Overkill (26 page)

“If I was Trueborn I’d study Earth. I hear it’s nice.”

She paused, smiled, then shook her head. “Too nice for me. Familiarity breeds boredom. The Seeded Worlds can teach us more, as a race. Take Yavet.”

I smiled. “Thanks. I’ve already taken plenty of it.”

“Yavet shows Earth the future it escaped. Human industrialization melted Yavet’s ice caps. Oceanic encroachment reduced crop land and packed Yavet’s population in so tight that being born became a capital crime.”

My heart skipped. As a perpetrator of said capital crime, I wanted this topic dropped immediately. “Maybe you will bore me.”

She held up a finger. “Yavet shows us what the Motherworld might have been if the War hadn’t changed things. But it’s hard to study because Yavet’s the most self-isolated, repressive society in the Union. No offense.”

“No argument.”

She said, “The Seeded Worlds add to what we know. A person could spend a lifetime studying them . . . ”

“But?”

She smiled. “But they’re still too familiar for me. Now, the Outworlds! Parker, the Outworlds don’t just add to what we know! They’re everything we
don’t
know! They cover more territory than the imagination can see. The Outworlds are where the action is.”

“The action can kill you, though. It almost killed both of us. Now it might kill that big thing we brought with us.” I twisted in my chair and stared aft and up at the ceiling. In a starship, the floors face toward space, the ceilings toward the centerline axis around which the ship rotates as it travels forward. Back in the centerline cargo bay the grezzen lay.

Kit left her homeworld for adventure. Why had the grezzen left his? I didn’t believe, and surely neither did she, that he had followed us home like a lonely puppy. If he really was people-smart, was he simply intellectually curious? Was he an adventure seeker, like Kit?

He was risking a lot more and enduring a lot more than I would chasing curiosities or adventures. It seemed to me that if he was really as smart as I was, something more had to be driving him.

Sixty-eight

The grezzen lay, alone and restrained within the shell the humans had woven around him. Imprisoned deep within the vast human nest called the
Midway
, he scratched at a cage bar. His foreclaw easily chiseled away flakes of plasteel that trickled into a small heap on the deckplates. He brushed the flakes with his forepaw, dispersing them. If he wished to, he could scratch through the bar in seconds. Seconds, he had learned, were a way humans subdivided time.

That wasn’t all he had learned. He had passed his time in this shell regaining his strength after the ordeal he had shared with Jazen in the smaller ship. Now he also sifted through the minds of the thousands of humans in this new and vast nest they called
Midway
. In this way he learned about plasteel and deckplates. Also about starships jumping through temporal fabric insertion points, vacuum, and Cavorite impellers. Even about jelly doughnuts, about why Machinist’s Mate Yakoubian was a jerk, and about football.

In football, males hunted an animal skin, head-butting each other like bull woogs. Frequent committee meetings were punctuated by violent episodes. But a foot seldom contacted a ball. Time ran backwards. Afterward, all participants fled, and no one ate the skin.

Football, like most of what he learned about humans, mystified him. And he had no more intention of revealing that he was capable of learning it than he had of escaping.

Escape he rejected for several reasons.

In the first place, dissecting this cage would simply free him within the larger restraint of what the humans called the cargo bay. It was an enormous space, tubular in the way of a log hollowed by rot. It stank of kerosene, the terrifying liquid that had nearly killed him.

The remainder of the ship
Midway
in which the humans nested wrapped the hollow of the cargo bay like a log’s bark, and extended forward, a warren of tubes and open spaces only large enough for humans. His bulk prevented him from moving beyond the cargo bay and into those areas except by clawing through the ship. That he could do, of course, as easily as he could disembowel a woog. But if he did he would stop the ship as certainly as disembowelment would stop a woog. The area behind him was made up of larger, but sparsely populated spaces that housed the mechanisms that made the ship
Midway
move. If he escaped into the cargo bay he would simply endanger himself. If he tried to perfect his escape either forward or backward, he risked stopping the ship’s progress.

The last thing he wanted was to stop the ship. Cutler, the human who he held responsible for his mother’s death, remained beyond his reach, in a separate ship. But this ship and Cutler’s would ultimately reach the same destination.

There, and only there, would the grezzen escape. Then he would hunt and kill Cutler. He would also kill the humans who suspected that his race were more than simple brutes. Even Kit and Jazen, though them without relish.

For all the grezzen had learned, he remained imprisoned by the simpler paradigm of the world that he and his species knew. He couldn’t understand the impossibility of his quest, or the vastness of the race he was challenging, any more than he could understand football.

This plan, and everything he had learned, his cousins knew as well as he did. Despite increasing distance, the grezzen and his cousins remained linked as immediately as they did at home.

But though his cousins knew what he intended to do, knew what he saw and heard and felt and even smelled, none questioned him or disagreed with him. How he acted was his decision alone.

None of them questioned his decision to be here, nor counseled him on future action. He was as behaviorally free from them as he was, and had always been, physically isolated from them. The grezzen did not realize that his was a truly libertarian society, albeit one facilitated by biologic accident. He didn’t appreciate the irony that the human-on-human violence he had just survived was justified as libertarian.

He did realize and appreciate that he already longed to be home and free again. And he realized that the price of preserving freedom for his home and for his race might be his own life. And the lives of Kit and Jazen, and of anonymous humans from whom he had learned about jelly doughnuts.

