Girl on the Moon (41 page)

“We’re at war with these things, Miss Garrow!” He was red in the face. “You’ve been the leading denier of that fact. You’re a traitor to your country and to your species.”

“Conn is neither of those things,” Persisting said. “She is a businesswoman. There was something in it for her. There was something in it for all of you!”

Conn was stung. She didn’t know why she kept expecting Persisting to consider her his friend, but she did.

“Mr. Bowman,” she said, “I’ve seen one of these Aphelials myself. His weaponry is staggering. With literally just a wave of a staff he crushed two spacecraft into junk. He killed two astronauts and almost a third. Almost me. We should be finding out from the Pelorians what we can expect from the Aphelials. They might be more of a threat than the Pelorians will ever be.”

“We need to stop fighting and talk instead? How typical.”

“We might need allies to protect us from the Aphelials. If you have another technologically advanced alien race you can call, by all means do so,” Conn said.

“For all we know, these Aphelials are on our side. You said they were humanoid. There’s a point in their favor, right there.”

“Mr. Bowman,” Persisting said, “why don’t the three of us—or four, we can get a reporter in here with us—why don’t we talk this out? There’s no need for violence.”

“Do you even care if I shoot you? I don’t think you do. I think I could shoot you in the head, and wherever you are, you, the real you, would just say, ‘
Oh well,
there goes another one.’”

“It doesn’t matter what he thinks. It matters that this is a living being!” Conn cried. She stopped short of calling him her
friend
. Was he really? Or was Glenn Bowman right? Had he been right all along?

“You don’t understand, none of you understand, what they can do with these things,” Bowman said. “They can fight a war without a single casualty. They can infiltrate the enemy. You get that. But it’s a license to act consequence-free. Avoid responsibility. Do whatever you want, because when you’re done? Just shut them off. Make a new one.”

“All of that may be true,” Persisting said. “But the avatar, this technology, doesn’t cause it. Just like people, there are lazy, duplicitous, even evil Pelorians. They would act that way with or without access to so-called avatars.”

“And how do avatars act? By definition? They’re temporary. Here and then gone.” Conn began to wonder if Bowman’s problem with Pelorians, avatars in particular, was personal.

“I’m here now,” Persisting said. He carefully sat back down, and motioned for Conn to do the same. “Let’s talk about it.”

“You,” Bowman spat at Conn. “You haven’t asked him the big question yet. Ask him where human avatars come from.”

Persisting’s avatar looked at Conn almost pleadingly.
Some Pelorians are lazy, duplicitous and evil,
she thought. “Where do they come from, Persisting?” she asked, in almost a whisper.

“Conn, it doesn’t matter—”

“It matters. Where do they come from?”

Persisting still balked at answering.

“From the cerebrospinal fluid and bone marrow of people. Dead people, obviously,” Bowman said. “That’s where they come from. And guess what happens if they need an avatar, but there don’t happen to be any dead people nearby?”

“How do you know this?” Persisting asked Bowman. Conn’s jaw dropped.

“It’s true?” she said.

“People don’t get killed to make avatars, if that’s what you’re saying,” Persisting said.

“Don’t they? Not one, huh?”

“Bone marrow and CSF are precious commodities,” Persisting said. “We have—had—many so-called avatars among the population of the United States who were copies. We don’t kill people to make them.”

“He’s lying,” Bowman said.

“Who is this person whose body you’re in right now?” Conn asked. “Where did he come from?”

Persisting leaned over to look into Conn’s eyes. “He died in a traffic accident in Delray Beach, Florida. That’s where he comes from. And there are or have been a dozen more just like this one.”

“How do you produce avatars of twentieth-century celebrities?”

“With great effort and expense,” Persisting said.

“You can say avatar technology only amplifies the kind of being who’s already there,” Bowman said. “But you don’t have to search far to find a Pelorian willing to kill. A hundred and fifty thousand avatars? If a quarter of them come from people who are killed, that’s genocide.”

Conn looked at Persisting’s avatar in horror.

“That,” he said, “overstates it. Yes, there are bad actors, there were especially early on when we hadn’t gotten to know you—”

“I don’t think I want you to talk anymore,” Conn said.

