Hellflower (v1.1) (2 page)

This, I told him, was a lovely fantasy, and I had one to match: In three days we’d both come back here, and he would hand me six densepaks of never-you-mind and the full payment for the tik, and
Firecat
would then take the densepaks unbroached to Kiffit and one Moke Rahone.

Eventually we settled about halfway between-half from him up front, half from Moke Rahone on delivery, confidentiality of cargo to be guaranteed. I agreed to the job, thumbprinted the contract, took charge of my half of the paperwork, and that was that.

My second mistake of the day. And two more than I needed for this lifetime.

###

In beautiful theory what I had just done was absolutely legal-and it was: in a Free Port. It went without saying that Gibberfur’s consignment was darktrade, either for what it was, or for the charming fact that it was getting to wherever without paying duty. But here on fabled Wanderweb, where the Pax Imperador did not run, these things made no nevermind.

Neither was my load-to-be illegal while getting from here to Kiffit. It was legal to the edge of the atmosphere, and after that I’d be in angeltown. And since you can’t enforce laws in hyperspace, it was still legal there. In fact, my kick-whatever it was-was dead legal and no headache until I entered Kiffit planetary realspace.

Once there it’d become a matter for intimate concern to a bunch of rude strangers and I would earn every gram of valuta I’d been paid and offered.

Eventually I’d get somewhere that somebody wanted a load run in to Coldwater, and I’d be home again without paying to deadhead. Simple, easy, no problem.

Maybe someday something’ll work out like that.

###

I thought I was keeping care, but I’d been too occupied with business to notice the change in the balance of power in the arcade. Even if I didn’t expect K’Jarn to be around after losing a hand, I should of known my luck was due to break.

And it had. There was K’Jarn in front and his sideboy Kevil in back, and nothing for me to do but make it look like I wanted to be there when K’Jarn came idling over.

Times like this it’d be nice to have a partner you could see. Brother K’Jarn was coked to his problematical gills on painease and maybe
R’rhl
and he had a biopak covering his left arm -from the elbow to where it currently ended. I counted six hardboys with him-downside townies all much too interested in me to be comforting-and nobody in the place wanted to stop a free floor show. So much for Gibberfur’s cargo and my future.

K’Jarn leaned over my table at me and made his pitch. I’d cost him a hand, he said. Cybereisis prosthetics were expensive, he said. Why didn’t I just (out of the goodness of my heart and a sincere desire to see justice done) sign over
Firecat
to him and he’d let bygones be dead issues?

"Rot in hell," I said. K’Jarn hauled me up with the hand he had left and I sliced him across the chest with the vibro I happened to have handy. The cut was too damn shallow to do much good, but I did make him drop me. I rolled under the table while he was bawling for his hardboys to come smear me into the bedrock.

I gave the first one that answered a blade through the throat, and by the time I got the blood out of my eyes another one wanted attention. He slugged me hard and I lost my vibro and ended up out in the middle of the floor.

And suddenly it was very damn quiet. I looked up. There was my bonny alMayne home-ec project towering over me, and the look he gave the general populace would of froze a hot reactor. Nobody moved.

Then K’Jarn drew down on the hellflower-or maybe it was on me and he didn’t care who was in the way, but afterward K’Jarn wasn’t where you could ask him anymore. Tiggy Stardust blew him away so fast I felt the breeze before I saw the flash.

K’Jarn hit the floor and I started making like Tiggy was my backup and I’d been expecting him all along. Nobody was looking to avenge K’Jarn against a hellflower, and said so, and that damn near set Tiggy the wonder warrior off again right there. You could tell he was looking to blow them all away and maybe me too for the "lack of honor" of it all, so me and Kevil called it quits real quick no-hard-feelings-eternal-friendship and the late K’Jarn’s faction made itself history.

Throwing caution to the vectors, I started to tell Tiggy Stardust how glad I was he’d showed up. He just stared at me with those hellflower blue eyes and said, "I do not want your gratitude either,
chaudatu,"
and stomped off again.

Right. Fine. I got out of the Last Gasp with no trouble and beat it back to the Port and
Firecat.

