Balance Point (20 page)
Authors: Robert Buettner
THIRTY-ONE
My father and I walked without speaking, the only sound our footsteps in the slop and the thrum of the machines, closer now beneath our feet as we got into the lower seventies.
From time to time, we cut through utilities barely wide enough for a full-sized human to crawl through, and far too narrow for a cop in armor, until we emerged into some other pedestrian passage. Then we did it again, and again. Finally, I felt sure we were so deep in the stink that even vice cops couldn’t or wouldn’t follow.
I stopped, turned and faced him. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I came back for you. I’ve been meeting every down shuttle for the last week.”
“What made you think I—?”
“Orion sent word. She’s always had an address where P-mail could reach us. Just in case.”
“Orion sent you word? Bullshit. I never told Orion I was coming here. I never told Orion anything. She just sent me a P-mail.”
“You didn’t have to. Mothers know what their children will do. Or they think they know. And she said you did send her a P-mail.”
“You came all the way to this crappy place because Orion thought her good boy would visit when she was sick?”
“No. I came because your mother also thought her good boy would show up. And I go where your mother goes.”
I stood there with my mouth open. Finally, I whispered in the dripping, vibrating silence, “My birth mother’s here? Are you two staying with Orion, then?”
My father shook his head. “Orion’s—”
My heart sank. “God. I’m too late.”
“No. She’s alive. She was in detention but got released because—because she was ill. So at the moment, she’s bunking with us at our hotel.”
“Hotel?”
“We’re ‘tourists.’ This time our docs say we’re from Rand. Just like we were ‘tourists’ when we came here while your mother was carrying you.”
A knot puckered in my gut.
Nobody in detention got released because they were sick. Or even because they were dying, which is when I realized that my father couldn’t bring himself to tell me. The only fragments of humanity that left the detention blocks were corpses bound for incineration.
I narrowed my eyes.
Orion may have been old and feeble. But she was so confused that she thought I sent her a P-mail that I never had? She hadn’t mentioned in her P-mail that she had been in detention, just that she was terminally ill. I had been so moved by the news that it had only fleetingly bothered me that I had never sent her my address. After all, she could have tracked it down. I knew better than most that almost any information was available for a price.
But now I wondered. Orion would pay to P-mail her son, sure. But would she have blown the price of a lifetime supply of whisky searching for the address of an illegal who was very probably dead?
I didn’t know my mother, of course. But what had Howard Hibble told me once about her? That she had been not just a pilot, but a starship captain, one of the original ones, during the War. So much for the “fact” that the keel-up starship captains, the ones that knew not just how to fly one, but how to build one, were all dead.
“You let my mother come back to Yavet?”
My father snorted as he shook his head. “She’s my wife, not my property! And remember, we got in and out of here once before.”
I sighed. Sure they did. But when I was born, the Cold War was more like the Cold Disagreement.
All of this didn’t answer all of my lifetime of questions, not by half. One remaining whopper was, what had my parents done that had been terrible enough to get them expunged from the history of the end of the War?
But all my other questions were suddenly pushed back by one new question of considerable immediacy. Orion improbably gets out of jail free. Orion improbably finds out I’m alive, and where to find me. From a P-mail I never wrote. But given those two improbabilities, any average student of human nature could bet I would probably come to Orion, and in turn my mother would probably come to me, if Orion knew how to contact her.
I cocked my head at the old man. “Could the Yavi have set this all up to get at my mother?”
My father stared. Then he said, “Oh, crap. By the way, I say that a lot.”
I nodded. “Actually, so do I.”
“Odd.”
“Not really, when you think about it.”
He grasped my elbow. “Orion said she told you why we left you with her?”
I nodded. “You told her you were tourists. But Orion always figured spies. Mom was eight months pregnant, but I came early. And I was coming messy, so you hired a midwife. And a dozen vice goons found the three of you. They were breaking down the door.”
On Yavet, parents caught with an undocumented child were summarily executed after watching their newborn suffocated on the spot. The evidence proved
prima facie
that both parents had managed to willfully violate the sterilization code, and the only “intent” an illegal newborn had to demonstrate in order to be guilty was attempting to breathe. Niceties like non-resident status were resolved after the corpses were incinerated. Oops.
Orion, literally red-handed after delivering me, escaped with me out the back door. From then on, my best chance of surviving to adulthood lay in all concerned pretending I didn’t exist. There was a bounty on illegals, and few of us grew up, as it was.
