Asimov's SF, July 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Social call for papa.” He could hear the running feet coming along the corridor toward the door. Would they miss the damage in the gathering smoke?

  “Extract, package, or kill?”

  Kill meant him, a stroke that would take his life and erase what he knew, painlessly, he was assured. It was the only way an out of uniform officer could choose to die, self-murder being an option denied to the kit stowed in their heads. Cushion represented herself on the wider shores of the public embroidery as a salonist, but she was also thoroughly job. She'd once walked Hamilton out of Lisbon and into a public carriage with an armed driver, keeping up a stream of chatter that had kept him awake despite the sucking wound in his chest. He'd wanted to send her flowers afterward, but he couldn't find anything in the Language of Blooms volume provided by his regiment that both described how he felt and kept the precious distance of the connection between them.

  “Extract,” he said.

  “Right. Looking.”

  She was silent for a moment that bore hard on Hamilton's nerves. Whoever was seeking them was now fumbling around like amateurs in front of that door. Perhaps that was why they'd botched the explosives. Hamilton feared amateurs most of all. Amateurs killed you against orders.

  “You're in an infested rat-hole, Major. You should see what's rolling out on my coffee table. Decades of boltholes and overfolding, hidden and forgotten weapons. None near you, worse luck. If a point time-stop opens there and collapses Copenhagen—”

  “If we punch out here, will it?”

  “Possibly. Never was my favorite city. Preparing.”

  Something went bump against the door. Then started to push at it. Lustre stepped carefully back from where the bullets would come, and Hamilton realized that, thanks to the length of the comms cord, he had no option but to stand in their way.

  He thought of moments with Annie, giving his mind nothing else to do.

  The thumping on the door was concerted now. Deliberate.

  “Ready,” said Cushion.

  Hamilton beckoned and then grabbed Lustre to him.

  “And in my ear . . . Colonel Turpin sends his compliments.”

  “I return the Colonel's compliments,” said Hamilton. “Go.”

  The hole opened under them with a blaze that might be the city collapsing. Hamilton and Lustre fell into it and down the flashing corridor at the speed of a hurricane. Bullets burst from the splintering door in the distance and tore down the silver butterfly tunnel around them, ricocheting ridiculously past them—

  Hamilton wished he had something to shoot back into their bastard faces.

  And then they were out, into the blessed air of the night, thrown to the ground by an impossible hole above them—

  —that immediately and diplomatically vanished.

  Hamilton leapt to his feet, looking round. They were in a side street. Freezing. Darkness. No witnesses. Cushion had managed even that. That was all she was going to be able to do tonight, for him or for any of his brothers and sisters anywhere in the solar system. Turpin had allowed that for him. No, he checked himself, for what was inside Lustre.

  He helped Lustre up, and they stared at the end of the street, where passers-by were running to and fro. He could hear the bells of Saint Mary's tolling ten o'clock. In the distance, the embassy was ablaze, and carriages with red lights and bells were flashing through the sky, into the smoke, starting to pump water from their ocean folds into it. Those might well come under fire. And they were the only branch of public life here that was almost certainly innocent of what had just happened. The smell of smoke washed down the street. It would be enough to make Frederik close the airways too. Turpin and Her Majesty the Queen Mother were being asked, in this moment, to consider whether or not the knowledge Lustre had was worth open warfare between Greater Britain and a Dansk court who might well know nothing of all this, who already knew those secrets. But rather than let a British carriage in to collect the two of them, they'd spend hours asserting that their own services, riddled with rot as they might be, could handle it.

  Across the street was a little inn with grown beef hanging from the roofline, pols music coming from the windows. The crowds would be heading to see the blaze and offer help in the useless way that gentlemen and those who wished to be gentlemen did.

  Hamilton grabbed Lustre's hand and ran for the door.