Somebody ought to do something about Tiggy, I felt. As it turned out, somebody had.

###

I spent the next three days in a sleepsling on
Firecat
waiting to feel like a member of any B-pop whatever again. I’d passed up Beofox’s fond offer to coke and wire me until I was feeling reet: stardancers ride on their reflexes and I couldn’t afford to scramble mine. Beofox and me’d made sure the RTS implant worked before I left surgery-a transmission check and me damn glad nobody had to take my face off again to see why it wasn’t working.

Paladin kept me company through the voder-outputs in
Firecat’s
bulkheads, because every time the RTS took incoming transmission my skull itched. Beofox’d said it was all in my imagination and I’d get over it, but it wasn’t her skull.

When he did talk through the RTS it sounded like he was standing right behind me, and that was the weirdest thing of all, because Paladin can’t do that.

Pally’s a real knight in shining armor, and the armor’s my ship. He’s black-boxed into
Firecat’s
infrastructure, wired into her computers and welded to her deck, so where she doesn’t go, he doesn’t go either. Without computer hookups he’s blind deaf and dumb; drain enough power from his crystal and you can add halt and imbecile to the list. When I’m off
Firecat
I’m out of his life.

The remote transponder implant was in the category of aiding and abetting our mutual quest to stay alive. The RTS’d been designed to coordinate Space Marine maneuvers and was reliable for about five kilometers without a comsat, and over an entire planetary hemisphere with one. Me wearing one meant Paladin could hear everything I said even away from
Firecat,
and talk to me without anybody knowing he was there. And it was real important for nobody to know Paladin was there. Ever.

My partner Paladin’s a fully-volitional logic. A Library. And the head-price on him-and on me for having him-has been reliably reported to be enough to buy you out of any crime in the Imperial Calendar.

Not that anybody’d collected on Class One High Book in the last slightly more than so long. Pally and me’d kept the ear out to hear the whistle drop about other Libraries. There’d only been two cases of High Book-that’s Chapter 5 of the Revised Inappropriate Technology Act of the nine hundredth and seventy-fifth Year of Imperial Grace to you -since we’d been together, and neither one involved a real working Library. I guess there aren’t any more but Paladin, and when I found him on Pandora he’d been a box of spare parts for so long he didn’t even know we had a Emperor. Imperial History goes back a solid kiloyear, and Paladin told me he comes from the Federation before that. It took the two of us about six minutes to find out what kind of laws there was against Old Fed artifacts.

That was the year Pally made me do a darktrade deal just to get that old history book. He read it to me, and said it was obviously censored. It didn’t make any sense whatever’d been done to it, and it didn’t tell about Libraries or why they had to be killed. Funny way to talk about 20K of crystal and a black box-or, as talking-books say, "a machine hellishly forged in the likeness of a living mind." But Paladin isn’t a machine. I’ve talked to machines. Pally’s a Library.

Paladin says "library" is just a old word for a building where they keep books-sort of like a bibliotek, but different someway. I’ve seen books, too, but damned if I know why anybody’d want to murder a building. And Paladin isn’t a building either, with or without books. Sometimes Paladin doesn’t make any sense a-tall.

I am not human. I am not a machine. I am Library Main Bank Seven of the Federation University Library at Sikander Prime, an honorable estate.

At least I was. Now I am Paladin, a new name for a new age. Many of my books are gone from my memory. The world in which I lived is gone. My "friends" and "relatives" are all a millennium dead, and the profession for which I was trained no longer exists. I run
Firecat,
a converted intrasystem shuttle used for smuggling. I pursue researches for books I will never write, that no one would understand. Without Butterfly, there would not even be that much to occupy me.

###

I was originally very disturbed when I discovered that my human rescuer was biologically female. As a creature of my own culture-as who is not?-I had never considered that a possibility. Person and male were synonymous. An autonomous female outside of a breedery, her genetic inheritance exposed to random mutating factors, was a dismaying indication of how long I had been unconscious.