My father said, “I didn’t stay and protect you. I’ve remembered that every night of my life since. And the best I can do today is tell you that I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t. One versus twelve gunfights end badly for the one. If my father and my mother and Orion hadn’t in that moment done exactly what they did, all four of us would have died that day. I should have told him all of that. I owed it to him to tell him all of that.
But I had preplayed this moment for decades, even though I never expected it to happen. Now here it was, and nothing was the way I had imagined it might be. So I just stood there.
“We never heard from Orion. So we had to assume the worst.” My father wiped his eyes. “We always hoped. But after awhile we didn’t really think . . .”
I stared, tight-lipped, as he spoke.
A lifetime’s resentment didn’t dissipate with one speech. But hearing the story from his mouth at last was like hearing it from my own.
“Jazen, we let you go once, and we lived with that mistake every day of our lives. The moment your mother and I knew where you were, the only way to keep us away would’ve been to kill us both. Please believe that you mean that much to us. Anyone who knows us knows that’s the truth.”
Howard Hibble knew my parents, so he knew that.
It almost explained why Howard Hibble played fast and loose with what had become the sole walking, breathing repository of the greatest strategic secret in human history. Why he let my parents roam around the universe in some kind of self-directed combination retirement cruise and witness protection program. And why he let them think I was dead, even after he learned differently, because my job took me places crawling with Yavi, places from which two spooks in three didn’t return. Howard couldn’t take a chance that my parents might follow.
Because in Howard’s paranoid but sentimental mind, his options in order to keep my mother secure from a Yavi interrogation were to have my parents imprisoned for life in some velvet retirement bunker. Or have them killed. Up until now, Howard’s plan had been pretty effective. Plenty of riskier longshots had come home for Howard Hibble over the decades.
I reached out and laid a hand on my father’s shoulder. “Dad, would you mind taking me home and introducing me to my mother?”
“Sure.” He reached out with his own hand, and laid it on
my
shoulder.
Then, for the first time in my life, I saw my father smile at me.
THIRTY-TWO
Mort looked out through Kit’s eyes, and out through the open eye of the Scorpion she flew, at the shining, gray ball that swelled in the distance. Now seen in reality, rather than in the incorporeal replica that had provoked conflict between Kit and the female lieutenant, the silver ring around the ball glistened as fine and as reflective as a web spinner’s silk adrift on the breeze.
Mort thought, “This is unexpected. The Yavi are as evil as Cutler, yet their nest is beautiful.”
Kit thought, “Maybe from this far away. But those clouds? Excess greenhouse gases. Fossil fuel and chemical particulates. Atmospheric nuclear test fallout. And that pretty ring? It’s a combination slave-labor colony and prison. But the slaves clamor to go there because stack-city living down below is worse.”
“Oh. Jazen is within such a city.”
Kit’s heart took an irregular beat. “You found him?”
“He is deep within the great nest of which you and the female lieutenant spoke, called Yaven.”
“He told you?”
“No. I have been unable to penetrate his consciousness. But those around him know the place where I have located him as Yaven. It is vast.”
Kit’s heart skipped again. “Who’s around him?”
“Too many to begin to know. I am sorry. I have accomplished nothing.”
“You’ve accomplished plenty. You’ve corroborated the listening post lieutenant’s hypothesis. In another hour or so, can you narrow Jazen’s location down more?”
“Perhaps.”
“Okay. Then I’m playing out this hand while we see if you can draw aces.” She spoke aloud to the Scorpion seed. “Maintain course. Maintain speed. Alarm at five thousand miles to first contact.”
“You intend to enter the nest of Yaven itself?”
“Relax. I’m still seventeen minutes away from first contact with the Helmet perimeter.
“The female lieutenant thought that even penetrating the Helmet would be unwise, although she grudgingly conceded your authority.”
“Grudging. I
knew
she didn’t like me. It’s the blonde thing. Wait. Mort, you know what she was actually thinking?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I did not understand her thoughts, but they seemed uncomplimentary. I would prefer not to share them.” Humans, females in particular, expended extraordinary energy attempting to decipher or discover hidden meanings in the words and actions of other humans. Mort, particularly in this time of stress on himself, found this a waste of energy.
