by John Scalzi
Berger slugged back the remainder of his Cuba libre and set it down on the bar.
“Hypothetically,” he said.
“Who are you?” Lowen said again.
“I told you, I’m a pharmaceutical salesman,” Berger said. He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet and grabbed a couple of bills. “I’m a pharmaceutical salesman who was looking for some interesting conversation. I’ve had that, and I’ve had my drink, and now, I’m going to go home. That’s not what I suggest you do, however, Dr. Lowen. At least not tonight.” He dropped the bills onto the bar. “There, that should cover us both.” He held out his hand again. “Good night, Danielle,” he said.
Lowen shook his hand, dumbly, and then watched him walk out of the restaurant.
The bartender came over, took the bills and reached for Berger’s glass. “No,” Lowen said, forcefully. The bartender looked at her strangely. “Sorry,” Lowen said. “Just … don’t touch that glass, okay? In fact, I want to buy the glass from you. Ring it up for me. And bring me some coffee, please. Black.”
The bartender rolled her eyes at Lowen but went away to ring up the glass. Lowen pulled it closer to her by dragging it by the cocktail napkin underneath and then pulled out her PDA. She called James Prescott.
“Hi, Jim,” she said. “Don’t tell Dad, but I think I just got put in a hell of a lot of trouble. I need you to come get me. You might bring the FBI with you. Tell them to bring an evidence kit. Hurry, please. I don’t want to be out in the open any longer than I have to be.”
* * *
“You have an interesting relationship with trouble recently,” Prescott told her some time later, when they were both safely ensconced at Foggy Bottom, in Prescott’s office.
“You don’t think I like this, do you?” Lowen said. She sank lower into Prescott’s couch.
“I don’t think ‘like’ has anything to do with it,” Prescott said. “It doesn’t change the relevance of my statement, though.”
“You understand why I got paranoid, right?” Lowen said to Prescott.
“You mean, random man comes in, tells you a story that, as ridiculous as it is, perfectly explains the problem of Luiza Carvalho murdering Liu Cong, pays for your drink and then tells you not to go home?” Prescott said. “No, I have no idea why you feel paranoid in the slightest.”
“You have a bunker underneath this building, right?” Lowen said. “I think I want to go there.”
“That’s the White House,” Prescott said. “And relax. You’re safe here.”
“Right, because I haven’t had any buildings filled with diplomats blow up near me anytime recently,” Lowen said.
“Don’t make me paranoid, Danielle,” Prescott said.
The door to Prescott’s office opened and Prescott’s aide poked his head through. “The FBI just sent you a very preliminary report,” he said.
“Thank you, Tony,” Prescott said, and reached for his PDA. “Bring me some coffee, please.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. He turned to Lowen. “And for you, Dr. Lowen?”
“I don’t need to be any more jittery, thanks,” Lowen said. Tony closed the door.
“First things first,” Prescott said, reading the preliminary report. “‘John Berger,’ or at least the one you met, doesn’t exist. They cross-referenced the name with the tax database. There are ten John Bergers in the D.C. metropolitan area, but none of them live in Alexandria and none of them have as their occupation pharmaceutical salesman. This fact, I imagine, does not surprise you.”
“Not really,” Lowen said.
“The DNA we got off the glass is being processed and maybe they’ll have something for us later,” Prescott said. “They’ve run the fingerprints through federal and local and have come up with nothing. They’re checking the international databases now. They’ve also taken the bar security tape and used it to do facial recognition scanning. No results there so far, either.”
“So I’m not actually paranoid in this case,” Lowen said.
“No, you are actually paranoid,” Prescott said, setting down his PDA. “You’re just paranoid with good reason.”
“The story he told me is still nuts,” Lowen said.