  * * * *

  He ordered in Dutch he called up from some regional variation in the back of his head some of the real beef, potatoes, and a bottle of wine, which he had no intention of drinking, but which served as an excuse as to why they wanted a discreet booth to themselves. Lustre looked demure at the landlord, avoiding his glance, a maid led astray. A maid, it suddenly occurred to Hamilton, in clothes that would raise eyebrows in London, being fifteen years out of the fashion. But they had no choice. And besides, this was Denmark.

  They vanished into the darkness of their snug. They had a few minutes before the food arrived. They both started talking at once, quietly, so that the landlord wouldn't hear the strange tongue.

  She held up a hand and he was silent.

  “I'll tell you the whole bit,” she said. “Fast as I can. Have you heard of the three quarters of an ounce theory?”

  Hamilton shook his head.

  “It's folk science, Golden Book stuff, the kind of infra-religious thing you hear in servant pools. This chap weighed all these dying people, and found, they say, that three quarters of an ounce leaves you at death. That being the weight of the soul.”

  “Is this really the time for dollymop theology?”

  She didn't rise to it. “Now I'm going to tell you something secret, For Their Majesties secret—”

  “No—!”

  “And if I die and not you, what happens then?” she snapped. “Because just killing me will not save the balance!” She'd added an epithet to the word, shocking him at the sound of it in her mouth. “Oh yes, I want to make sure you know that, in case push comes to shove.” She didn't give him time to formulate a reply and that was probably a blessing. “What kind of out of uniform man have you become, if you can't live with secrets?! I don't care what you're cleared for, it's just us at the moment!”

  Hamilton finally nodded.

  “All right, then. You probably haven't heard either, your reading still presumably not extending beyond the hunting pages, about the astronomical problems concerning galaxies, the distribution of mass therein?”

  “What?! What is this—?”

  “No, of course you haven't. What it comes down to is: galaxies seem to have more mass than they should, loads of it. Nobody knew what it was. It's not visible. By just plotting what it influences, astronomers have made maps of where it all is. For a few years that was the entire business of Herstmonceux. Which I thought odd when I read about it, but now I know why.”

  The dinner came and they were forced to silence for a moment, just looking at each other. This new determination suited her, Hamilton found himself thinking. As did the harsh language. He felt an old, obscure pain and killed it. The landlord departed with a look of voyeuristic pleasure. “Go on.”

  “Don't you see? If the three quarter ounce theory is true, there's weight in the world that comes and goes, as if in and out of a fold, up God's sleeve as it were. Put loads of that together—”

  Hamilton understood, and the distant enormity of it made him close his eyes. “That's the extra mass in those galaxies.”

  “And we have a map of it—”

  “Which shows where there are minds, actual foreigners from other worlds, out there—!”

  "And perhaps nearby."

  Hamilton's mind reeled at the horror of it. The potential threat to the balance! Any of the great powers—damn it—any nation, could gain immeasurable advantage over its fellows by trading intelligence with foreigners. “And this is what's in your head. The greatest secret of the great powers. But this is old news—they must have found a way to deal with it—”

  “Yes. Because, a
fter all, any of them could put together enough telescope time to work it out. As near as I can figure out, they shared the info. Every great court knows it at the highest level, so the balance is intact. Just about. I suppose they must have all made a secret agreement not to try to contact these foreigners. Pretty easy to check up on that, given how they all watch each other's embroidery.”

  Hamilton relaxed. So these were indeed old terrors, already dealt with by wiser heads. “And of course communication is all we're talking about. The distances involved—”

  She looked at him like he was an erring child.

  “Has one of the powers broken the agreement?!”

  She pursed her lips. “This isn't the work of the great powers.”

  Hamilton wasn't sure he could take much more of this. “Then who?”

  “Have you heard of the heavenly twins?”

  “The Ransoms?!”

  “Yes, Castor and Pollux.”

