Cosmonaut Keep (27 page)

Someday, they might learn a different response.

With a gleeful yelp the pilot took the skiff upward again, skipping over a ten-thousand-meter mountain range like a saucer sent spinning across water. And down again, to the southern plain.

Here, the herds were not patches but rivers, flowing north in their annual autumnal migration away from the oncoming snows to the approaching rains and lush growth. Most of the streams were moving in the direction of gaps in, and passes through, the mountain range. Others had been diverted onto a path that would take them parallel to and south of the mountains, toward the western coast.

A saur voice, distinct from that of the two in the craft, sounded in the air. The pilot made a long, low noise in reply, lifted the craft again and sent it yet farther south, and then down in another swoop until it was skimming along at a hundred meters. Gregor felt his fingers dig into the screen's sill -- the forward rush was terrifying at this height, the grass a green-and-brown blur beneath them.

A blemish on the horizon resolved in seconds into a great tide of animals moving along in a cloud of dust and a haze of insects and bats. The craft flew straight toward the herd and then, five hundred meters in front of its leading edge, stopped.

And dropped until it hung a meter above the grass. The herd advanced like a striding forest, the swaying necks of the adults reaching fifteen meters into the air. Gregor could see the ground in front of them actually shake, dust particles jumping above the tough stalks of rough grass. He could see the dappled patterns of their hides, brown-on-green for the most part, their undersides yellow and white. The younger and smaller animals seemed almost to dance along, dodging around the mighty legs of their elders. And darting between them, the dark slinking shapes of the bolder predators. When the compact leading group was a few steps, a few seconds away, the pilot took the craft up and at them. A head that looked bigger than the craft itself loomed in the screen, sending Gregor and Elizabeth into a futile instinctive backward lurch.

At the last moment the pilot veered to the left, jinxed about and took them in again at the herd's leaders, from the side this time. They dived directly at a huge rolling eye, then up and over the tossing head's flailing wattles; swung up and away, much farther to the left, to the east, and paced that edge of the herd, setting beasts shying and rearing, shit flying by the steaming ton as they lurched sideways, shouldering their fellows.

Then again in at the group at the front, this time coming at them from behind and to the left. And around at the flank again, and then to the front again, until -- the fourth time they approached -- the leading bulls and cows broke into a run, veering off on a course that now leaned to the west. At that the pilot pulled the skiff back, zooming skyward and halting at a few thousand meters, surveying the success of his deflection of that whole miles-long torrent. Slight though it was, he seemed satisfied.

"That's enough for now," he said. "I'll be back. I've staked my claim on this lot."

With that he leaned on the indented panel and set a course straight to the west. In the next few minutes they passed to the south of several herds now trudging in the same direction that the craft flew. Other skiffs attended these, chivying them on, blocking any breaks toward the north. Such attempted breaks became more frequent as the mountain range ran down into isolated peaks and foothills. Long-necked carrion-bats, circling on thermals, were thrown into screaming downward spirals by the skiff's wake. Predators and scavengers feasted on the bodies of beasts that had refused to turn back, and had been -- as the pilot explained -- decapitated by skiffs flown straight through their necks.

"Isn't that dangerous?" Elizabeth's face was white, her hands tight, her lips thin as a saur's.

"Oh no," the pilot said. "Edge-on, it's no contest. It's the tails whacking you from above or below that you have to watch out for. Or getting crushed underfoot, for that matter. You have to be gods-cursed stupid or unlucky to do that, but it happens."

Ahead of them the western sea appeared on the horizon, and as they flew toward it they could see the herding become more intense, skiffs buzzing the great beasts like bees, to the point where entire herds were being panicked into stampeding for the final few kilometers and minutes of their lives.

To the slaughter cliffs.

The skiff hovered, hanging in the air a hundred meters above the level of the top of the cliffs and a few hundred meters out from the beach. The cliffs themselves at this part of Southland's western coast, the reach called by the humans Gadara, rose about two hundred meters above the beaches.

