Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System

by T. K. F. Weisskopf

  "Ah." She took my hand and, unzipping her jumpsuit, guided it inside her clothing. Like so many women on the moon, she'd abandoned bras, and so it was her bare breast that nestled in my hand, warm, round, and soft. "Emma and you?" And gazing up at me with her dark and solemn eyes, she undid my coverall. "Burrow? Yes?"

  It was the luckiest misunderstanding of my life.

  * * *

  Poor Banter wasn't sure which of us to be more pissed at. Me, for getting Emma first—or Emma, for reasons I'm not sure that I totally understand.

  "I can't shake the feeling that she's using you to get something." Banter complained but helped me move Emma's stuff to the new burrow.

  "You know, if I wasn't so incredibly mellow at this moment, I'd be offended."

  "Laugh it up, Monkey Boy, but it's fishy that you tell her that she can't move into a burrow alone and she jumps the closest human."

  "Ah." I made noises to make her happy. "You see, Banter, that's the difference between men and women. When a truly desirable female says 'let's have sex' you ask 'why?' and I say 'yes!' "

  "Okay, I agreed that she's totally hot, but there's something a little creepy about all this." Banter picked up one of the photographs. "For example, these pictures. None of them are from Earth; she's taken them all up here. She's got the archive feature on." Banter pointed out the timestamp and record counter; by coincidence she'd gotten the first one Emma'd taken. It was of Mel and Bucky, the unofficial "King and Queen" of the moon.

  "That's just Mel for you." I took the picture off of Banter and packed it in the crate. "Mel has to be first for everything. First woman on the moon. First permanent colonist. First documented fuck. First wedding. I hear she's trying for first baby too; claims her biological clock is ticking."

  "I still think its weird; none of them are of you."

  "Well, there's none of you either," I countered.

  Ethan had discovered electricity. Fiona set herself on fire. Gerald garroted himself. Hitomi chewed on hemlock. Honestly, we tried not to laugh about it. Io, at least, broke the pattern and was hit by a cargo carrier and killed.

  All things considered, Emma took the death of her monkeys well. She'd insist on cleaning up whatever mess, apparently so she could fully document the monkey's accident. Only after she sent off her reports, and all her work was done, would she grieve, surrounded by the photographs of the bright, smiling human couples. I tried to keep Emma distracted until the next monkey arrived, which truthfully, was quite pleasant on my part, and taught her English, because really, as much as I liked the sex, I wouldn't mind a conversation once in a while.

  Now, Banter, I worried about, as she was showing all the signs of becoming a stalker.

  "She uses the heaviest level of encryption!" Banter cried.

  "You're hacking her communication?"

  "Yes! She's hiding something here."

  "She's doing simple scientific research!"

  "On primate development? On the moon? When are monkeys going to build spaceships to the moon?"

  "Oh, cut us some slack, Banter. We've got guinea pigs, chickens, rabbits, cats, a dog, and a current mouse problem. If we're going to be a true colony, we need to be able to live a full, real life here, and animals are part of it."

  "Cats and dogs, yes, but monkeys, no. We're not going to have monkeys here. Look at the trouble they get in. Io survived the longest, but that was only a week. Emma is doing something more than development studies. What kind of research is she doing?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "You're not sure? What the hell does she do all day?"

  "She watches the monkey play and takes a lot of notes." Obviously that wasn't enough for Banter, so I added another data point. "She did a full computer rendering of the burrow when we first moved in, and when a monkey gets hurt or killed, she does a computer simulation of the accident."

  "Hurt?"

  "Well, not everything kills monkeys; there's been nonfatal accidents."

  "Like what?"

  "Well, the thing with the organic trash processor." I mimed sticking my hand down into a hole. "It turns out that hole is large enough for their hands to fit down." Banter looked horrified. "It didn't cut anything off! Hitomi just needed a few stitches. Besides, Emma must have sent in a report, because Earth already shipped up smaller access plates for all the burrows."

  I found out about Mel's newest "first" and the answers to Banter's question just the next day. I came home to find Emma acting like another monkey had died, when the next wasn't scheduled to arrive until the day after.