  Hamilton's mind was racing. The twins were arms dealers, who sold, it had been revealed a few years ago, to the shock of the great powers, not just to the nation to which they owed allegiance (which, them being from the northern part of the Columbian colonies, would be Britain or France), or even to one they'd later adopted, but to anyone. Once the great powers had found that out and closed ranks, dealing with the twins as they dealt with any threat to the balance, their representatives had vanished overnight from their offices in the world's capitals, and started to sell away from any counter, to rebels, mercenaries, colonies. Whoring out their services. The twins themselves had never shown their faces in public. It was said they had accumulated enough wealth to actually begin to develop new weapons of their own. Every other month some new speculation arose that one of the powers was secretly once more buying from them. Not something Britain would ever do, of course, but the Dutch, the Spaniards? “How are they involved?”

  “When I was halfway across this city, on my original mission, a rabbit hole similar to the one we just fell down opened up under me and my honor guard.”

  “They can do that?!”

  “Compared to what else they're doing, that's nothing. They had their own soldiers on hand, soldiers in uniform—”

  Hamilton could hear the disgust in her voice, and matched it with his own. Tonight was starting to feel like some sort of nightmare, with every certainty collapsing. He felt like he was falling from moment to moment as terrible new possibilities sprang up before his eyes.

  “They cut down my party, taking a few losses themselves. They took the bodies with them.”

  “They must have mopped the place up afterward, too.”

  “I was dragged before them. I don't know if we were still in this city. I was ready to say the words and cut myself off, but they were ready for that. They injected me with some sort of instant glossolalia. I thought for a second that I'd done it myself, but then I realized that I couldn't stop talking, that I was saying all sorts of nonsense, from anywhere in my mind, ridiculous stuff, shameful stuff.” She paused for breath. “You were mentioned.”

  “I wasn't going to ask.”

  “I didn't talk about what I was carrying. Sheer luck. I wrenched clear of their thugees and tried to bash my brains out against the wall.”

  He had put his hand on hers. Without even thinking about it.

  She let it stay. “I wouldn't recommend it, probably not possible, but they only gave me two cracks at it before they grabbed me again. They were planning to keep injecting me with the stuff until I'd spilled the words that'd let them use an observer to see the map. They locked me up in a room and recorded me all night. That got quite dull quite swiftly.”

  Listening to her, Hamilton felt himself calm. He was looking forward, with honest glee, to the possibility that he might be soon in a position to harm some of these men.

  “I gambled that after it got late enough and I still hadn't said anything politically interesting they'd stop watching and just record it. I waited as long as I could with my sanity intact, then had at one of the walls. I found main power and shoved my fingers in. Wish I could tell you more about that, but I don't remember anything from then on until I woke up in what turned out to be a truly enormous void carriage. I came to in the infirmary, connected to all sorts of drugs. My internal clock said it was . . . four years later . . . which I took to be an error. I checked the package in my head, but the seals were all intact. I could smell smoke. So I took the drug lines out best I could, hopped out of bed. There were a few others in there, but they were all dead or out of it. Odd looking wounds, like their flesh had been sucked off them. I found more dead bodies in the corridor outside. Staff in that uniform of theirs. There was still somebody driving the thing, because when I checked the internal embroidery, there were three seats taken. I think they were running the absolute minimum staff, just trying to get the thing home, three survivors of whatever had happened. The carriage was throwing up all sorts of false flags and passport deals as we approached Earth orbit from high up above the plane. I went and hid near the bulwark door, and when the carriage arrived at one of the Danish high stations I waited until the rescue party dashed on. Then I wandered out.” Her voice took on a pleading edge, as if she was asking if she was still in a dream. “I . . . took a descent bus and I remember thinking what classy transportation it was, very bells and whistles, especially for the Danes. When I listened in to the embroidery, and checked the log against what I was hearing, I realized . . . and it took some realizing, I can tell you, it took me checking many times . . .”

  Her hand had grasped his, demanding belief.