Any sauropod that shied at the edge was pushed implacably forward by those behind. So by the dozen, by the score, the huge animals plunged to their deaths. Any that survived for a moment, their impact softened by the bodies already fallen, were swiftly crushed by the next to fall.

The bodies were given no time to pile up further. For miles around this primitive mass slaughter an industrial process of butchery and preservation went on. Specialized vehicles waded in the bloody surf, dragging and cutting, pumping and hosing. The sea close to the shore thronged with great iron ships, from which hooks and cables and cranes were deployed to haul the hacked meat away. Half a mile to the south an installation the size of a small town stood on stilts in the sea. Clouds of steam and smoke drifted above it.

Above everything, above the beach and the inshore fleet and the processing-plant, the air was filled with the white-and-gray wings of seabats, the surface broken by their diving in a million places like raindrops on a lake.

Gregor found himself gazing at the process with a kind of nauseated fascination. He was very glad that he could not smell any of it. All he could bring himself to say was:

"Isn't this a bit inefficient? Doesn't it contaminate the meat?"

"And," added Elizabeth, likewise transfixed, "isn't it
cruel?"

"Good gods, no," said Salasso. "Death is swift, perhaps swifter than any other method of killing such large beasts would be. As to efficiency, we use every part of the animal. Contamination, well -- it is actually not difficult to hose away the excreta."

"Anyway," said the pilot, "It's traditional. We did it on a bigger scale in ancient times, and less efficiently."

Another unfelt jump took them farther back and higher up, to show a wider view of the coast's black cliffs and miles of white sand.

"See the beaches we no longer use," he said. "Their sand is splintered bone."

The craft spun about again and flew a few more miles to the south. The cliffs sloped away to shingle shores bordering the grassy plain, and a straight road and railway line crossing the prairie and terminating in a kilometer-long causeway came into view. At the causeway's end, New Lisbon hunched in the sea, a rocky island crusted with streets and fringed with quays. Its harbors were crowded with ships and boats. A mile out to sea, attended by the usual fleet of small vessels, the starship hung on the water.

The pilot set them down at the end of one of the quays, and flew off, back to the dinosaur drive. Gregor stood on the boardwalk watching it disappear, and took a deep breath. The breeze carried no taint of the gruesome work being done beneath the cliffs. The meat handled here, being transferred from the shuttling factory ships to the refrigeration tankers for the long haul, was already processed and packaged for freezing, or salted and smoked, boiled and canned. Some of it would be due for a longer haul than an ocean crossing. What delicacies, Gregor idly wondered (eyeballs? tongues? sweetbreads?), would be worth shipping to the stars?

He turned to the island town and to his friends. New Lisbon loomed before them on its volcanic plug, its buildings dense and high, its streets narrow and steep, a haystack of needles.

"So where do we go now?" he asked.

Salasso lifted his case and set off along the echoing boards with dauntless step. Gregor and Elizabeth hurried after him.

"We find a lodging," the saur said. "Then we split, and search. I have a list of places. Simple."

14

____________

Revolutionary Platform

"The delegates brandish their weapons." We were sitting on the edge of a rickety stage. Driver and Lemieux -- their avatars shabby-suited like Bukharin and Zinoviev -- sat behind the table, frowning over data in its illusory depths. Camila, her head seamlessly edited to the body of a bandy-legged horsewoman, propped her cutlass on the shoulder of her yak-hide coat and looked at the gathering throng with nervous amusement.

"What's this based on?"

Avakian, robed as a mullah, looked up from a grubby notebook, his virtual visual display.

"Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East," he said. "Nineteen nineteen, I think. Swiped the details from an old film about John Reed, to tell you the truth. Last week we did the Petrograd Soviet, but there's only so much fun to be had with muddy trenchcoats and Lenin's trousers."

