by Larry Niven
“Certainly.”
XXVII
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
— SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
1
The amount of valuable material abandoned in Earth orbit was absurd, but what had been done about it, prior to Foundry’s arrival, gave the entities a handle on the term “ludicrous.” Monitoring of communications had revealed that the most capable of the spacefaring powers had actually enacted regulations that specifically required new objects to be designed to reenter and vaporize from the heat of atmospheric compression. The first enterprise to go up and collect the waste could have made itself rich in the extreme, but most of Earth’s powers were participants in a council whose members had passed rules forbidding each other to engage in such activity—among many other activities whose only possible results would have been to improve human welfare. This seemed to be the council’s principal function.
The entities decided that this was not their problem, and it would be a wasteful indulgence to destroy the meeting place of the council … for free.
Foundry, which was not a member of the United Nations and not likely to apply, had taken up less than a quarter of the debris on its first pass. The second pass was slow enough to allow the oncoming material to be vaporized by lasers and the exhaust before it hit the scoops, which had been repaired by then. Deceleration during this pass put Foundry in an orbit whose period was slightly more than half a planetary rotation. There remained a good deal of eccentricity to the orbit, so the armatures were withdrawn, to process the new material collected on the scoops, and to simplify trim maneuvers.
2
The near-transparency of the suits, though he knew it was useful for the nanos, bothered Toby a lot more than it did May. “I look like a magazine cover from 1943,” he said as they emerged into the hangar.
“Yeah,” she said huskily, “Captain America.”
It was true he was in better shape than he’d ever been, including the first time he was this young. That, and the way she was looking at him, made it suddenly easier to take. “You don’t mind yours?”
“It’s not like anybody’s going to stare at me but you. I get to wear a classic working spacesuit. And I always wanted to look like a Kelly Freas poster.”
“You’re not wearing enough makeup.”
May stuck her tongue out at him.
“You always know how to get on my good side,” he said.
“You might have said something before you got your recycler connected.”
He hadn’t expected her to have an answer. “Ah. How’s yours?” he said.
“Intensely personal, but it beats a catheter. —Sh!” she said, holding up a hand and looking grave and alert.
Toby stared at her, looked around, looked at her again, turned his hands up, and shook his head.
May pointed out of the hangar door at an approaching car. “Indians!”
* * *
Every now and then she cracked him up a lot more than she expected.
He got himself together as Yellowhorse got out of the car. After a moment Toby said, “No, that’s Captain America.”
“That’s more like Superman,” she said. On TV she’d never really seen how big Yellowhorse was. “And that’s a Frank Frazetta poster,” she grumbled as a woman got out after him. Both had suits on, but in their case the suits were decorated. Yellowhorse’s, naturally, was done in streaks of war paint, but the woman’s had the kind of tracery lingerie uses to make you uncertain of how much you’re really seeing. “Hey, how come our suits don’t get fancy designs?” she called out as they came in and the car drove off.
“What did you think the paints were for?” Yellowhorse called back.
“Paints?”
“In the patching kit. You didn’t inspect your gear?”
“We just got this stuff on,” Toby said.
“Oh. Well, we have a couple of hours before the first easy launch window. —This is Alice Johnson, formerly DHS, now a security consultant for JNAIT. Alice, May Wyndham.”
May shook her hand. “I wish my suit looked like yours.”
“I think yours looks great,” Alice said, looking it over with a smile.
Oh dear. “Thanks,” May said.
Alice caught the undercurrent. “Oops. Sorry, I’ll tone it down. I pretty much just discovered sex. Born Moslem. Clitoris amputated. Mycroft grew it back.”
May literally staggered with the realization: “If he can do that, he can heal cripples!” she said, waving her arms for balance. Damn boots.
“That’s who about a third of our immigrants are,” Yellowhorse said as Toby caught her. “Were, anyway.”