  “It had been four years unconscious for me . . . but . . .” She had to take a deep breath, her eyes appealing once again at the astonishing unfairness of it.

  “Fifteen years for us,” he said. Looking at her now, at how this older woman who had started to teach him about himself had stayed a girl of an age he could never now be seen with in public . . . the change had been lessened for him because it was how he'd kept her in his memory, but now he saw the size of it. The difference present between them was an index of all he'd done. He shook his head to clear it, to take those dismayed eyes off him. “What does it mean?”

  She was about to answer him. But he suddenly realized the music had got louder. He knocked his steak knife from the table to the seat and into his pocket.

  Lustre looked shocked at him.

  But now a man looking like a typical patron of an inn had looked in at their booth. “Excuse me,” he said, in Dutch with an accent Hamilton's eye notes couldn't place, “do you know where the landlord's gone? I'm meant to have a reservation—”

  A little something about the man's expression.

  He was getting away with it.

  He wasn't.

  Hamilton jerked sidelong rather than stand up, sending the knife up into the man's groin. He twisted it out as he grabbed for the belt, throwing him forward as blood burst over the tablecloth and he was up and out into the main bar just as the man started screaming—

  There was another man, who'd been looking into the kitchen, suddenly angry at a landlord who, expecting the usual sort of trouble, had turned up the piped band. He turned now, his hand slapping for a gun at his waist—

  Amateurs!

  Hamilton threw the bloody knife at his face. In that moment, the man took it to be a throwing knife, and threw up a hand as it glanced off him, but Hamilton had closed the gap between the two of them, and now he swung his shoulder and slammed his fist into the man's neck. The man gurgled and fell, Hamilton grabbed him before he did and beat his hands to the gun.

  He didn't use it. The man was desperately clutching at his own throat. Hamilton let him fall.

  He swung back to the booth, and saw the other twitching body slide to the floor. Lustre was already squatting to gather that gun too.

  He turned to the landlord coming out of the kitchen and pointed the gun at him. “More?!”

  “No! I'll do anything—!”

  “I mean, are there mor
e of them?!”

  “I don't know!” He was telling the truth.

  Professionals would have kept everything normal and set up a pheasant shoot when Hamilton had answered a call of nature. So, amateurs, so possibly many of them, possibly searching many inns, possibly not guarding the exits to this one.

  It was their only hope.

  “All right.” He nodded to Lustre. “We're leaving.”

  * * * *

  He got the landlord to make a noise at the back door, to throw around pots and pans, to slam himself against a cupboard. Gunfire might cut him down at any moment, and he knew it, but damn one Dane in the face of all this.

  Hamilton sent Lustre to stand near the front door, then took his gun off covering the landlord and ran at it.

  He burst out into the narrow street, into the freezing air, seeking a target—

  He fired at the light that was suddenly in his eyes.

  But then they were on him. Many of them. He hurt some of them. Possibly fatally. He didn't get off a shot.

  He heard no shots from Lustre.

  They forced something into his face and at last he had to take a breath of darkness.

  * * * *

  Hamilton woke with a start. And the knowledge that he was a fool and a traitor because he was a fool. He wanted to bask in that misery, that he'd failed everyone he cared about. He wanted to lose to it, to let it halt his hopeless trying in favor of certainty.

  He must not.

  He sought his clock, and found that it was a few hours, not years, later. He'd kept his eyes closed because of the lights. But the light coming at him from all around was diffuse, comfortable.

  Whatever situation he found himself in, his options were going to be limited. If there was no escape, if they were indeed in the hands of the enemy, his job now was to kill Lustre and then himself.

  He considered that for a moment and was calm about it.

  He allowed himself to open his eyes.

  He was in what looked like the best room at an inn. Sunlike light shone through what looked like a projection rather than a window. He was dressed in the clothes he'd been wearing on the street. A few serious bruises. He was lying on the bed. He was alone. Nobody had bothered to tuck him in.