“How can I possibly trust you?” her father said.
The little man cracked a smile. “That’s what my father said after I wrecked my first personal transport.” Aubry felt that she might like the man, but a voice inside her told her to be wary. After all, he might be anyone.
“I have a little device with me, encoded into my handshake, actually. It’s legal, but barely.”
“Where did you get this?”
“My organization has quite a few merci programmers and grist specialists as members. I can hook you up with your wife, on a merci sideband. Not full virtual, but it should be enough. Would you like to talk to her?”
“This could be a trick,” said Kelly. “It feels like a trick.”
“You’re going to have to trust me,” Leo Sherman said. “At least so far as to shake my hand.”
Her father frowned, then seemed to make up his mind. He looked down at Aubry. “If anything weird happens,” he said, “grab your brother and run like hell.”
And then he quickly shook hands with Leo Sherman.
Thirty-two
For Aubry, the handshake lasted only a few seconds, hardly longer than a regular handshake might. For Kelly, however, it seemed much longer. He found himself in an incredible press of bodies. That is, he assumed they were bodies, because he couldn’t see anything. Only touch, smell, and sound were coming through this link. And it was an odd sensation, the virtual equivalent to the smell of nervous sweat. He felt a touch on his hand, then fingers tracing the lines of his face.
“Oh, Kelly,” said Danis. “This is horrible. I don’t think they’re going to let me out.”
“Danis, I can’t see a thing. Is it really you?”
She didn’t answer with words, but with a kiss. It was really Danis.
“They were waiting with the Section C wording on that quantum futures contract. Kelly, it was as if they’d combed through my entire life, looking for something to hold against me.”
“We have to figure out a way to get you out of this,” Kelly said. He wanted to sound confident, but his voice cracked, and betrayed him.
“I’ve got a Friends of Tod lawyer,” said Danis. She slipped her hand into his, and Kelly could feel the pressure of her warm, dry skin. “He seems very good. But I don’t think it will help. He has told me about another option, though, if the hearing doesn’t go well.”
“What is it?”
“The society he works for. They have a . . . sister group. A group that isn’t legal. They . . . smuggle out free converts. Like me. They get them out in something like a pocketbook.”
“If they’re going to break the law, then why can’t they just use the merci? They could instantly broadcast you to Pluto—or anywhere.”
“The Department of Immunity has taken total control of the merci. I suggested that to my lawyer. Damn the iteration laws and make a copy of me on Pluto or wherever. But Department of Immunity security is preventing that sort of thing. They have new containment algorithms in place. I’ve felt them. They’re mean. They are quarantining free converts, Kelly.”
“All right then,” said Kelly. “What about this pocketbook smuggling arrangement?” He felt steadier with something concrete to discuss. They are trying to take away my wife! His mind still screamed. They are taking away Danis.
“There’s no guarantee,” Danis said. “And the ship they’re loaded on makes a roundabout trip. It could be months before I get out of cold storage.” Danis’s grip on his hand tightened. “Kelly, I don’t think I can leave you and the children like that. I don’t think I can do it.”
Kelly pulled her toward him. He heard a loud voice call out: “Agila 19, serial number P0874R30-Vl9, report for Hearing on Conditions immediately.”
“That’s the convert ahead of me in line,” said Danis. “I’m next, Kelly.”
He held Danis even tighter. “Get yourself smuggled, Danis,” he said. “Do it. I will find you. No matter where you are, I will find you. And I swear to you that I won’t let anything happen to the kids.”
“My God, Kelly, is this really happening? It can’t be happening. They’re going to take me away from my children, Kelly.”
“We will be waiting for you, my love. Always remember that.” I can’t lose her, Kelly thought. I can’t lose my wife.
“I can’t even see you,” Danis said.
“Nor I you,”
“You’re just a voice in my mind. And a touch.”
Kelly kissed her again. They kissed for a long time, holding one another in the dark. Then it was time for Danis’s hearing, and she reluctantly pulled away from him.
“Tell the children I love them,” Danis said.
They were her last words to him there. Kelly was pulled backwards, as by a physical force. He felt as if he were falling down a long shaft. There was the sensation of rushing wind, but nothing else. And then the fall stopped, and he was standing in the alcove at Leroy Port, shaking hands with the stranger, his children looking on with big, frightened eyes.
He withdrew his hand from Leo Sherman’s. “What about the children?” he asked the little man. “They’re half– free converts, you know.”
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to alarm you even more,” said Sherman. “But it is going to be a major problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your son will be fine with you,” said the man. “He’s young enough to fit under a nonseparation clause our lawyers have cooked up, as long as you allow them to attach certain security restraints to his convert portion. The Friends have people in the transport ships who can remove those programs, no harm done. The problem, Mr. Graytor, is your daughter. She might be let through, but she’s extremely precocious. I’m afraid that this fact has gotten into her records. They aren’t going to want to let Aubry go, period. She has the makings of a LAP.”
“They’re not keeping my child!” said Kelly loudly. The little man motioned for him to quiet down. “They’re not taking my daughter,” he said in a lower tone.
“No,” said the man. “We have to prevent that at all costs.”
