by Larry Niven
May was saved from having to reply by the text light going on. It was from Connors, and said:
Alice Johnson from DHS says they need a spaceplane. She is in Quito, and her personality defects do not include insincerity. Address is Hotel High Incal, room 429.
“The nanos let him judge character?” she exclaimed.
Toby shook his head. “He could always do that. Littlemeade had some trouble with pilfering before he came to work for us. Really smooth job. He pointed Security at two people, they got caught. He never could explain how it worked. I think it may have just been that he pays complete attention to people.”
2
At least she was out of the bathtub when she got the call. Alice wrapped herself in the hotel robe and tapped the Picture button, and the night manager said, “Ms. Johnson, there’s someone here with a parcel. Are you expecting a delivery?”
He’d done it anyway. Fast, too. “Yes, send it up.”
“She says she needs a signature.”
“I’ll be at the door.”
She opened at the bell a couple of minutes later, and saw a hotel guard next to a pretty Indian girl in an ACME Delivery uniform. (She seemed to see pretty Indian girls wherever she turned lately.) The girl said, “Ms. Johnson? Signature here.”
She signed and accepted a flat package, thanked her, closed the door, and had the seal open before it occurred to her that most, if not all, of those girls must be working for Yellowhorse. After all, he hadn’t always been an Indian.
Or young. She wondered briefly just how old that “girl” really was.
Inside the package was a disc, with a note:
Aero Transcielo can follow the program, and they still pay me licensing fees. Just build the damn thing. Your problem is parasite control. Anyone wants his own improvements on it gets a bullet in the back of the head.
—Wyndham
Alice smiled. Now she really wanted to meet that woman.
She started her laptop and put the disc in.
Two minutes later she called Keith Danton, who she’d left in charge at home.
“—Yes, it’s my boss, I do have to take this. —Yeah, Chief?”
“Wyndham’s sent me a disc with a plan on it. It’s a spaceplane. More cargo than both Shuttles put together, and there’s a factory down here already set up to follow the blueprints.”
“Holy geez, what’d you do, sacrifice a goat?” he said. “That’s terrific! —So now what?”
“So now I phone the Director of Homeland Security and explain that getting someone to the asteroid will salvage the president’s chance of reelection.”
“You might not want to put it just that way. China launched something small this morning, and they’ve announced that they’re going to put up more, assemble a ship in orbit, and turn the asteroid aside ‘for the good of mankind.’”
Alice ran her entire vocabulary of bad words through her head and found none that were adequate. “And if they happen to drop it on India by mistake, ‘oops,’ right?”
“I was more concerned that they’ll be able to get the rock into orbit, under their control—for a consideration. And my Mandarin’s a little rusty.”
Alice grimaced. Not conspicuously better for India, and a lot worse for everyone else. “Then we need to move fast. Talk to you later.”
“Bye.”
Alice disconnected, then used a phone number she was allowed to call exactly once.
XXI
By the work one knows the workman.
—JEAN DE LA FONTAINE
Emanuel Torres had been born on a farm uphill from Ibarra, at a time when everyone in the north end of South America had far too keen a consciousness of the concept of Lebensraum. Every day held the concern of looking northeast and seeing Venezuelan tanks rolling down the highway. Of course, they would have had to come through Colombia, but the television had made it clear that every Colombian who knew how to shoot was living in Los Angeles.
Then the miracles began.
The tanks had never come. The dictator had died of some minor ailment, which went untreated because he was certain that all doctors secretly worked for Israeli Intelligence, and Venezuela turned from militarization to exports of plastics and fertilizer. Those were cheap, and the farms all did better, and a trade school was built near Emanuel’s home. Children were sent there to learn how to fix farm equipment. Emanuel turned out to have a talent with machines. He could fix anything that had ever worked.
And one day a tall blond angel from Heaven had come and asked him if he’d like to build spaceships.
He only had to work eight hours a day, and they fed him when he arrived, and he learned English, and there were the most marvelous things to read in English, and he built spaceships all week, and they paid him for all that!
They had paid him for that for almost thirty years now. He had learned more than he had imagined there was to learn, and he understood laminar flow and how a Coanda-Stine ambient athodyd worked, and why Gordon Wyndham had built the largest plane in history: half of its job was to make the liquid oxygen that went into the hybrid orbiters. Wyndham Launch had been bought by its employees and become Aero Transcielo, and when Emanuel suggested handing out astronaut wings for the tourist trade he’d gotten a raise and an office. He still spent most of his time on the line, but now he spent it teaching. He’d seen all the mistakes it was possible to make.
He did have to spend some time in the office every day. Once he had calculated that if all the documents he had had to deal with over the years were printed out on paper, a Rukh loaded with them would barely be able to take off. And that had been a couple of years back.
It was a rare day when he enjoyed spending time in the office.
* * *
He looked in on the Olympics while he was eating his lunch. The Indios had won some more gold medals, and once again everyone was acting like it was remarkable. It had never surprised Emanuel from the start. The Europeans had spent hundreds of years killing every Indio who was weak, slow, or careless.