But Butterfly was not dissimilar to humans I had known before. I ignored her gender, as I could not survive without her help. Eventually it ceased to obtrude itself on my notice-but the fact of her humanity did not. Butterfly was as human as any person in what had become, as I slept, the semi-mythical Old Federation. Of the war that destroyed it, or the reason "Libraries," as all fully-volitional logics are now called, are held in such despite, I remember nothing.

(Fortunately Butterfly lacks curiosity about the Federation. I do not know what I would tell her about the way we lived then, or what she would understand of it. Would she think it odd for an entire species to declare one of its genders nonsentient for the sake of convenience? Or would she, in a culture that declares random organics nonpersons for financial consideration, think it rational? It is unlikely that I will ever know.)

What began as a purely random intersection became an alliance necessary for the survival of both of us. It was a long time after my "rebirth" before I realized how very dangerous my mere existence was to Butterfly, and even longer until I cared about anything beyond my own survival. But every year I become more aware that we are "farcing the odds," and that the "good numbers" become more and more scarce. Our illusion of safety grows unconvincing, and I fear more and more for Butterfly’s survival.

The culture of the Phoenix Empire would doubtless find it unbelievable that "a machine hellishly forged in the likeness of a human mind" could care for something outside itself. The dogma of their technophobic age holds that created beings cannot have emotions, but while it is true that some emotions are triggered by animal instincts and fed by chemicals spewed into the brain by uncontrolled glands, more come from the ego, which all things may possess. I am, therefore I want. Rage is a chemical emotion, brewed in the animal brain. Is loyalty? Lust no inorganic life-form can feel; it is the residue of chemicals readying the organic body for the unreliable act of reproduction-but love? Affection? Kindness?

There is no one left who would care to chart true boundaries in the borderland between organic and machine. Butterfly has always thought of me as human. The only created beings she knows are programmed and limited artifacts. They are not human-therefore I, who am nothing like them, cannot be a machine.

###

About the time Beofox said I would I started to feel human again, and then it was time to go meet Gibberfur. It was a whole new experience to have Paladin along for the ride. He had lots of available dataports to track me through Wanderweb and lots of opinions to express.

###

At the Last Gasp I got the personal attention of the owner, who along with the guaranteed nonnarcotic to my B-pop libation handed out the joyful news that the Wanderweb slugs had tossed my partner a day and another day ago and he thought I’d like to know.

My partner. Meaning Tiggy Stardust, hellflower. That’d teach me to do street theater for the brain-dead. Still, he’d be back on the streets in a few whiles, a freer but poorer nutcase.

About then Gibberfur arrived, with a very large strongbox on a A-grav sled. He had hysterics while I popped the box and pulled out six densepaks of illegal.

"I must protest! Our agreement clearly states that the cargo is to be transported unbroached to its destination." He was fluffed out to one-and-a-half-wiggly’s worth of outrage, and his little pink nose quivered.

"Will be, furball. But it don’t say nothing in agreement about this damn wondershow." I jerked a thumb at the strongbox, which was blinking and flashing with all the details of the status of its various locks, stasis fields, and armaments. "Figured you’d kind of like to hold on to it for sentimentality’s sake, seeing as otherwise I’m going to shove it out my air lock as soon as I’m at angels."

"But-but you can’t do that! My cargo—"

"Is going to get where it’s going safe and sound-but I can’t trot it past the Teasers if you’re going to hang bells and whistles on it. A mathom like that’ll trip every scanner from here to the Core and back to the Rim, and what do I say when the Teasers board me: I didn’t know it was there? Get real."

Teaser is short for Interstellar Trade, Customs & Commerce Commission: the Law, and something neither Gibberfur or me wanted the attention of.

"But—"

"If your cargo wanted special handling, you should of said. Not too late for you to change your mind about me dancing it, neither." That shut him up, and I took the Embarkation Receipt for the load and we both signed it and I stuffed my copies of the fax and all six densepaks into the pockets of my jacket.

###

Things was so much easier in the nonexistent days when a darktrader’s word was her bond and all that. You know, the ones where your Gentry-legger takes this priceless cargo sixty light-years and hands it over on word alone to someone she’s never seen, with no documentation, no penalties, and no comeback? It’s too damn bad the idea never caught on.