Thirty-three
Aubry felt as if the ground had been pulled from under her, and she was back in free fall. First her mother was being detained, and now she was to be separated from her father, kept in the Met. They aren’t going to get any use out of me, Aubry told herself. I’ll kill myself before I’ll work for the Department of Immunity. But the promise sounded hollow, even in the flush of the moment. They could probably do whatever they wanted with her, and she would have precious little to say about it. She was only eleven.
“I’m eleven,” she said.
“What?” said Leo Sherman.
“I’m not a baby. Tell me what you want me to do.”
She felt her father’s hand on her shoulder. He gave her a quick squeeze. “Yes, tell us both. Do you have any idea how we can get out of this mess?”
Leo Sherman grinned. He seemed to have a normal-sized smile for his too-small head, and his teeth seemed to take up half his face. Then he was all seriousness once again.
“It’s going to be difficult, but there is a way,” said Leo Sherman. “There’s another port that is less closely guarded. We think we can get Aubry out there.”
“Then let’s go,” said Kelly. “As fast as we can.”
Leo Sherman shook his head. “You don’t understand, Mr. Graytor. We only have so much space. We’ve already sent three ships out, and we still have a lot of half converts waiting. Hundreds now. It could become thousands. After the war really starts, there won’t be any more ships getting out. Not so easily.”
“What are you saying?”
“Aubry will have to go with me. You and your son can go the normal way, and so you must. I’ll take her to the other ship.”
“You think I’m going to trust my daughter to a stranger?” said Kel
ly. “That would be worse than getting stranded here.”
“No it wouldn’t,” said Leo Sherman. “The Friends have learned of plans for work camps, Mr. Graytor. It’s claimed that all the computing power is needed to deal with the hostilities from the outer system. To model solutions.”
“That is absurd.”
“It is merely a rationale,” said the smaller man, “to allow the Department of Immunity to do whatever the hell it wants with free and half converts.”
“But everybody has a convert portion to their personality,” said Aubry. “Mine just happens to be a little more sophisticated because of who my mom is.”
“That’s right,” said Leo Sherman. “Everybody has a convert portion. We think it will start with the free converts, the ones without bodily aspects, and then . . . we don’t believe the Department of Immunity is going to stop there. But one problem at a time. We have to get Aubry to safety, Mr. Graytor.”
“I understand what you are saying. Who is we? I always thought the Friends of Tod were a bunch of—well, fuzzy-headed Mergies. All I see is you,” her father said. “And I still don’t know if I can trust you.”
“Mergies or not, the Friends are on your side, Mr. Graytor,” Leo Sherman began, then he was silent for a moment. Aubry realized he was hearing voices in the grist. “Danis Graytor was officially denied exit at her hearing, sir. There isn’t much time now. They may detain you and your son on suspicion of aiding and abetting.”
“This is crazy,” Kelly said. “I’m a Met citizen . . . I . . . all right. We have to come to a decision. Obviously.”
Aubry’s father put his hand to his nose, took it away. He touched his neck, kneaded his shoulder. “Obviously,” he murmured.
Aubry realized that she had to help her father. He was not going to be able to let her go off on her own, yet he could not keep her with him.
“You have to take care of Sint,” she said to him. “That’s what you have to do. You know I can take care of myself pretty good. A lot better than Sint is able. You have to let me go.”
“But you’re my dear. My darling,” Kelly murmured. “I can’t risk losing you all. I can’t—”
“You’re not going to lose me, Dad,” Aubry said. “We’re all going to get away from here.”
Kelly looked at her with fervent desperation in his eyes a moment longer. Then he seemed to pull himself together and be the man Aubry had always known.
“All right,” he said. “She’s going with you, Sherman.” He looked the other man straight in the eye. Many a stock-market trader had received that look and immediately put aside any plans to put one over on Kelly Graytor. It was the look that he gave Aubry when times for objections and complaints were over and it was time to do what her father told her. “I appreciate all you and your people have done for my family,” he said. “If there is any way I can ever repay you, I will do so. But, sir—” He put a hand on Leo’s arm, squeezed it, not hard, but, firmly. “Take care of my daughter.”
Leo Sherman looked him in the eye, right back in the eye, Aubry saw. Not very many people could do that so easily with her father. “I’ll treat her as if she were my own sister,” the little man said.
“Very well,” Kelly said, and released him. He turned to Aubry. “See you soon, Aubry. Your mother and I love you.” He opened his arms and she fell into them.
“See you, Dad,” she said. She hugged Sint, too, who was crying, and told him to take care of their father. Then Kelly took Sint’s hand and Leo Sherman took Aubry’s and the family went in opposite directions down the main corridor.
Thirty-four
from
Quatermain’s Guide
The Advantages of the Strong Force
A Guide to and History of the Met
by Leo Y. Sherman
Conclusion
The Met continues to grow, and changes often in unexpected and fascinating ways. Although the asteroid belt has proven to be a frontier beyond which current technology will not allow the structure to extend, every e-year, several new dendrites are added, along with the free-floating “micro-Mets” which exist in the reaches of inner interplanetary space and only come into direct physical contact with the larger Met at long intervals. The inner planets, while maintaining their importance, have gradually been subsumed into the larger system as well. After the disastrous terraforming experiments on Mars in the 2700s, it was seen that humanity’s best bet for living in space lay not on the other planets, but among them. In 2802, the Earth was declared an “Ecological Repatriation Area,” with limited construction and population growth allowed, and now vast stretches of our native planet have been returned to their natural state for all to enjoy.
