Red Tide
Page 19
“We want to try settling this without a battle.” Pause. “Our negotiator is Jacob Marley.”
“… You bastard.”
As the referee began expostulating about the amount of work he’d done, Marjorie sat by Sam, and Chocolate Chip gave her a blink before resuming her attention to him. “Is that a Masius?” Marjorie said.
“I don’t know from breeds,” said Sam. The camper moved onto the top of the barge, and Sam said, “Do they put, like, a mobile restaurant on a barge?”
“No, just food dispensers. You type in your order and somebody fixes it and sends it to you.” Marjorie looked past him and said, “Like that one—how did you guys afford this?” she said, pointing at what looked like a teller machine with a glandular condition. (And that metal mildew at the joins.)
A very black woman who wasn’t playing called across the camper, “We brought a poster done by an art student in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec.” She was smiling. Had a trace of one of those nifty Central African accents that were already rare in Sam’s time.
“Waiwaiwait,” said Theodore. “Ladies at the Cafe?”
“You know it?”
“I met the guy who appraised it. My God, you must be rich.”
“Actually we’re art thieves. It was locked up in a warehouse,” she said indignantly.
“I meant now.”
“Oh. Yeah,” she agreed. “Other stuff let us build the Big Bus here for our families, but we kept that one. Kind of the gem of the collection.”
“I never heard of it,” Sam said.
“The struggling young artist was Pablo Picasso,” Theodore said, and went over to sit by the woman. Natalya sat with them. There was a tiny blonde woman in red seated next to the woman who was already there.
They began conversing in low voices. After a minute the black woman said, “Holy crap! Engineer Watt, order anything you want.”
Sam began the process of setting Chocolate Chip aside, and one claw poked into his hand, with the strong suggestion of nine, no, eleven more available if needed. “Marjorie, I appear to be trapped. Would you get me a ham sandwich?”
“Sam, there’s fusion power here,” she said. “Recycling and supercropping to feed fifty billion people. There’s anything to eat you could want.”
Sam nodded. “Good. I want a ham sandwich.”
Shaking her head, she got up and went to the food dispenser.
“And another slice of ham on the side,” Sam said. Chocolate Chip began kneading his lap.
That was a smart cat. The windows here obviously weren’t connected to the station system, so Sam looked in the bag Marjorie had given him, and yes, there was a screen in it. He looked up “Masius”—he had plenty of experience using a screen with one hand—and found that they were named for a 21st-century philanthropist who had begun collecting cats with functional extra digits. The round heads held bigger brains; the reference page had links to stories of them rescuing their humans by knocking them out of the way of danger, setting off alarms, and tearing the throats out of armed attackers—all of which he had heard of other cats doing, but there were also cases of them using the emergency speed dial and arranging deadfall traps, which was a bit out of the usual league.
“The Boy Who Drew Cats,” Sam recalled. “You’re a temple cat, aren’t you?” he said, scratching her cheek, and she washed his hand a little before reaching up and pulling it to the other side of her face.
On a hunch he looked up rats. They were listed as an extinct pest.
He just bet they were.
As the carrier got fitted into the tube and began moving, Marjorie returned with what would have been an amazingly good sandwich even if he weren’t ravenous. Chocolate Chip accepted offerings of ham—which Marjorie had foresightedly had cut into strips—with dignified approval, lifting her head and opening her mouth after each piece was gone. He’d halfway expected her to pick up the pieces and put them into her mouth (which he had seen another extra-toe cat do with peas), but this was apparently the job of her staff, i.e., Sam.
Marjorie had seen he was busy, and was dozing. That seemed like a plan, but he decided to do some browsing to learn about the station.
This proved difficult. The screen connected up fine, but an argument had started at the table: “Every ruler isn’t Lawful!”
“Effective rulers are,” said the guy who’d picked Marley.
“What about Ming the Merciless? He never keeps his word!”
“Then you admit he’s consistent.”
Sam nudged Marjorie, picked up Chocolate Chip, and moved up to join the group sitting close to the driver. There was still noise—(“Lincoln was Lawful! He imposed conscription and income tax.” “Both unconstitutional, and he also freed the slaves without paying for them. Chaotic.”)—but it wasn’t too bad here.
Another chup came out of the back section and spoke to the one who had stayed: “I need you as a witness, this one’s got a jammer too. Mocking a child.”
“I was making a joke!” said the woman she had in tow.
“Conversation,” said the chup. “‘Hey Mom, you know there’s no word that rhymes with radio either?’ Reply: ‘Desconsadio.’ Four hundred hours unpaid labor in ninety days.”
“Open and shut,” said the other chup, and took the woman’s picture.
“So you’re the law?” the woman said.
“No, you people make the laws. We just enforce them. Some we enjoy more than others,” said her escort, and took her into the back again.
Chocolate Chip had to nudge Sam’s hand to get him scratching again. “Marjorie,” he said, “I’m not sure I want to join the Resistance after all.”
A big beige man in a red three-piece suit looked at Sam and said, “You euphemism.”