“Oliver Carter, CIA. You will all turn and raise your hands,” called a man from a side door. He was white, armed, and wearing a standard gray suit and red tie, which at this latitude made him a lunatic. “William Connors, you are under arrest for sedition, rebellion, and treason.” He had about twenty meters to cross as he approached.
Yellowhorse turned to face him, and said, “Alice, the man with May is Tobias Desmond Glyer.” He drew a sharp breath, shuddered faintly, turned sheer black, and charged.
The boots didn’t impede him at all.
Every round from the clip hit him. Then he hit the gunman, once, with a palm to the chest as he went past.
The Company man was flung aside into a stack of empty packing cases, the only thing he could have hit that wouldn’t have shattered his bones. He began hauling himself out of the mess at once to go after his machine pistol, but Alice reached him and stamped on his hand. He grabbed for her, ignoring his injury, and she leapt up and kicked him in the head. He fell backward, unable to coordinate but still trying to act. “He’s drugged!” she shouted, and spun aside from the red laser spot on her face as a bullet whizzed by.
“Thomas Appleton Swift Pleasurizer!” Yellowhorse bellowed, and there were thumps and crashing sounds from several places in and outside the hangar. He came back over to the original shooter, who was now doing nothing except twitching ecstatically. Yellowhorse pried fifteen bullets from dents in his torso and arms, and said, “I thought I couldn’t go senile. Should have done that in the first place. I should have realized somebody would hit on the idea of loading assassins with painkillers.” He picked up Carter by the scruff of his collar, put his other arm around Alice, and came back over to May and Toby. The whole thing had taken about twenty seconds. “You’re mistaken,” he said to May. “It’s not Superman who’s transformed by saying the name of the wizard who gave power and purpose to a cripple.” He’d heard her from the car?
“It turned you bulletproof,” Toby said. That seemed to be all he had at the moment.
“Nominally. I’ve been shot before, it sucks. The thing is, he was firing sniper bullets: high speed, hardcase, denser than usual, and they would have drilled right through me and hit you folks. Fortunately I also made the suits tough enough to stop a glass knife. Don’t try this at home. —I have quite a collection of bot triggers for various situations. Some verbal, some situational. Things I wouldn’t normally say or do. Most don’t work on people with the upgrade, some only work on me. —Alice, how do you feel?”
“A little sore, but I don’t mind,” she said.
There was a moment of silence. “You mean from wrenching aside to dodge the bullet,” he said.
“Of course,” she said, deadpan. “—I didn’t break his neck, I figured you must need him or you’d have taken his head off.”
“I most certainly would not. It’s a disgusting sight. But thanks.” Yellowhorse let go of her, took Carter by his shirt front, and said, “Feel the burn.”
Carter looked shocked, then began to weep.
“Snap out of it.”
Carter stopped crying and started to look worried.
“The rest of your team is still getting direct limbic stimulus. They’ll be incurably addicted in ten minutes at most. Now tell me, why did you decide to risk World
War Three by pissing off JNAIT?”
“We had people searching Mecca for months,” Carter said. “They found the bomb.”
Yellowhorse raised his eyebrows. “Do tell. Describe this bomb you found.”
“A hundred and seventy kilotons,” Carter said. “Did you think I was bluffing? I was given a picture to show you. Jacket pocket.”
The picture was extracted and examined. “Well, this is disturbing,” Yellowhorse said.
“I thought you’d see it that way.”
“I doubt it. My warhead is in orbit. I’ve never seen this bomb before in my life. Now, go find your men and give each of them a big sloppy kiss. Repent, sinner!” He slapped the man on the forehead and turned him loose.
Carter staggered off to the far side of the hangar, looking stupefied.
“We need to find the guards they took out,” Yellowhorse said. “Then we need to leave.” He got out his phone and sent an automatic message, then led them outside, running. An ambulance siren started up in the distance.
As they reached the first man, May said, “That was quick thinking on the bomb thing.”