  "What's wrong?"

  "So sad," Emma stared at a printout in her hands. "Mel knows."

  "What does Mel know?" I gently took the printout. It had two names on it. John Thomas. Sarah Jane. "I don't understand."

  "Mel make list," Emma said. "She say: no use names for monkey."

  "These names?" I asked and got a sad nod of her head. "Why not?"

  "No dead monkey with baby name."

  "Ah." And then a heartbeat later, "Mel's having a baby?"

  "Eight months. So little time. So little monkeys."

  I stood pondering that for a minute and it all clicked together for me. "You've been baby-proofing the moon with the monkeys! That's—that's . . ."

  I was going to say "so wrong" but would I rather it had been a child killed by the toilet, the fans, the trash processor, and all the other ways that Emma's monkeys been hurt and killed? The list was already very long. I suppose that we'd been baby-proofing Earth for hundreds of years, but infants were still being killed. Somehow this insane plan to use monkeys as a crash course in safety made . . . sense.

  Emma looked at me warily. "No one can know about my monkey business."

  "Why not?"

  "No tell," she said firmly. "Monkey must go where there is trouble. No one wants a dead monkey."

  Which was true. If people knew what Emma was doing, they'd try to stop her, and as she pointed out, we had very little time before Mel's baby arrived.

  So here we are, Sarah Jane Bucknell was born yesterday, and Xavier has managed to last a full month. Earth has shipped Ying and Zoey, just in case, and I can truthfully say my life is a barrel of monkeys. And we're hopeful that no monkey will die before its time.

  EARTH'S FIRST IMPROVED CHIMP GETS JOB AS A JANITOR

  Meanwhile, back on Earth, another story about humanity's closest relatives, by the author of the Posleen Wars series.

  John Ringo

  "No, Mark. You can't." Mark Second had heard those words too many times in his life. The student's dark face did not flicker but the coach still had a wary look in his eye. "It's not my rule, Mark. It's the rule of the High School Sport Board. Anyone with 'excessive enhancement' cannot participate in intramural sports. Period."

  "Why not?" asked the exasperated teenager. He knew the true answer but he wanted the coach to admit it. His features were as still as granite despite his fury. "Or rather, 'why me?' Half the kids in school have one modification or another. What? You don't think Patty Rice naturally has that curly, platinum blond hair? Do you?"

  "They're not built from the ground up, Mark," said the heavyset football coach with a cautious shrug. "They're just . . . fixed. They're not specifically designed for . . . physical activity the way you are. They're not—"

  "Monsters," said Mark, bitterly.

  "That's not it," said the adult, watching the still, flat, square face across from him carefully. Mark never showed what he was thinking, which was one of the things that frightened people. It was currently frightening the burly former football player. Teachers had learned to worry about the quiet ones, the outcasts. Regular troublemakers were bad enough, but the education system had slowly learned that it was the ones who just took it and never fought back that exploded. And if this one ever went mokker nobody would be able to stop him. "Their changes didn't come from illegal genics. Kids like Patty and Tom have the normal, limited enhancements. The sort of thing that anybody can get done through body surgery. You
rs are—"

  "Evil," Mark finished for him, snarling. He flexed a thigh-thick forearm. "Frightening."

  "You keep saying things like that," snapped the coach, becoming exasperated. He gestured at Mark as if to take in the whole picture; the armored forehead, the flat, masklike face with eyes set deep in ripples of bone, the tree-trunk legs, the expanded, armored and massively muscled chest. "The rule was practically designed for you, Mark. Putting you on the field with regular kids would be like them playing a Pop Warner team! You're different; face it!"

  "So I have to stay the school outcast, huh?" asked the teenager, his face finally starting to show his anger. "Is that the bottom line?"

  "Sports won't change that, Mark," said the adult with a sigh, losing his anger as fast as it had developed. "Only you can."

  "Get real," snarled the student. "You don't live this life, I do." He stood up, nodded at the coach and stalked out.