Tensions continue with the outer system, which has never fully accepted integration into the directorate-based democracy of the Met, and still retains modified vestiges of the old Republic of the Planets governmental structure. New political and cultural challenges have arisen, including the push among virtual entities for “free-convert rights.” The ecological balance of the Met is another area not fully explored, and there are worries that some of the unintended grist feedback effects that doomed the Mars terraforming projects might surface again as the Met expands.
At its best, the Met is a place of adventure and fulfillment unparalleled in human history. We invite you to explore it in all its wondrous aspects.
Thirty-five
Fragment from the Fall of Titan
Dory Folsom couldn’t breathe methane, but she could damn well swim in it. So could her platoon. At least, that’s what they’d been told. They’d been scheduled for a trial run on the new mods before shipping out, but things had been stepped up, and there hadn’t been time. Nobody told them where they were going, but it didn’t take a genius to guess that it was somewhere with a good supply of liquid methane, since that was all they’d heard for an e-month: methane, methane—oh, and a brief refresher on nitrogen and the bends. And when you were talking methane in all its triple-point glory—solid, liquid, and gas—you were talking Titan.
They came in skipping off Saturn’s atmosphere to confuse the fremden. They skirted the rings (“Not too close, Cap’n, not too goddamn close!”) and used Titan’s thick atmosphere for braking. They descended like fireballs onto the moon. The fremden civs were totally surprised, and Laketown fell in a day. There was some fierce resistance in a couple of sectors of the city, however, and Dory’s unit was sent directly into the heat. It was literally heat, because some clever fremden gristwright had figured out that the big methane snowfall of the past two weeks was not methane at all, but military grist. To simulate snow, it had been given the same physical properties as methane, and one sure way to get rid of the stuff was to melt it. So the locals had used some countering grist and old-fashioned self-contained blowtorches to set their whole part of town on fire.
In the other parts of Laketown, the grist had fallen, accumulated to a certain point, then activated and gone about its tasks. These tasks were varied, but, for the most part, deadly. Some of it just ate a fremden alive, “digested” him or her, then went and ate some more. Some of it was preprogrammed to go after command and control—that is, both structures and people. The local governor’s face was imprinted on the minds of a billion tiny assassins, so it was no wonder that they got him, even though people had caught on by then, and he was dug in pretty deep. Some of the grist insinuated itself into walls, into machinery, into people’s bodies. There it took up residence and slowly replaced crucial structures in the “host” building—a driveshaft, a supporting girder, a ventricle valve. And then, on the day of the attack, it just dissolved. And there you were—or weren’t.
Some bright youngster was rooting the grist out of New Alki, a peninsula that stretched away from the city and formed a spitlike whorl out in Lake Voyager. Dory’s platoon, unlike the methane grist, wouldn’t burn and wouldn’t melt. Nevertheless, som
ebody had figured out how to make their own homemade evil snow, and Zavers, Dory’s buddy on the obstacle course (and her onetime lover), stepped into a puddle that wasn’t a puddle, and before anybody knew what was up, he was writhing and the “puddle” was crawling up his leg. The fremden grist must have compromised Zaver’s heating elements incredibly quickly, because within seconds he was frozen in mid-writhe like a Popsicle in pain. It was – 180 Celsius out there.
After that, they avoided stepping in anything that looked like liquid. The heat around them was a cold fire by the standards of life from Earth. It flickered blackly, only hot enough to melt the killing snow.
The platoon met their first human resistance near a clump of high-rise apartments on New Alki’s main thoroughfare. It was an ambush from above using some kind of projectile accelerator. They later found that the fremden had converted a railgun used for firing packets into orbit into a deadly weapon that could throw bricks at several times the speed of sound in nitrogen. The brick arrived, followed by a tremendous sonic boom. One of the bricks hit the sarge in the chest, and he exploded into a nova of goo. Another one hit near Dvochek, flung up some rocks that acted like shrapnel, and took off Dvochek’s right arm. The grist of his adaptation quickly sealed the wound; he lived and was able to keep fighting.
When the sarge died, Dory felt a new presence suddenly light up her mind, and she knew that she’d been picked by the lieutenant to replace the squad sergeant.
“Corporal Folsom, stand by for command communication protocols,” said the voice of Lieutenant Uhl in her mind.
“Yes, sir.” And there, in the midst of the brick barrage, she’d been made part of the vinculum, the Department of Immunity Enforcement Division’s Merced communications network.
Commanding officers in DIED infantry battalions didn’t communicate their will to their soldiers, they expressed it through them. This expression, flowing down the command chain of the vinculum from a soldier’s lieutenant, captain, major, and general, was ultimately a product of one controlling mind, that of Director Amés.
Tony Daniel Page 20