“That it definitely is,” Prescott said. “The only real problem with it is that it’s not completely impossible. Carvalho killed Liu with blood-borne nanobots specifically designed to asphyxiate him. It’s not entirely crazy to believe that someone could design ’bots to work on the brain in the way your friend suggested. The Colonial Union’s BrainPals trigger parts of their owners’ brains. None of this is particularly new in its details. It’s how it’s being used that’s new. Hypothetically.”
Lowen shivered. “You know what, don’t use that word with me at the moment, please.”
“Okay,” Prescott said, a little warily. “The real problem we have with all of this is that we don’t have any way to verify it. The Colonial Union let Carvalho float out into space. We have a good story, but good stories aren’t enough.”
“You believe it,” Lowen said.
“I believe it’s possible,” Prescott said. “I believe it’s possible enough that I’m going to recommend to your father that we design a protocol for nanobiotic infestations and their eradication if and when we find them. The nice thing about this story is that even if it’s completely crazy, if we get a process out of it, then this particular avenue of sabotage gets closed. If it doesn’t exist, then it gets closed before it can become a problem.”
“Three cheers for paranoia,” Lowen said.
“What would really help, of course, is if we could find this friend of yours,” Prescott said. “Conspiracy theories involving remote controls in the brain are more believable when you have people who can accurately describe them.”
“I don’t think you’re going to manage that one,” Lowen said.
“Never say never,” Prescott said. The door opened and Tony came through, bearing coffee. “Your coffee,” he said. “Also, the FBI is requesting visual.”
“Right,” Prescott said, set his coffee down and picked up the PDA again, pausing briefly to also loop on an earpiece. “This is Prescott,” he said, looking into the PDA.
Lowen watched him listen to the PDA, glance over to her and then glance back at the PDA. “Got it,” he said, after a minute. “I’m going to mute you for a second.” He pressed the screen and looked over at Lowen. “They think they found your friend,” he said. “At least, based on the screen shot they got from the security camera. They want you to take a look and confirm.”
“All right,” Lowen said, and reached for the PDA.
“Uh,” Prescott said. “He’s kind of a mess.”
“You mean he’s dead,” Lowen said.
“Yes,” Prescott said. “You don’t sound surprised.”
“Give it to me,” Lowen said.
Prescott handed it over, along with the earpiece. “This is Danielle Lowen,” she said, after she slipped on the earpiece and unmuted the PDA. “Show me.”
The image on the screen wheeled for a minute and then resolved to a body lying in an otherwise nondescript alley. The head of the body was covered in blood; as the PDA got closer, Lowen could see the deep crease above the right temple. Someone had cracked the head wide open.
For all that, the face was still blandly handsome, with the residue of a small, tight smile.
“That’s him,” Lowen said. “Of course it’s him.”
EPISODE THIRTEEN
Earth Below, Sky Above, Parts One and Two
PART ONE
I.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Harry,” Hart Schmidt said. “I’m a little concerned that you’ve taken me to a maintenance airlock.”
“I’m not going to toss you into space, Hart,” Wilson said. He tapped the outer portal of the airlock, which had among its features a small porthole made of a thick, transparent alloy. “It’s just that the airlocks are one of the only places on this whole godforsaken tub where you can find
an actual one of these.”
“Don’t let Captain Coloma catch you calling the Clarke a tub,” Schmidt said.
“She knows it’s a tub,” Wilson said.
“Yes, but she wouldn’t like you to say it,” Schmidt said. “She’d start the purge cycle on this airlock.”
“The captain’s on the bridge,” Wilson said. “And anyway, she’s got a lot of better reasons to space me than me making a crack about her ship.”
Schmidt peered at the porthole. “This isn’t going to be a very good view,” he said.
“It’ll do well enough,” Wilson said.
“There are lots of monitors on the ship that will give you a better look,” Schmidt said.
“It’s not the same,” Wilson said.
“The resolution on the displays is better than your eyes can resolve,” Schmidt said. “As far as your eyes are concerned, it will be exactly the same. Even better, since you’ll be able to see more.”
“It’s not the eyes that matter,” Wilson said. “It’s the brain. And my brain would know.”