“Hardly,” Yellowhorse said as he knelt and opened the man’s shirt. “Mine’s two homemade fission imploders, each about Nagasaki yield. One fireball pancakes the other into the ground and scoops out a crater a mile across. Fusion is a lot of work. And this one’s a government job anyway. I gotta go feed my witch,” he said, hands on the man’s chest. The guard twitched, gasped, and started coughing horribly. As he looked around, Yellowhorse got out the photo and handed it to May. “This way.” He ran around the corner of the hangar and found the next man.
“You can raise the dead?” Toby said.
“Lots of people can. Depends what you know and how dead they are.”
“But you do it by talking to them.”
“Don’t be silly, they can’t hear me. I quoted William Goldman to trigger my bots. Then they passed the word.”
Four guards had each been stabbed from behind, through a lung so they couldn’t call out, and left to drown in their own blood. May looked at the picture rather than look at the men. “Who put this one in Mecca, then?” she said, once he couldn’t detect any more fresh corpses.
He shook his head. “God knows. The casing is French, so it could have been anybody. Hang on.” The airport ambulances were just arriving, and he went to talk to the crews for a bit. He came back and said, “They’ll be looked after. They’re recent enough that the brain should still hold its connection settings pretty well. Let’s get to our bird, shall we?”
“What about the spooks?” said Toby.
“The crews will take their guns and ID, but then I’m giving them a second chance,” Yellowhorse said.
“Are you crazy? —Strike that. Why?”
“Because I am really, really pissed. Stone reminds me of the union rep at dear old William Golding High School, and his men weren’t drafted. In less than a day they’re going to be teenage girls who appear to have damn near no memory. Language and basic hygiene, and that’ll seem to be about it. In fact they’ll remember everything. They’ll just be unable to express it to anyone. New prints, altered DNA, no identity. They’ll be safe from abuse, but being taken seriously as human beings is a problem for another generation. Childhood is still its own punishment. I saved the men they killed, but it remains to be seen how much memory is restored. Karma’s such a bitch.”
“Yes,” Alice said, “but she swallows.”
Yellowhorse made a choking noise for a moment, then patted Alice very gently on the top of her head. He led them back into the hangar, loaded their four equipment packages in the back of a hauler, and said, “This way, folks.”
May got on, looked at the cluster of eight confused, frightened men, and didn’t look at them again.
* * *
The Rukh they’d be using was in another part of the airport, in a big hangar, this one with a lot more people around. Some of the people had tools, others had cameras and were bothering the ones with tools, some had weapons and were interfering with the ones with cameras. All were ignored by the four.
The 40-V had been mounted the night before.
After a while Toby looked at May. She was still looking at the orbiter.
It was exceedingly beautiful.
In addition to the elegance of its design, it had been completely covered in a pattern of brilliant feathers, in every color that flame has. Along the nose on the left side (and presumably the right) was the word Firebird, in fluorescent violet.
“Wow,” Alice said. “Mycroft … how did you know the bomb casing is French? Can you use your eyes like a spectrometer or something?”
“I could, but I didn’t. It’s too weird, and almost useless on any normal photograph anyway. —The numbers stenciled on it include two sevens, both of which have that superfluous little decorative line through them. This is on an object that’s intended to be vaporized. Nobody else would do that. Nobody else would sell an H-bomb, either. I blame the wine and cheese. Always be suspicious of a culture whose cuisine is based on ingredients with no expiration date.”
May, who detested wine and was at best lukewarm about cheese, turned her head to look at Yellowhorse. Then she looked at Toby.
“I said he had a position piece on everything,” Toby said.
“You didn’t say he was right,” she said. She looked at Yellowhorse again. “Why didn’t you ever write any science fiction?” she demanded.
“Good God, the same reason I never bought an elephant. As cool as it is, it still takes up all your time, and it absolutely cannot be justified by the return on investment. If I ever have to write again, I’ll stick to romance novels, thank you.”
“You who the what?”
