Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (5 page)

Jon considered standing and then didn't.

The man watched him, weighing him, probably using an outsider's magic as well as his eyes.

"It's not enough," Jon said at last.

"It probably isn't," the man agreed.

"If I do this, you walk out of here with my life. Is that what happens?"

"Yes."

"So this isn't nearly enough. Everybody that I know will think... they'll have no choice but to believe... that I abandoned them and our cause...."

"That can't be helped," the man said. "It sucks, but what other way is there?"

Jon studied the machine once more.

"I picked you and just you," said the man. "Nobody else fits my needs. And sure, yes, the others will be free to tell themselves that you got weak and gave up. But you know that won't be true, and I'll live forever knowing that it wasn't true. And besides, when I give up this life of yours, I can send a confession back here. I'll tell them that you died in your home. Hell, if you want, I can tell the world that I murdered you, which will sure make everybody smile."

Jon started to hand back the alien hardware.

He paused.

The stranger reached up, and in one sloppy motion he tore off the mask, revealing a new face, a genuine face. It was Jon's face, rendered completely—the washed-out, hollow-eyed face already halfway to ash.

"Now I have one more gift, if you want it," said the man.

"What is that?"

"I'll tell you who I am."

Jon shrugged. "What do I care? Your real name doesn't matter."

Reaching into a pocket, his tormentor and salvation brought out a diamond with one hundred and forty-four faces.

Jon jumped up, and then he nearly keeled over, fainting. The alien machine hit the dirty carpet, humming for a moment, leaving an arc of charred fiber.

"Careful," said the one-time captain.

"Let me hold it," Jon said.

The man placed the diamond into his palm and closed the hand around it. The immortal's flesh was exactly as cool and sick as Jon's flesh, which was another wonderful detail.

"Is this the same die?" Jon asked.

"No, that trinket got left behind long ago," Pamir said.

Inspiration came to the dying man. Forcing the diamond into the fugitive's hand, he said, "Throw it. Or roll it. Pick your number either way, and if she stands on top, I will do whatever you want."

Pamir closed his hand.

He breathed once, deeply.

"No, I played that game once," the lost captain said, and with that he dropped the diamond back into his pocket. "I'm done letting chance run free."

Three hours of sleep and the humans were sharing the day's first meal. Tailor wasn't with them. Since boarding the fossil ship, the alien had spent most of his time cuddling with a distant control panel, trying to coax the sovereigns into saying one coherent word. But despite ample power and reassuring noise, the AIs remained lost, crazy or rotted and probably gone forever.

G'lene felt sorry for the old beast, chasing what wasn't there.

And that was where her empathy ended. Like most aliens, the Kajjas man was a mystery and always would be. She accepted that fact. Dwelling on what refused to make sense was senseless. What G'lene cared about, deeply and forever, were human beings. That was true onboard the Great Ship, and her desires were even more urgent here in the wilderness.

But her three human companions were burdens, odd and vexing, usually worse than useless. The twins never stopped whispering in each other's ears. They went so far as creating their own language, and deciphering their private words was a grave insult. Yet despite their vaunted closeness, they did nothing sexual. With a defiant tone, Rondie claimed that sex was an instinct best thrown aside. "That's what my brother did, and I did, and you should, too." Preaching to a woman who couldn't imagine any day without some lustful fun, the muscle-bound creature said, "Each of us would be stronger and five times happier if we gave up every useless habit."

G'lene was entitled to feel sorry about her loneliness. That's why she kept smiling at Jon, the Luddite. She smiled at him one hundred times every day. Not that it helped, no. But he was the only possibility in a miserably poor field, and she reasoned that eventually, after another year or maybe a decade, she would wear some kind of hole in his cold resolve.

This was Jon's third breakfast as a living crewmember.

G'lene smiled as always, no hope in her heart. Yet this morning proved to be different. The odd homely conundrum of a man suddenly noticed her expression. At least he met her eyes, answering with what might have been the slyest grin that had ever been tossed her way.

She laughed, daring to ask, "Are you in a good mood, Jon?"

"I am," he said. "I'm in a lovely, spectacular mood."