Emanuel had also learned about evolution. By now some of the Indios were probably bulletproof.
That they had united and gotten rich made sense too. The disorganized ones and the poor bargainers had starved.
He finished eating, sighed, and checked his in-box.
The company had accepted contracts for two special orders. Both were manned orbiters. One was for the USA, and it was a design he’d seen when he’d been learning about the Rukh: a ship that could maneuver in space, land on the Moon, take off from there, and land anywhere on Earth that had a runway—or any long, reasonably flat patch. They also wanted a Rukh, so they could launch it themselves.
The other was for the Indios, and it was the same, but improved. Not by much. There wasn’t a lot to improve. They’d paid in advance for triple shifts, and would be paying A-T to launch it for them.
The designs were in attached files, and they were in the line’s programming format.
Emanuel left his office smiling. Today was a rare day indeed.
The angel was back.
XXII
One for all, or all for one we gage.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Alice was assigned as Official Nagging Pest—“liaison”—to the factory, since a) she was already here, and b) Largo didn’t want a routine-disturber like her there.
(Good luck with that. If Keith’s physical abilities had matched his brains and inclinations, he’d need a hell of a good secret identity.)
She stopped in once a day to see how things were going. She’d never imagined assembly-line workers could be so jolly. People came by on their breaks to shake her hand. One lady gave her a fruit basket.
There was a big banner across the end of the cafeteria that said TRABAJE BIEN.
She understood the people at the factory after she’d done a search on that. During NASA’s Mercury Program, Gus Grissom, asked to address a crowd of employees at the plant that made the Atlas rockets, and possessing all the
oratorical ability of a man who had dedicated his life to nothing but flying, had blurted, “Well … do good work!” and been greeted with wild cheering.
These people understood the past.
And they knew they were building the future.
* * *
She’d spent a lot of time thinking about her conversation with Mycroft. She didn’t figure out a thing until she did a search on the records of William Connors.
Birth name Guillaume Olivier Connors, but neither parent was French; good God, no wonder he’d changed it. It was a wonder he’d never brought a machine gun to school. Handwriting analysis suggested he’d spent a lot of time angry and frightened. Father started a successful employment agency, subsequently dissolving it, and several marriages, in alcohol. Mother was a wheel in the League of Women Voters—key delegate to the convention that nominated LBJ in 1964, later instrumental in pressuring broadcasters to remove “inappropriate content” from children’s TV. Two older sisters. One did artwork for charitable organizations that all seemed to have a grudge against the country she lived in. The other had worked in the office responsible for censoring the language of federal publications, until someone looked a little more closely into a few accidents that had removed her superiors and gotten her promoted.
It appeared that William, a fanatical convicted killer, was the most reasonable, rational person in his family.
Married thirty-five years. Arrested in year fifteen, domestic violence. Pled guilty, suspended sentence, probation and one year compulsory counseling. No record of relationships after his wife’s accident in 2018.
Connors’s employment records showed he had done superior work at every job he’d had, but lost all but two due to excessive sick time. One of the ones he had kept was at Littlemeade Operation Systems. The other was right afterward, at the renowned Goldmine Promotions … which had been a shoestring operation called Curry Advertising until shortly after he showed up.
Never registered in any political Party.
A rather important detail of his arrest report had never been admitted into evidence at his trial, nor mentioned to the media: twenty-two bullets had been dug out of him after he was taken in. Three from his head. The NFR agents had certainly reloaded.
The judge had ordered him gagged after he refused to stop exclaiming, “A hundred and six!” while the agents’ records were being read by the prosecutor.
An exhaustive side search showed Alice that a nine-year string of rape/torture murders with identical MO had ended just about the time of his killings. The murders—106 of them—had occurred all over the continental U.S., about one weekend a month, and two extraordinary details had never been noted before she checked: all the forensic evidence had been “lost” in each case, and no computer analysis of criminal activities had ever linked them together.
One of the dead agents had been a high-clearance computer analyst.
The inescapable conclusion made her throw up.
She rinsed out the wastebasket and then her mouth, and kept looking.
In prison, Connors had organized fantasy-gaming groups; tutored other prisoners in reading, science, and literature; stopped fights by talking spree killers out of their wrath; and organized an ongoing blood drive called Blood Brothers. It was still going. He himself had donated over thirteen gallons by the time he was pardoned.
An awful lot of incorrigibles had suddenly died in violent convulsions while he was there, starting about a year after his sentence was commuted. The rest of the prison population was the healthiest group in any federal, state, or local facility. A few new prisoners in Lee Ultra still dropped dead sometimes, and the rest were still healthier than was at all reasonable—including inmates who had been HIV positive when they came in. This dated back well before the disappearance of AIDS everywhere else.
A weird thought came to Alice, and she looked up the judge and prosecutor in the Connors case. Both had died in courtrooms. In violent convulsions. Not long after returning to work following surgery.