He nodded. “It came to me when I was in prison. The only guy I ever saw shanked had torn a page in a romance novel. Shanked unfairly, I might add, as all the ones in the library were pretty worn out. —I was bored and broke, so I read a few and got the pattern down, then bartered some favors for time at a keyboard. —I had the advantage of having been sick for an incredibly long time, so I know work-arounds for all kinds of problems. As a side effect I became the go-to man inside. When I started to write … I need to tell you a somewhat obscure story. Let’s get going, it can wait a bit.”
They went to the elevator, waited for it to be rolled into place, and got in. Toby was fidgeting with impatience.
They plugged in their gear, put on their helmets, and found their seats, May and Toby in front. The cabin was cramped. “I left the controls the way you designed them,” Yellowhorse said.
“Toby did say you planned for me to fly it,” May said, powering up the screen for the checklist.
“Who else?”
“What if I’d turned you down?” she said.
“Well, the mission is dangerous, possibly foolhardy, and conceivably insane. And you’re a test pilot. So it never crossed my mind.”
Toby hurt his lips a little, biting them to keep his mouth shut. Fortunately May just snorted and continued her work without noticing him.
“The U.S. model was changed back to standard instrumentation,” Alice said.
“That’s going to slow them down,” May said absently. “Is our cargo loaded?”
“It’s in my pocket,” Yellowhorse said.
All three of them turned to look at him.
“It was an idea I got from Josie Bartlett,” he began.
Toby burst out laughing. “You’re bringing them broads?” he said.
“Well, there goes that surprise. Yeah, they’ll develop faster if they exchange modifications when they reproduce. These have the same kernel as your original design, iridium.”
“Hey, that reminds me. What does Goat Flu use in the buckyball?” Toby said.
“Twenty atoms of carbon-13 framing a dodecahedron, linked to twenty of the shell atoms. It’s very stable.” Diamond. It certainly was stable.
“Why … oh, of course, you have so much left over anyway.” M
inority isotopes were left out of nanos because they screwed up the balance.
“Yeah. —Oh, and the new ones get iridium-191 instead of 193. Rarer isotope. That way the guys will have to compete for attention. Tough selection, only about half will get partners.”
“Not necessarily,” said Alice, with a prim look that really didn’t suit her manner.
“Cough cough,” said Yellowhorse. “You set up, May?”
“Let me jack in. —Cosmos Traffic Control, this is Firebird. You ready to light this candle?” Only she heard the reply, but they all heard the Rukh powering up. “—Okay, crew, we’ll be in the air in twenty minutes, then it’ll be an hour to fill the LOX tank. Start talking.”
“Wait,” Alice said. “I never got this part. Why isn’t it full now?” When they all looked at her, she was defensive. “I had other stuff on my mind growing up.”
“It’s not— Okay, it is rocket science,” May said. “But it’s not the really hard part. Without the liquid oxygen in it, the 40-V weighs as much as a fueled Rukh can carry. The LOX weighs substantially more than the fuel that’s needed to get us to altitude and make the LOX. If we didn’t make the liquid oxygen in flight, the orbiter would have to be a lot smaller. We could have made the 40-V even bigger if we had the Rukh start off almost empty and get refueled in flight, but the nose attachment would have cut the top speed of the Rukh, so all the extra weight would have to be solid fuel for the orbiter anyway.”
“At more than twice the launch cost,” Toby said.
“I was wondering when someone would mention money,” Alice laughed. “Wherever two or more are gathered in the name of private space travel—”
“This ain’t Need Another Seven Astronauts,” Yellowhorse cut in, in a remarkably mild tone considering how Toby had heard him speak on the subject before. “We’re not attention whores, we’re not making the Universe safe for robots, and we’re not boldly entrenching where no bureaucrat has entrenched before. The only reason to walk into the jaws of Death is so’s you can steal his gold teeth.”
“Is what?” Alice said, and started laughing again.