"Why's that?"

"Last night, I realized something very important."

"Something good, I hope."

"It is. And do you want to know what my epiphany was?"

"Tell it," she said, one hand scratching between her breasts.

But then Jon said, "No," and his eyes wandered. "I don't think that you really do want to know."

G'lene knew thousands of people, but this Luddite was the most bizarre creature, human or otherwise.

The twins were sharing their breakfast from the same squeeze-bowl. They stopped eating to laugh with the same voice, and then Rondie said, "Give up the game, dear. That boy doesn't want you."

What a wicked chain of words to throw at anyone.

"But you can tell us your epiphany," Maxx said.

Jon glanced at the twins.

G'lene felt uneasy in so many ways, and she had no hope of guessing why.

Tipping her head, Rondie said, "Whisper your insight inside my ear. I promise I won't share it with anyone."

Her brother gave a hard snort, underscoring her lie.

"No, I think I should tell everyone," said Jon. "But first, I want to hear a confession from you two. Which one of you strangled me?"

Maxx laughed, lifting a big hand.

But his sister grabbed his arm, bracing her feet inside the glass strands before flinging him aside. "No, I'm quieter, and I have the better grip. So I did it. I broke your little neck."

Jon nodded, and then he glanced at G'lene.

"All right, that's done," G'lene said. "What's the revelation?"

"Starting now," said Jon, "we are changing priorities."

"Priorities," Maxx repeated, as if his tongue wanted to play with the word.

"You've been spending your last few days assembling weapons," Jon said to the twins. "That crap has to stop."

Similar faces wore identical expressions, puzzled and amused but not yet angry.

"Our enemies won't arrive inside a starship," said Jon. "Unless I'm wrong, and then I doubt that we could offer much of a fight."

"Our enemies," Maxx repeated.

"Do you know who they are?" G'lene asked.

Jon shook his head. "I don't. Do any of you?"

Nobody spoke.

Jon teased a glob of meal-and-milk from his breakfast orb, spinning the treat before flicking it straight into his mouth.

The ordinary gesture was odd, though G'lene couldn't quite see why.

"Tailor claims that we have to be ready for an attack," said Jon. "Except our sovereign isn't particularly forthcoming about when and where that might happen. His orders tell us nothing specific, and that's why they tell us plenty. For instance, this crazy old wreck is worth nothing, which means that it's carrying something worth huge risks and lousy odds."

The twins didn't look at each other. Thinking the same thoughts, they glanced at G'lene, and she tried to offer a good worried smile. And because it sounded a little bit reasonable, she said, "That Kajjas is so old and so strange. I just assumed that he's a little paranoid. Isn't that what happens after millions of years?"

"My experience," said Jon. "It doesn't take nearly that long."

"You want to change priorities," Rondie said, steering the subject.

"Change them how?" Maxx asked.

"Forget munitions and normal warfare," said the Luddite. "We have one clear job, and that's to finish loading the fuel and dismantling the streakship. Its entire mass has to be ready to burn, when the time comes."

"That would be crazy," said Maxx. "If you can't get the pulse engine firing, then the other ship becomes our lifeboat."

"Except we aren't going to fly any streakship," said Jon. "Streakships are brilliant and very steady and we love them because of it. But if we have enemies, then they'll spot us at a distance, and believe me, streakships are easy targets. On the other hand, the Kajjas pulse engine is a miserable mess full of surges and little failures. Tracking us will be a very difficult proposition. And that's why today, in another ten minutes, I want the two of you to start mapping the minimum cuts to make that other ship into a useable corpse."

"But you promised," said Maxx. "Our enemies aren't coming inside a warship."

"What I promised is that we can't beat them if they do come. We don't have the munitions or armor to offer any kind of fight. My little epiphany, for what it's worth, is that our foes, if they are real, will have one of two strategies: They don't want anybody to have this ship or its cargo, which means they destroy us out here, in deep space. In which case, boarding parties are a waste. Or they want to have whatever we have here, and that's why we have to make ourselves a lousy target."

Rondie scoffed. "Again, we know nothing."