“Come on! Share! Buddy to buddy. Spill and I’ll tell
you
anything you wanna know. Deal? It’s a fair trade.”
No grezzen individually possessed a skill, knowledge or an object that another grezzen needed, so grezzen didn’t trade.
However, the community by which humans survived in a universe that was stronger than they were depended on division of labor, and division of objects, and so on trading. Mort had learned that human bargaining involved rapid, familiar banter, temptation and interpersonal goading. And Kit possessed something he wanted to know very much.
“Very well. You are on, lady.” He paused for effect. Humans did that. “The lieutenant thought you were stubborn, overbearing, hot for a granny with a fat ass, reckless and a complete prick when she was just trying to help. And you obviously hadn’t gotten laid in a long time.”
“Granny? Fat ass?”
“Do not kill the messenger. Ha-ha. Kit, a deal is a deal. My turn.”
A metallic voice said, “Multiple contacts. Range five thousand.”
“Talk fast, Shylock. Gettin’ busy here.”
“When Howard spoke with you at Mousetrap, I was unable to perceive what he told you. Only that it made you angry and confused. Since then you have trapped the memory in the part of your mind that I cannot reach, in the way I have trapped snakes beneath rocks in hopes that they might weaken and die before I must return and risk their venom. What did Howard say?”
The voice said, “Range four thousand.”
He felt the tension in Kit’s muscles, which had increased sharply when the voice first spoke, increase further.
“Mort, I can’t look under that rock right now. The present’s trying to bite me.”
“But when you must look? What lies beneath?”
He felt anger and sadness well up in her.
Kit did not speak aloud, but thought, “Mort, not now! Shop talk I can deal with. Not the other.”
“Range three thousand.”
Kit said, “Resume manual.”
Then Mort felt the metal against her foreclaw, and in that moment her anxiety fell away, as it fell away within him when he finally confronted a striper or other competing predator that he had felt from a distance. It was when Kit was hunting that she felt to him most like his mother.
Kit spoke, her voice free from expression. “Heads up: display targets.”
An angular pattern glowed before her eyes.
He modulated his inquiry so that she felt only a whisper. “There are machines ahead that will seek you? Like the crawling mines that have killed my cousins?”
“Exactly like that, actually. Except this minefield is three-dimensional, and the distances are longer. And so far it’s asleep.”
“That is good.”
“That is expected. A Scorpion-T’s got the radar cross section of the bluebird of happiness and the heat signature of day-old pizza.”
Ahead of Kit points of bright light showed, now diverging visibly because the Scorpion seed sped toward them so rapidly.
“I’m gonna punch through equidistant from those six HKs in front of me at center display. Probably none of them will wake up. If one does, I’ll be through so fast it’ll think I was a system fault. If one chases and detonates, I’ll outrun the shrapnel, but the doorbell will ring down below.”
“But detonation would pose no physical danger to you?”
“If the chaser’s the one in twenty that’s nuclear, I’m not in danger, I’m dead.”
Ahead, the light points were gone.
“Huh. Non-event.”
“What?”
“I’m inside the chicken coop already, and the Yavi don’t know it. If we ever go postal on these people, they are so screwed.” Kit expelled breath through her nostrils, indicating derision. “Iron Helmet, my ass. Which, by the way, is not fat.”
Now the area ahead of Kit was soft gray, not black. She was now so close to Yavet that the ball consumed her view.
“Heads up: reset target display.”
The space before Kit’s eyes swarmed with lights that spread all across her field of vision.
“Hello! That is a
lot
of fighters.”
“Fighters. Shells like yours, directed by humans?”
The roiling lights both grew and diverged as Kit closed the distance to them.
“Not like mine. They aren’t C-drive. Slow. Sluggish. Visible to radar, which lets their controllers direct them onto targets easier. And their controllers are all in one fat-ass room in the Ring, looking at fat-ass radar displays.”
“Your task is harder, then.”
“No, my task is easier.” Kit spoke aloud. “Evasive action.”
Kit’s view again shifted to black, then gray, then back, faster than a nectar sucker’s wings beat. “A scorpion’s not as straight-line fast as a cruiser, or durable enough to jump reliably. But it’s got the same gravity cocoon, so it can juke right angles at Mach 6 without squishing its payload.”
Mort stared at the landscape ahead of him to relieve the disorientation he felt from the flickering view through Kit’s eyes.