Schmidt said nothing to this.
“You have to understand, Hart,” Wilson said. “When you leave, they tell you that you can never come back. It’s not an idle threat. They take everything from you before you go. You’re declared legally dead. Everything you own is parceled out according to your will, if you have one. When you say ‘good-bye’ to people, it really is for the last time. You don’t see them again. You never see them again. You won’t know anything that ever happens to them again. It really is like you’ve died. Then you get on a delta, ride up the beanstalk and get on a ship. The ship takes you away. They never let you come back again.”
“You never considered the idea you might come back one day?” Schmidt said.
Wilson shook his head. “No one ever did. No one. The closest anyone ever comes to it are the guys on the transport ships who stand in front of the room full of new recruits and tell them that in ten years, most of them will be stone dead,” he said. “But even they don’t ever come back, really. They don’t leave the ships, at least not until they get back to Phoenix Station. When you’re gone, you’re gone. You’re gone forever.”
Wilson looked out the porthole. “It’s a hell of a thing, Hart,” he said. “At the time, it might not seem like a bad deal. When the Colonial Union takes you, you’re seventy-five years old, you’ve probably had some major health scare and a few minor ones, you might have bad knees and bad eyes and maybe you haven’t been able to get it up for a while. If you don’t go, then you’re going to be dead. Which means you’ll be gone anyway. Better to be gone and live.”
“It seems reasonable,” Schmidt said.
“Yes,” Wilson agreed. “But then you do go. And you do live. And the longer you live—the longer you live in this universe—the more you miss it. The more you miss the places you lived, and the people you know. The more you realize that you made a hard bargain. The more you realize you might have made a mistake in leaving.”
“You’ve never said anything about this before,” Schmidt said.
“What is there to say?” Wilson said, looking back at his friend. “My grandfather used to tell me that his grandfather told him a story about his grandfather, who immigrated to the United States from some other country. What other country, he wouldn’t say; he never talked about the old country to anyone, Grandpa said, not even his wife. When they asked him why, he said he left it behind for a reason, and whether that reason was good or bad, it was enough.”
“It didn’t bother his wife not knowing where he came from?” Schmidt asked.
“It’s just a story,” Wilson said. “I’m pretty sure Grandpa embroidered that part. But the point is that the past is the past and you let things go because you can’t change them anyway. My grandfather many times over didn’t talk about where he came from because he was never going back. For better or worse, that part of his life was done. For me, it was the same thing. That part of my life was done. What else was there to say?”
“Until now,” Schmidt said.
“Until now,” Wilson agreed, and checked his BrainPal. “Quite literally now. We skip in ten seconds.” He turned his attention back to the porthole, silently counting off the seconds.
The skip was like all skips: quiet, unimpressive, anticlimactic. The glare of the lights in the airlock were enough to wash out the sky on the other side of the porthole, but Wilson’s genetically-engineered eyes were good enough that he could make out a few of the stars.
“I think I see Orion,” he said.
“What’s Orion?” Schmidt asked. Wilson ignored him.
The Clarke turned, and a planet rolled into view.
The Earth.
“Hello, gorgeous,” Wilson said, through the porthole. “I missed you.”
“How does it feel to be home?” Schmidt asked.
“Like I never left,” Wilson said, and then lapsed into silence.
Schmidt gave him a few moments and then tapped him on the shoulder. “Okay, my turn,” he said.
“Go look at a display,” Wilson said.
Schmidt smiled. “Come on, Harry,” he said. “You know it’s not the same.”
II.
“This is a bad idea,” Colonel Abel Rigney said to Colonel Liz Egan over pasta.
“I agree,” Egan said. “I wanted Thai.”
“One, you know that it was my turn to pick,” Rigney said. “Two, you know that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“We’re talking yet again about the summit between us and the Earthlings at Earth Station,” Egan said.
“Yes,” Rigney said.
