

  Chapter 6

  The door hissed shut behind Ratty, stranding him in another of the beige tubes. As before, he was lifted and swept along by some ghostly electronic wind. The journey this time was shorter but included three sharp bends. It was no comfort to know that those were designed to block any leakage of hard radiation from the entangler back to the waiting room. Too much knowledge was a dangerous thing.
Most people knew that entanglement was the safest form of transportation in the galaxy. Ratty knew that the statistics came from STARS, Inc.

  In moments he saw a doorway straight ahead. In sudden panic, he made a wild grab for the doorframe, but the system seemed to anticipate the move. It swung him around so that his hands touched nothing, then set him down within a metal box no larger than a cheap shower cubicle. The door closed.

  “Your heartbeat is elevated,” Control said. “There is no cause for alarm. Entanglement is the safest form of transportation in the galaxy. Please breathe deeply and slowly… in… out…”

  He told the machine to do some inning and outing of its own.

  “Take a deep breath and hold it…”

  Ratty also knew that entanglement’s fatality rate was one hundred percent. His body would now be scanned by a high energy beam that would record the atomic number, location, and energy state of every atom, but in the process it would blast those atoms away from the molecules they constituted and reduce him to nothing. The data would be transmitted to the BERM and thus to the other BERM at the receiving end, which would pass the information to a 3D printer that would create an exact replica of him, using atoms salvaged from other travelers going the other way. The replica would have all his memories and emotions, but it would not be the original Ratty. He was about to die. The fact that no one ever complained of having being turned into feedstock was no comfort.

  “You may breathe normally,” said a different voice. “Welcome to Climatal 2 Station. We are about to adjust air pressure. If you feel discomfort in your ears, please hold your nose and swallow.”

  Hiss. The door opened.

  He stepped out into a lounge almost exactly like the one he had just left, except that the decor was red and green, the lights a little brighter. It smelled funny, and a circular wall screen displayed a sunlit, cloud-streaked planetscape, mostly ocean. He felt like himself, not a doppelgänger.

  Backet was at a snack dispenser. “I am puzzled,” she said sourly, “by the absence of attendants. You’d think we were the ones under quarantine, not the Pocosins! I have never known these lounges not to be staffed by humans.”