"Or there's nothing worth knowing," G'lene added.

"Physics and tactics," Jon said. "I see our advantages as well as our weaknesses, which is why my plan is best."

"Impressive," said Maxx with a mocking tone, one leg kicking him a little closer to Jon.

G'lene didn't like anybody's face. Where was Tailor? In the distance, hands and long feet working at a bank of controls—controls that hadn't been used since she was a broth of scattered DNA running in the trees, waiting for mutations and the feeble tiny chance to become human.

Jon's gaze was fixed in the middle of the threesome.

"You know quite a lot for a simple drive-mechanic," Maxx said.

"Simple can be good." Jon winked at that empty spot of air. "Now ask yourselves this: Why did our captain hire children?"

"We're not children," Rondie said.

Maxx said.

But G'lene sighed, admitting, "I wondered that too."

"Real or imagined, Tailor's enemy is treacherous," said Jon. "Our Kajjas wants youth. He brought only humans, which are a very young species. And he wants humans that aren't more than a thousand years old, give or take. That way he could study our entire lives, proving to his satisfaction that we aren't more than we seem to be."

"I'm not a little girl," said Rondie.

"You're not," Maxx said nothing.

But Jon was a thousand and the siblings weren't even five centuries old, making them the babies in this odd group.

G'lene watched the angry faces and Jon's face, alert but weirdly calm. Then she noticed the twins' sticky breakfast floating free of its orb. G'lene was born on the Great Ship. Everybody had been. This was their first genuine experience with zero-gee, and she hated it. Without weight, everything small got lost inside the same careless moment, and she didn't know how to move without thinking, and she wasn't moving now, remembering how the Luddite so easily, so deftly, made that bite of his breakfast spin and drift into his waiting mouth.

Jon had been in zero gravity before this.

When?

She nearly asked. But then Maxx said, "I'm going back to work. Plasma guns need to be secured and powered up."

"No, you're not," said Jon.

Rondie kicked closer to the Luddite, hands flexing. "Who put you in charge?" she asked.

"Life," Jon said.

Everybody laughed at him.

But then he asked, "Do you know what I did last night? While you slept, I changed the pass-codes on every gun. Nothing warms an egg without my blessing."

The twins cursed.

Jon shrugged and said, "By the way, I've convinced our human-built AIs that the only voice of reason here is me. Me."

The twins wrapped some brutal words around, "Luddite," and "mutiny."

The mysterious human showed them nothing. He didn't brace for war or smile at his victory. The milky water from a glacier was warmer and far more impatient. Then the twins' anger finally ebbed, and Jon looked at G'lene. Again, from somewhere, he found the sly grin that unsettled her once more. But it also had a way of making her confident, which she liked.

"You never were a Luddite," she blurted.

Jon didn't seem to notice. "Sleep is an indulgence," he told everyone. "We're working hard and smart from this instant, and we'll launch eighteen days earlier than you originally planned. Everybody can sleep, but only when we're roaring back to the Great Ship."

"You're somebody else entirely," she said. "Who are you?"

"I'm Jon, the drive-mechanic," he told them. "And I'm Jon, the temporary captain of this fossil ship.

"Everything else is electrons bouncing inside a box."

The field kitchen had no trouble generating propanol and cyanide, and for that matter, spitting out passable rum—an archaic drink that Pamir had grown fond of. What was difficult was finding the moment when the ship's new captain and the Kajjas could drink without interruption. The streakship was being gutted and sliced up, each piece secured against the scaffolding on the old ship's hull. Pamir's three-body crew was working with an absence of passion, but they were working. When everything was going well enough, he offered some calibrated excuse about his lifesuit malfunctioning. Then alone, he slipped back inside the long interior room, grabbing the refreshments and joining Tailor, drifting before that bank of murmuring and glowing, deeply uncooperative machines.

"For you, my sovereign," said the human, handing over a bulb of poison.

The Kajjas was fondling the interfaces, using hands and bare toes, using touch and ears. But his eyes were mist and dream, and the long neck held the head back in a careless fashion that hinted at deep anguish.