Remember the Twenty-six Commissars of Baku,
I thought grimly, as my virtual leather jacket and trousers -- Bolshevik chic -- creaked around me. My hand tightened on the realistically rusty Afghan-workshop copy of a Lee Enfield which represented my say in decisions. Pathans and Mongols, Turks and Armenians, Kazakhs and Kalmyks and many other nationalities -- all in traditional costumes with swords and rifles and fierce expressions -- were filing in and taking their seats in a semicircular auditorium under a flapping marquee. The scene and our accoutrements might be testimony to Avakian's warped sense of humor but the meeting was as seditious, and as fraught with consequence, as its original.

Even if none of us ended up shot by the British.

It was the day after our arrival, the day after we'd shown the project data to Avakian.
He
hadn't needed any walk-through from me. After zapping through the whole thing faster even than Driver, he'd come out raving and raring to go, hand-waving wild speculative explanations of the implied AG physics, from which all I could extract was that the density of the transplutonic nuclei generated a quark-gluon plasma at the nuclear core which, when set in cyclical motion, interacted directly with the quantum foam of the space-time manifold, after which matters got complicated and arcane. He also had a few ideas about "the engine," about which he was even more excited and less comprehensible.

"Think fusion bombs compared to atomic bombs," he said. "It's the same physics, but ramped up several orders of magnitude to something that has
no practical limit.
You don't just
control mass.
You
become light."

And then his frightening laugh.

Driver had told him to spread the word around the station's intranet, and while he was off doing that, Driver and Lemieux had explained the mutinous crew's brilliant plan for the Revolution.

They were busy releasing the alien mathematics, the basis for completely ripping open any kind of prime-number-based encryption, to as many nodes on the Internet as the station's powerful and highly directional transmitters could reach. With this, it would not take long for the distributed processing-power and collaborative ingenuity of the world's hackers and geeks to pry open the secrets of every military and security establishment on Earth. The people would shortly thereafter have the goods on all the deceptions practiced by the powers of both sides, and ...

And in this way, we will build the Revolution!

It struck me as the kind of program that could only have been dreamt up by scientists, disillusioned security men, and code-geeks, and exactly the sort of naive, apolitical suggestion that got laughed out of enthusiastic young information-techs at their first IWWWW meeting. Knowledge is one thing, and power is something else.

But I didn't tell them I thought that. Their program wouldn't bring down any states -- maybe a few governments -- but I couldn't see it doing any harm.

Driver stood up and addressed the assembly.

"Comrades and friends," he said, with only a little irony in his voice, "I know you're all very busy and I know you all know what this meeting's about, so I won't waste time. We've already decided on our revolutionary strategy -- "

He was interrupted by a murmur of approval and a shuffle of opposition, both of which Avakian's VR software, getting into the spirit of the thing, translated into a pounding of rifle-butts and a tumult of cries of
"Allah-hu Akbar!"
He smiled and continued:

" -- so all we have to do now is decide whether to incorporate the Nevada Projects -- as we're calling them -- into the program. I can see arguments for and against it. One obvious argument for it is that if the devices perform as some of us seem to think, we'll have an extraordinarily effective means of defense. Against it, there's the obvious point that developing the machines might be a diversion of time and resources from more-urgent tasks. I don't consider myself in any way competent to decide this at present -- it's partly a technical question. Over to you."

He sat down, to a jangling quiet. One of the scientists immediately stood up. Her name was Aleksandra Chumakova -- a small woman with an intense gaze. She must have hacked her avatar, because she appeared as wearing ordinary uniform fatigues.

"This is a farce!" she said. "Let's stop playing at being revolutionaries: we're scientists. You uncovered some illegal actions by Major Sukhanov and his connections on the ground -- well and good. You moved decisively, appealed to the people and the proper authorities, action is being taken ... Excellent! And then you went and ruined our moral position by starting this campaign of subversion -- "

About two-thirds of the assembly flourished their weapons and flashed their teeth. Chumakova glared at them and continued:

" -- which many of us deplore, and which could easily destabilize the military balance on Earth -- "

Driver raised a hand.

"We had this discussion last week," he said. "We've taken our decision and reconsidering it is
not
on the agenda of this meeting."