She checked personnel records for the DHS, and as an afterthought the BATF. Since 2030 there had been a gradual and steady increase in medical retirements among agents who had had surgery. The phrase “idiopathic neuralgia” came up a lot.
Since November of 2051, those cases had not been limited to surgical patients, and had increased to the point where the standard medical retirement procedure now included a security investigation. A few interesting things had been found, none of them involving leaks. Cover-ups, yes.
She did some more checking. Over the past couple of decades, more and more people who had gotten transfusions had become dedicated donors in turn.
He’d saturated the blood supply with nanobots. Then he’d made them contagious, and people called it Goat Flu.
Goat?
She did a search on goats.
They appeared to be going extinct. So were sheep. They’d quit reproducing.
The standard of living in places that used to rely on them was increasing. People were farming instead of herding.
They were able to farm because arable land was no longer being grazed down to bedrock. Deserts had stopped spreading.
And something like six hundred million people had died since November, of what WHO was calling Goat Flu syndrome (because it was worst in places where the sterility of goats had a major economic effect), and no news source had been screaming about it. None of the usual career alarmists had made political or financial mileage out of it—but several hundred had died of it.
The symptoms were easily mistaken for strychnine poisoning. Agony and bone-breaking convulsions.
There were no figures on Goat Flu syndrome deaths in China, but she had to wonder. She called up a NOW map of progress in women’s rights, inverted the pattern, and compared the result to the WHO map. The maps were just about identical.
It is rape if the check bounces.
Treating women as property was a death sentence from which there was no appeal.
He was saving the world.
On a case-by-case basis.
* * *
Alice went back to the arcade again, looking for Mycroft Yellowhorse.
She’d been a loner growing up, and didn’t have much experience with the society of children. She’d never known kids could be so good at stonewalling. If looks could kill she’d have been thin vapor. She persisted until she found one little blond girl who was willing to chat … at first. An older girl saw them talking, came over, showed the younger one her phone cam, and walked on. The girl she’d been talking with said, “You’re the one who made him go away!” Then she kicked Alice in the ankle and ran off.
It was an enthusiastic and precise kick, right where the corner of a dresser hits on the way to the bathroom in the dark, and it hurt like a really big bastard. Alice sat down hard, clutched her wound, and screamed, “Goddammit, I wanted to apologize to him!”
She checked under her fingers, stared as the gash began closing, and heard, “Cross-country bicycle.”
Alice looked up and saw the girl with the phone. She looked Oriental-Polynesian, and would have been amazingly pretty if her expression hadn’t been that of someone who was deciding whether electrodes would be required. “I’ll get him to come back if I can,” Alice said.
The girl noticed Alice’s ankle. Her manner changed. “Maybe you’re okay,” she said, face neutral. “You know how many gifted kids have died of abuse and neglect so far this year?”
Alice tried to follow this. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“None,” the girl said. “Don’t waste his time. We look out for our own.” She turned and walked into the crowd, which opened for her and closed behind her.
Alice stared after her as she absorbed this. Then she looked around.
A lot of kids were looking at her, but she spotted at least eight who were observing her. Boys, girls, big, little. They all had the same look to them. It was one she knew from the mirror. They were survivors.
* * *
&nb
sp; The cross-country bicycle course was some way from the arena, and rough enough to make some future Olympic venues unlikely to be able to equal it. The start and finish were nine kilometers apart on the map, but the straight path held rocks and gullies. The route that wound between all the obstacles was twenty-five kilometers, but the rules allowed for shortcuts over bad terrain. The goal was to get from start to finish in the shortest time. Helicopters held judges and cameras to watch for fouls, and medical crews for accidents, but any course was fair game as long as you stayed with your bicycle; climbing a rock and hauling your bike after you on a rope, for instance, was an immediate disqualification.
Competitors started out at one-minute intervals. Mycroft Yellowhorse tightened the straps on his pack, turned aside from the path the general mass had taken, and set out on the straight-line route. A helicopter followed overhead.
Enthusiasts would have talked about the charges up steep rock and leaps over gullies for years, if not for the event at what came to be called the Big Gap.
About two klicks short of the finish, Yellowhorse got to the edge of a span six meters across and five deep and stopped.
Everyone watching him onscreen stopped breathing.
He turned away, and all over the world his adherents moaned.
He got about ten meters away, got off his bike, undid some extra straps on his pack, bound the bike to his back, and charged.
He landed a couple of meters past the other side of the gap, unstrapped his bike, took it back to the edge, got on, secured the loose straps, and rode the rest of the way without further incident.
Alice had been watching on her phone, at the finish line. The significance of his going back to the edge had not been lost on her. There were shortcuts where riders needed to walk their bikes, but they had to ride wherever possible. Otherwise—just to pick an example at random—someone incredibly tough and powerful could just pick up his bike and run in a straight line to the finish.
He’d even ridden back a greater distance than the width of the gap before jumping it. He’d covered the full distance, riding. He was playing fair.