  The coach waited until the door cycled closed and sighed in relief. As the designated enforcement officer for the Delta Wing of the school he had had to take down more than one mokking student. But he was afraid if that one ever cracked it would require a bazooka.

  Mark walked up to his locker and took a long, cleansing breath. Then another. Stress management exercises were his earliest conscious lessons, even before reading. How to confront and manage the anger, the easy descent into berserk rage, that was his heritage. He took another breath, feeling the trickle of ultraline he had been unable to contain fritter away against the wall of his control. Breathe in, breathe out. Let the rage subside. All in the mind.

  He looked hard at the poor inanimate locker but finally resisted punching it. Not only would he, probably, break a knuckle, the punch would undoubtedly shatter the security plastic. And he didn't need the resulting whispers added to the current around him. Breathe in, breathe out. He leaned his head against cool plastic, hoping that some lightning bolt would just strike him dead on the spot. Maybe if he just stayed here until the end of school. Or, at least, until the next PE class came in.

  As it was, he stayed there, leaning on the plastic, until his shoes became wet.

  "Some super-soldier," opined a gravelly voice. "You've got lousy situational awareness."

  Mark leaned back and cracked an eyelid. The Imp janitor peered back at him with soft brown eyes as the kid examined the mop resting on his shoes. "I'm not a super-soldier," said Mark, tiredly. "I'm not any kind of soldier. I've never held a gun. I don't want to hold a gun. But I would like you to take your mop off my shoes; you're getting my feet wet."

  "Okay," said the improved chimpanzee, pulling the mop back. "But I need to mop the floor."

  "Could you maybe give me a minute," said Mark in a low, growling tone. He rarely let himself sound like that because most people found it intimidating. And that didn't help his reputation either. How-ever, he really didn't have any interest in moving. And the damn chimpanzee was getting on his nerves.

  "Kid, I'm not in the mood for adolescent angst right now," said the unintimidated Imp. "I'd like to finish this floor. See, if I finish the floor, I can go prop my feet up for a few minutes and have a coffee and a banana. But, until I finish it, I gotta stay on my dogs. So, I'd really like you to move. Okay? Just, stand on the bench or something."

  Mark bemusedly climbed up on the locker room bench as the janitor swept the mop efficiently back and forth. "Aren't there robots to do that?" the student asked. He had sort of noticed janitors around the school, but he'd never really thought about them. However, this was the first person in a long time who recognized him for what he was and didn't act scared.

  "Yeah," answered the Imp, expertly flicking the butt of a joint out from under the bench and into the mop bucket. The janitor must have been an earlier model; he seemed both quicker and more intelligent than the current norm. Pan sapiens was a diverse species. There had been a variety of early experiments before the current "normal" form was settled on, and then, in the wave of revulsion after the Oligen Incident, locked in by legislation. "But robots are lousy at getting under benches. It's easier to just mop the hard stuff myself and leave the robots for the hallways at night."

  "Was mine the last gym class?" asked Mark, stripping off his shirt. The sweat-soaked jersey was the result of a few warm-ups and a solid forty minutes in the weight room fast-pumping four times his body weight; nobody was going to ask him to join the scheduled basketball game.

  "Yep. Then I go get a banana until you brats get out of the buildings. Turn on the robots, turn off the lights and go home."

  "Seems like an easy enough job," said Mark, pulling on a baggy, button-down shirt. The loose cotton concealed his Herculean physique, but nothing could conceal his face.

  "Sure, sure, kid," snorted the janitor. "Every day's a holiday and every meal's a banquet."

  Mark slowed in buttoning the top button of his shirt and treated the chimpanzee to a quizzical look. "I've heard that somewhere before."

  "Well, I didn't say I made it up," said the chimp, dumping the mop in his bucket and regarding the kid mildly. "Tell you what, kid, wanna banana?"

  "I should be getting back to class," said Mark with a sigh.

  "Screw it," laughed the chimp. "It's algebra. You can afford to skip a day."

  "How did you know what class I'd be taking?" asked the genie, interested.