“Right, why don’t you shut up and stand up, so I can shoot you properly?”

Persisting stood. “If we’re as disposable as you say, what does shooting me accomplish? You said yourself, I’ll just shrug and say ‘
Oh, well.
’”

“The thing is,” Bowman said, “I don’t blame you for turning this country onto your side. I blame her.”

He pointed the gun at Conn. Fired.

At the same time, Persisting’s avatar cried out, and leaped in front of the shot.

He took it right in the chest. He fell to the floor, motionless.

Several
NewsAmerica
staffers rushed Bowman and subdued him. The gun skittered away across the floor.

Conn froze in shock. Then she saw four people struggling to keep Bowman down.

She calmly rose and strode to the gun. She picked it up.

She approached the tangle of bodies.

She knelt beside Bowman. His hands were balled into fists, and he struggled.

Conn serenely brandished the gun, and she saw Bowman’s eyes go wide. She stared down the barrel of the gun at him for a few beats. Then she knocked him on the head with its butt.

When he was struck, his fists relaxed. Conn pushed the gun away across the floor, and got a death grip on his right hand with both of hers.

“No! Don’t!” Bowman shouted. It startled the
NewsAmerica
people, who stopped struggling, as did Bowman.

Conn put her thumbs on his palm. “Why not?” Conn said. “It won’t kill you. Not the real you.”

His hand flexed and he tried to tug it away, but Conn kept hold.

“I’ve worked for six years to become Glenn Bowman. You can’t just take all that away.”

“Why? Why become the most vocal opponent of Pelorians on Earth?”

“It never stops,” Bowman seethed. “We use avatars, we become lazy. We don’t care. We keep running. We fight, we run. We fight, we run. It’s got to stop! If we just stop using avatars, the Aphelials will leave us alone!”

“I thought Aphelials were genocidal maniacs,” Conn said, still with a two-handed grip on Bowman’s hand.

“The Aphelials are trying to wipe out avatars, not us!” Bowman said. “It’s all avatars. It’s all avatars, and fortresses on moons, and commandeering a planet’s weapons, and another species sent back to the stone age. It has to stop!”

“Did you kill Bowman?”

“What difference—”

“Did you kill him? To become him?”

“OK, yes. But—”

Conn squeezed. Nothing happened right away, except the avatar looked at his newly released hand in horror.

“It’s not necessarily painless, you know,” he said. “It triggers sudden cardiac arrest.”

“I didn’t know that.
Oh, well
.”

“We underestimated you,” Bowman said. “All along. You’re a strange civilization, you know that? You develop the capability to travel to your moon, and then you don’t use it. We didn’t know what to make of you. Were you anti-technology? Anti-exploration, antiscience, antiknowledge? Some of you were, but altogether, you weren’t. Yet you refused to go back to your moon, or go to Mars, or to one of Saturn’s moons.”

“Until someone did,” Conn said.

“Until Peo Haskell did. You, and your brave colleagues, yes, but all because of her. All because—”

Bowman let out a brief croak, sighed and slumped.

May, 2036

An enterprising company quickly manufactured and marketed a protrusion to strap to the right hand that would turn off any avatar with a handshake. Handshakes became tests, proof of humanity. The company that made the protrusion made a fortune.

Conn didn’t buy one.

She struggled with whether Persisting’s avatar taking a bullet for her was proof of friendship, or proof that Pelorians considered avatars disposable. If it had been Persisting, the original Persisting, and there was no such thing as avatars, would he have tried to save her life at the risk of his own?

To answer that question would also answer this one: had Conn murdered Glenn Bowman? Or had she avenged Glenn Bowman’s murder? Had she killed at all?

What happened would be easier to live with if the avatars were constructs, puppets, something to be used up and discarded. But Conn couldn’t convince herself that was true. Persisting’s was a living body, and it had Persisting’s mind. A mind that died when the body was shot in the chest. There may be others like him. But this one, the one who died saving her life—that was her friend. They all were. Whether they cared to say so or not.

And Persisting had been right: if you gave some people incentive to kill, they’d kill. Those were bad people. That didn’t mean that all human beings were evil. Likewise, there were bad Pelorians. That didn’t make them all evil.