“Is this an official thing?” Egan asked. “Are you, Colonel Rigney, communicating to me, the Colonial Defense Forces liaison to the Department of State, a statement from your superiors that I will be obliged to deliver to the secretary?”
“Don’t be like that, Liz,” Rigney said.
“So, no,” Egan said. “It’s not an official communication and you’re just taking advantage of our lunchtime to kvetch again in my general direction.”
“I’m not comfortable with that assessment of the situation,” Rigney said. “But yes, that’s basically correct.”
“Are you opposed to the summit?” Egan said, twirling her pasta on a fork. “Have you joined the ranks of those in the CDF who think we need to go to Earth with guns blazing and try to take over the place? Because that will be an adventure, I have to tell you.”
“I think the summit is likely to be a waste of time,” Rigney admitted. “There are still too many people pissed at the CDF down there on Earth. Then there are the people who are pissed at the Earth governments for not letting them emigrate or enlist before they die. Then there’s the fact there are still a couple hundred sovereign states on that planet, none of which wants to agree with anyone else, except on the subject of being unhappy with us. It will all end up with yelling and screaming and time being wasted, time that neither we nor the Earth really have. So, yes, waste of time.”
“If the summit were to go off as originally planned, I would agree,” Egan said. “Although the alternative—no summit, the Earth turning away from the Colonial Union, the Conclave waiting in the wings to sweep it up as a member—is considerably worse. Engagement is key, even if nothing gets done, which it won’t.”
“That’s not my actual concern,” Rigney said. “If our diplomats and theirs want to talk until they are blue in the face, then I wish them joy. I have problems with the setup.”
“You mean having it on Earth Station,” Egan said.
“Right,” Rigney said. “It’d be better to have it here at Phoenix Station.”
“Because there’s no environment the Earthlings will find less intimidating than the single largest object humanity’s ever built,” Egan said. “Which incidentally will also serve to remind them just how bottled up we’ve kept them for the last two hundred years or so.” She stuffed pasta into her mouth.
“You may have a point,” Rig
ney said, after a second of consideration.
“I may,” Egan said, around her pasta, and then swallowed. “We can’t have the summit here, for the reasons I just enumerated. We can’t have the summit on Earth because there’s nowhere on the planet short of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station where there wouldn’t be riots, either by the people who hate the Colonial Union or by the people who want us to get them off that rock. The Conclave, of all people, offered to host the summit as a quote unquote neutral third party at their own administrative rock, which I will remind you is an order of magnitude or two larger than Phoenix Station. We definitely don’t want the Earthlings to make any inferences off of that. So what are we left with?”
“Earth Station,” Rigney said.
“Earth Station indeed,” Egan said. “Which we own, even though it’s above Earth. And that is in fact going to be a negotiating point.”
Rigney furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?” he said.
“We’re offering to lease it,” Egan said. “The lease strategy was approved this morning, in fact.”
“No one told me about it,” Rigney said.
“No offense, Abel, but why would anyone tell you?” Egan said. “You’re a colonel, not a general.”
Rigney pulled at the collar of his uniform. “Stab me again, why don’t you, Liz,” he said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Egan said. “I wouldn’t know about it, either, except that I’m the liaison, and State needed the CDF to sign off on this. This is an agreement far above both of our pay grades. But it really is a masterstroke, if you think about it.”
“Us losing our sole outpost above Earth is a masterstroke?” Rigney said.
“We’re not going to lose it,” Egan said. “We’ll still own it, and mooring rights will be part of any deal. It’s a masterstroke because it changes the nature of the game. Right now Earth has no egress into space. We locked up the planet for so long that there’s no infrastructure for space travel. They have no stations. They have no spaceports. They hardly have spaceships, for God’s sake. It will take them years and a few multiples of their yearly global output to gear up. Now we’re offering up the one way into space that’s already there. Whoever controls it will control trade, will control space travel, will control the destiny of Earth, at least until everyone else on the planet gets their act together. And you know what that means.”