“Even if a radar in a brilliant moment sees me, the radar’s brain doesn’t register what its eye sees. An object moving nonconformably to Newtonian physics doesn’t exist to it. The Yavi can’t remodel their computer algorithms to match C-drive fighters, because they’re just guessing what C-drive fighters can really do. An unalerted centrally directed fighter is no fighter at all.”
Mort shook his head to clear it. Too many concepts. He referred to a simpler hunting technique that grezzen and humans shared. “But the pilots might see you. You can see them.”
“They won’t see me if I go where they don’t want to go. Cancel evasive action. Resume manual.”
Mort peered again through Kit’s eyes. Her view ahead was again gray, and the wispy silver thread now floated so close that he saw it was an angular human shell, immensely vaster even than the cruisers like the
Gateway
. Within the great shell, he felt too many human intellects to count. “There are many humans inside the great thread. If you continue, you will butt it.”
“I won’t butt it. Not exactly. You see that brown haze floating beneath the Greatest Manmade Wonder of the Universe?”
“What is it?”
“Mort, what do one hundred million humans make more of than noise?”
“You mean—”
“The Yavi don’t mention
that
in the tourism holos. The Ring vents its solid waste to vacuum, into a designated lower orbit. It freezes, then its orbit decays, and it burns up on atmospheric entry. Except for maybe a few million tons.”
“Ingenious. Eventually it fertilizes the surface.”
“Makes you want to go sing in the rain, doesn’t it?”
Already Kit had slowed the Scorpion so that it drifted below the great shell’s belly scarcely faster than a gliding gort.
Whump. Whump
.
Through Kit’s ears, Mort heard objects strike the Scorpion’s skin. Kit’s view was of dark and irregular objects ranging from smaller than a human head to larger than the Scorpion itself, tumbling as the Scorpion itself now tumbled.
“Your shell has been damaged!”
“At this speed, all that’s damaged is her dignity. The pilots are up in the umbrella patrol at orbital speed because they have to cover a whole planet from equator to poles. Their hard deck’s miles above the Ring because jettisoned debris smaller than a lug nut
could
hole their ships. Besides, what fighter jock wants to fly his shiny baby through a shitstorm? That’s the beauty. A Scorpion can’t just go fast, it can go slow. It can yaw and roll like a hunk of frozen shit, unnoticed among a billion other hunks. I’m working my way down gradually. Once I’m through this, it’s clear sailing to the surface for a ship as stealthy as she is.”
As the Scorpion drifted, Kit asked, “Find him yet?”
Mort paused, sought a better response, found none. “It is hopeless.”
He felt anger flash in her. “It can’t be hopeless! Mort, I’ve come too far. And the hardest part’s still ahead. A stack city like Yaven’s a hundred-level-tall pyramid, twenty miles wide where the base meets the surface. And another hundred downlevels beneath the surface. And the whole hive’s crawling with armored-up Yavi cops who shoot on sight. I’ve got to know where I’m going.”
“Please! I am looking for one needle in a hay storm.”
He felt Kit’s body sag along with her spirit. “I know. There’s three billion of them, and only one of him.”
The Scorpion continued drifting, the silence broken only by the thump of frozen excrement against its flanks.
He felt adrenaline surge through Kit, saw her view shift as she came upright.
“Mort, I said there was only one of him. Would it help if there were more than one? I mean, not multiple Jazens. Somebody near him genetically similar?”
“Oh, immeasurably. Of course, the signature of a woog herd is vastly stronger than a lone woog. But within the herd a cow with her calf is distinct. If the sire bull remains nearby the calf, the signature is strongest of all.”
Mort felt Kit strike the Scorpion’s inner skin so hard that her palm registered pain. “Sure! Your ancestors that could spot a cow and calf ate better, survived better. If they also knew how to avoid calves protected by bulls, better still. Natural selection.”
Too many concepts. “Perhaps.”
“Mort, stop looking just for Jazen. Look for two Jazens in relative proximity.”
“I will if you ask. But as you have said, there are not multiple Jazens.”
“Yes and no.”
“How will I recognize this other Jazen?”
“Find a stubborn dickhead with a heart of gold. Just like his son.”
The view before Kit cleared to gray clouds, across the bulbous, churning tops of which night began to fall.
Kit again touched the metal that accelerated the Scorpion. “Work fast, Mort. It’s about to get real warm for me down there.”