  "I got eyes, kid," said the chimp, pointing to his deep-set orbs. "Just like yours. You want that banana or not?"

  "Sure," said Mark, with a nod. "Thanks."

  "De nada," answered the chimp with a gesture. "Us test-tube types gotta stick together."

  "Yeah," said Mark with a rare smile. "I guess. What's your name, chimp?"

  "Charlie," answered the janitor. "Charlie Algernon."

  "Well, my name's Mark," said the genie. He took the proffered paw and squeezed it gently, but was surprised at the strength of the returning grip.

  "Don't worry, Mark," said the chimp with a broad grin. "One of the reasons I ain't worried about you is chimps is pretty strong, too."

  Able Tyburn looked up from his reader. "Good morning, Mark," he said calmly. Able and his wife Shari did everything calmly. Which was why they had been chosen as Mark Two foster parents.

  When the remnants of the Cyberpunk entry team had finally broken through the Mark One defenders of Oligen and taken the nursery, the Terrestrial Union had faced a dilemma. There were forty-eight Mark Twos completed, but they were, to all appearances, human babies. Unlike the chimp derivative Mark One offspring, all of which had been put down, the Mark Twos fell under the rules regarding human genetic modification. They were, despite universal revulsion, held by the Supreme Court to be humans. Therefore, they could not be killed out of hand.

  But the Mark Two was designed as a high-intensity combat model. They had no purpose beyond entering heavy firefights and winning. They were, effectively, genie tanks. As such their ultraline glands were tweaked to produce at the slightest provocation. The testosterone-adrenaline-nicotine neural enhancer gave them the ability to go into "hyper-state" at a moment's notice. The downside was that they were extremely aggressive.

  The Terrestrial Union had dealt with this by finding, among its four million residents, forty-eight couples with almost preternatural calm. Couples who could raise and train pseudo-human hand-grenades in a loving and nurturing environment.

  "Good morning, Father," said Mark, with a smile. He opened the cold-door and pulled out a jug of milk and a bunch of bananas then headed for the door of the apartment.

  "Where are you going, Mark?" asked his father. The question had no negative overtones; it was a perfectly formed query. Able Tyburn never used a negative tone.

  "I'm going to go have breakfast with Charlie," Mark answered, grabbing his reader and coat.

  "I had been meaning to discuss that with you, Mark," said Able, setting down his own reader. The morning news had been mildly distressing, with another outbreak of the Thuggee Cult in California. Unlike the traditionalists in India and
Europe, the American branch of the nihilistic religion believed that shedding blood in their executions was the best way to worship their goddess. The slaying in the downtown LA-San school had been particularly bloody.

  "You understand that we do not want to slow your societal development," said the foster parent, calmly. As he did the house chimp emerged from the kitchen and silently began laying out his breakfast. "However, it would be a preferred condition if you could spend socially enhancing time with a human as opposed to a chimp."

  "Unfortunately, Father," said Mark, almost automatically suppressing the stab of irritation he felt at the comment, "I have found it difficult to make human friends. As you know."

  "Yes, Mark. I am, sadly, aware of that," said the foster parent. He was, in fact, very aware of that fact. Mark was on the low end of sociability among the fifteen surviving Mark Twos. As the most recent e-mail from The Program had pointed out in no uncertain terms. "However, I am sure that when you begin attending college, and have a larger population to draw from, you will find more companions."

  "Until then, Father," said the young man, as calmly as a Buddha, "my sole socializing outlet is this chimp janitor you seem to disapprove of."

  "Mark, there is a difference between humans and chimps," said the control. He gestured at the servant who was serving him his cholesterol-free egg—substitute. "I would suggest that you could actually hurt your socialization process by developing skills that are inadequate. The social reactions you develop from interacting with this 'Charlie' are going to be different than those you should be acquiring. This will delay your development. I cannot find this to be a positive outcome."

  "So," said the student taking a calming breath and suppressing the stab of ultraline that threatened to send him into a berserk rage, "you are recommending that I stop socializing with 'this chimp.' "

  "Yes," said the father, picking up his fork. "That is my recommendation."