Bowman, or the avatar that looked like him, said that the Pelorians killed people to make avatars from their CSF. He himself had killed to substitute himself for Bowman. When Conn thought about that, she became almost ill. But then she remembered the Pelorians’ cadre of twentieth-century avatars—Audrey Hepburn, Muhammad Ali, Marie Curie. They didn’t have access to any of those people’s bodies. But they made avatars that looked like them,
with great effort and expense,
Persisting had said. So they had made avatars that weren’t essentially clones of the people they came from. Bowman and Murrdip Hangzhii could call the Pelorians evil all day, but Conn refused to believe they routinely killed people to make avatars. She’d seen avatars they couldn’t have killed to make.

But she couldn’t be sure. Of anything.

The China-Russia war had its first exchanges of nuclear missiles. Did that mean events were playing out the way Murrdip Hangzhii had predicted they would? Like Bowman implied they would? Or did the awful government in Beijing simply attack a traditional rival and enemy because it could afford to with nitrogen powering their country?

Conn didn’t know if the Pelorians were friends of humanity or not. She didn’t know if humans and Pelorians could peacefully coexist, if the Pelorians even wanted to, or if the United States even wanted to. Well, OK, that, Conn had a good idea about. Most were in favor of the war that America was supposedly fighting with the Pelorians.

Conn spent days after the incident at
NewsAmerica
waiting for federal agents to come get her. After a while, she figured that she had been discredited enough that they didn’t worry about her anymore.

There was one positive development: when Conn had told of how she was detained without charge for weeks, the feeds went to work verifying her and exposing other, similar cases. Public opinion favored the war, but was contentiously split on detention without charge—the supposed suspension of the writ of
habeas corpus
. A civil rights group wanted Conn to join their lawsuit against the federal government, alleging that the president or Congress only had the power to suspend the writ in cases of rebellion or insurrection, neither of which was happening. She wasn’t interested. She was, however, happy to read that Warden Kohler had been fired: that meant she wasn’t disappeared anymore.

When it came to the Aphelials, Conn wanted answers. There were still so many questions. Were they relatives? Ancestors? Did they mean humankind harm? Were they pursuing the Pelorians to seek justice or commit genocide? More than that, she couldn’t stop thinking about the Murrdip Hangzhii’s “gravity bursts,” the manipulation of the force of gravity. Technology like that could launch rockets without fossil fuels, power spacecraft, make the moon and Mars more like Earth, gravity-wise. There were more applications than even Conn could imagine. She smiled to herself when she realized that she was still an engineer at heart.

Laura Haskell-Lefebvre wanted Conn back at the company. Employees and executives apparently were adamant that she was important to have around. They needed a new head of the division that made and sold the SafeTfields, and many people, Jody included, thought it would be perfect for Conn. Concentrating on T-fields would also keep her away from Laura, which might turn out to be a good thing for them both. Conn said she would think about coming back. And she did think about it.

She kept coming back to how the company wasn’t sure what to do with its successful fifth-dimension-traveling spacecraft prototype. Where was there to go? What did they need that this technology delivered? It could make the journey to the moon and Mars a snap, but what was there on the moon or Mars that could do Dyna-Tech any good? That was their mindset—or at least the people running the place. Conn didn’t have to be a Dyna-Tech insider to know Skylar Reece was calling the shots.

Her friends at the company told her and Laura what they needed in person, in e-mails, and in v-mails: they needed Conn back if they couldn’t have Peo. Someone to tell the company
Let’s do this bold thing
.
Because we can.

But coming back as the head of the SafeTfields division wouldn’t put Conn in a position to move the company to do things, and Laura wouldn’t let her near a position that would.

Conn supposed she could go back and work her way up. She had always thought that that’s how she should have done it in the first place. But Peo had trusted her. Loved her. And Conn had given Peo’s company away, to the worst recipient imaginable.

“I did it
for
the company,” she told Pritam, who wasn’t avoiding her anymore. “I did it to get everybody back to work and paid. If I hadn’t, they wouldn’t have finished the fifth-dimensional prototype. Who knows what that Aphelial really had in mind for me and Grant?” Pritam nodded sagely.