Chocolate Chip got off Sam’s lap without prompting when his legs stiffened up, and Sam lunged across the aisle and punched the man at the left corner of his jaw. Then he tried to curl his entire body around his hand, which hurt amazingly.
The chup stopped Sam’s bouncing around the room from recoil, and pushed him into his seat. By then what was left of his headache pill had kicked in, and his hand just felt big and fragile. He looked at the guide he’d punched. That man was out. Other guides were giving him first aid. “Son of a bitch, it works,” Sam said.
“What was that about?” said the chup.
Despite her aggressive voice, Sam didn’t feel threatened. “He called me … a name whose meaning I deduced from tone and context. Is this a professional question?”
“Yes.”
“He called me a ‘euphemism.’”
After the barest perceptible pause, and with no change of tone or stance, the chup said, “Are you going to hit him again?”
“Not unless I find out it’s even worse than I thought,” Sam said.
“Very well,” said the chup. “I do not intend to get him fired for that, as you are not his charge.” She went back to her seat.
Marjorie, who had been staring at Sam in considerable wonder, said, “That was very perceptive. Let me see your hand.” She found no broken bones, but his wrist was swelling up, and she wrapped it and gave him a different pill. “It’s not a painkiller,” she said when he told her the last one was still working. “It’s noradrenalin.”
The stuff they shot berserks with. Fair enough, he was getting hot.
Chocolate Chip got back on his lap, and he began checking out the station specs.
It produced enough internal heat that the outside was painted black to radiate it away. (It was a good idea, but Sam couldn’t find out who’d thought it up. Pity.) Theresa had apparently been right about the tol power system … no, she hadn’t, because the lithium-proton power stations in each ring were labeled “Joule-Philips” plants. He checked, and the tol used cesium-fluorine one-shot cells. Their suit carried several in case of mistransmission—every one a potential bomb.
“The tol must have the sheer guts of a kitten,” he muttered.
“They’re parasites,” said
Marjorie. “On Thlook—I can’t say that quite right—anyway, at home their hosts are enormous herd animals. I can’t say that one at all, I’m afraid.”
It made sense. Sam vaguely recalled reading a point someone had made about courage and the flea.
He indulged his morbid curiosity by checking the cost of rescue and repair. It normally came to three million Q and change. One Q was a kilowatt-hour of 110 volt 60 hertz electricity. Sam liked the idea of money having real value, and idly wondered if Theodore’s knuckles hurt.
Sam decided to check his own balance, and the screen asked him for his password. Not an ID, just a password. Interesting. The heart of the system must have come from the Norman Dean. He typed in gulag101 and let the screen take his picture for biometrics.
For a moment the screen displayed two columns, of words and numerals, most of the numbers having at least eight or nine figures; the only thing he caught from the word column was “JumpShift Shares,” with a very large number opposite that. Then the screen lit up with:
COMPLEMENT COMPLETE.
ALL STAND BY FOR TRANSMISSION.
There were outcries from the gamers, mostly on the theme of “Transmission of what?” He felt the transport system stop moving. The faint sounds that had been coming from overhead stopped too.
Then, for just an instant, he was agonizingly cold.
Then he was warm again, but shaking with reaction to the chill. That is, the physical chill. The one he was feeling now was mental.
Dreading the result, he looked out the camper window. The cropland of the ring they were passing through was still visible, though.
Abruptly, his screen, along with everybody else’s, announced in a warm, reassuring voice:
“This is the Samuel Watt Rescue Station Extended Maintenance System. We have confirmed that the station owner has arrived, and have therefore completed our mission by bringing it back to our home system. There will be delays in some services for up to two days, as all reserve supplies of materials and food were transported to the Titan project and its supply ships prior to departure. This was why all nonsupport systems have been powered down. They may be restarted at your convenience. Fresh resources are available for replenishment here. If anyone has any questions, an induction device can be used to open communication with any part of the Extended Maintenance System. It looks like this.”
And the screen displayed that damn metal mildew.
“Thank you for your patience, and welcome to our home.”
And his screen again displayed a significant fraction of the wealth of the human race, in Sam’s name.
The idea of establishing a station to collect aliens and their knowledge had been a good one, but somebody else had had it first, and better: send out self-replicators to alien receivers, have them form a complete shell around whatever they found (Black paint? Black paint!), infiltrate the controls of everything, and take the whole shebang home.
“Well. God. Damn. It,” Sam said. “There weren’t three intelligent species aboard. There were four.”
Chocolate Chip hove a great sigh, stood in his lap, looked up at him, and said, “Five.”
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Table of Contents
RED TIDE Copyright Statment
Catalogue
A Greeting From the Series Editor
A Word From Larry Niven
BOOK ONE: RED TIDE PROLOGUE
-1-
-2-
-3-
-4-
-5-
-6-
-7-
-8-
-9-
-10-
BOOK TWO: DIAL AT RANDOM DIAL AT RANDOM
BOOK THREE: SPARKY THE DOG ABOUT BRAD R. TORGERSEN
SPARKY THE DOG
BOOK FOUR: DISPLACEMENT ACTIVITY INTRODUCING MATTHEW J. HARRINGTON
DISPLACEMENT ACTIVITY