For the next forty-two days he lay still, husbanded his strength, and allowed the ship to carry him farther from home and closer to Cutler.

Sixty-nine

Kit and I floated weightless in the rotating fifty-foot fish bowl that was
Midway
’s forward centerline observation blister while the cruiser drifted toward Mousetrap. Kit, myself, and a couple of other passengers were turning knees-tucked somersaults at the prospect of the imminent layover. A cruiser offers plenty of room and diversion to its passengers, even when freight-configured. But after forty-two days and nine jumps, leaving
Midway
behind for a few hours, even to visit the drilled-out gut of a nickel iron meteor, had people bouncing off the ceiling.

I’d shipped through Mousetrap twice as a legionnaire, but was always quartered on the windowless troop decks aft of bulkhead ninety. So on this visit my mouth hung open.

For anyone who’s been under arms, it’s the history, sure. First Battle of Mousetrap. Second Mousetrap. The shipyards that birthed the armada of cruisers, like the
Midway
, that had finally won the war.

But to see the twenty-mile football of a moonlet spinning slowly in empty space, silhouetted black and tiny as a peppercorn against the orange disc of the gas giant planet Leonidas, overwhelmed a Yavi who had grown up inside a layer cake.

Kit swam to me and tapped my elbow. “I thought I’d visit the museum. Maybe dinner and a holo. You in?”

I shook my head. “Seen it. Headache. Good time for a nap.”

The cruiser matched rotation and lined up with Broadway, the central tunnel through Mousetrap from which radiated its shipyards, mines and docking platforms. Then
Midway
drifted in through the end lock, and on down the fifteen miles to the south end berths where cruisers docked.

A double chime preceded the purser’s voice, which echoed in the observation blister and throughout the great ship. “Ladies and gentlemen, let me be the first to welcome you to Mousetrap, crossroads of the Human Union. If you’re transshipping, follow the signs to the appropriate shuttle or hotel. If you’re continuing on with us to Earth, the ship will be reconfigured here to accommodate additional passengers, so we’ll be berthed here for ten standard hours. If you disembark, the Pseudocephalopod War Museum and Memorials are accessed by
southbound
transport. The captain has asked me to remind you that he is unable to assume responsibility for your safety if you elect to visit Shipyard, or the other abandoned quadrants accessed by northbound transport. Passengers returning from Shipyard are subject to medical screening and contraband search as a precondition of reboarding.”

While
Midway
kissed its mile-long bulk up to the berth fifteen miles south along Broadway, Kit and I returned to our cabins. I lay on my bunk with the hatch open.

It would take Kit ten minutes to disembark, make her way to the transport platform, and catch a southbound to the museum.

I lay still for fifteen minutes, to be safe, disembarked, and arrived on the transport platform two minutes before a graffitti-smeared tuber whispered up. The green-lit sign on its prow glowed behind grime:

NORTHBOUND LOCAL—SHIPYARD
.

The arrival chime rang, the doors squealed open, and I stepped aboard.

Seventy

The grezzen sat up in his cage when the human entered the larger cargo bay.

She pushed a rolling device on which rested two objects, in the aggregate as large as she was, as she walked toward him.

Molly the human slid a woog haunch between his cage bars, as she had each day of the past forty-two. “Extra popsicle today, ogre!” She slid a side of ribs in behind the haunch. Humans, he had found, audibilized even to inanimate objects or dumb animals, which Molly assumed he was. Of course, he allowed her to assume.

She said aloud, “Won’t see you tonight.”

Why not? The grezzen almost cocked his head, then caught himself. Molly was incurious for a human, but he didn’t want her to wonder whether he understood her.

His anxiety rose. He reached out and felt other humans, then relaxed. No, the ship had not reached the end of the journey sooner than he expected. But it had stopped, now enveloped within an even larger hive.

“I got liberty on Mousetrap. Paar-tay!”

Molly left him alone with his meal, as she always did. He bit into the lifeless meat and rumbled a sigh. He preferred fresh kill, but could survive on rotted carrion. Actually, it wasn’t rotted, though it was not fresh kill. The humans retarded the growth of unappetizing parasites by lowering the temperature of the meat. The unfamiliar coolness added a tang to the bland meals.

While he ate, he reached out to locate Kit and Jazen’s threads. What he found so startled him that a rib dropped from his mouth to the deck. He had become accustomed to the thousands of human threads of consciousness in the ship, but now there were more. Many more.

Now the ship rested within a larger nest. A great sea of threads washed over him, dwarfing the thousands to which he had accustomed himself. This new nest, Mousetrap, was far larger than the
Midway
. Indeed, it was far larger than the nest back home that the humans called Eden.

And, from all that he sensed along the individual threads that he had studied during his journey, uncountably larger nests—entire worlds!—of humans made up the vast buzz that underlay everything that every grezzen felt every moment of every day.

His mother had been wrong. His race had been wrong. There was no containing this species. There was no competing with this species. There was certainly no destroying it. Even the idea of deceiving this species by the notion that grezzen were simpleminded seemed to grow more hopeless hour by hour.

He cast about in the vast sea of consciousness that now engulfed him. Gradually, he pieced together understanding along individual threads, by feeling and seeing through them.

The Mousetrap nest, like the
Midway
, was a place of human-sized burrows punctuated by grezzen-sized spaces.

Much of the verbalization he encountered in his explorations proved to be nonsense. Bills of lading led him to counterfeit bills led him to duck bills, then Buffalo Bills. He growled and pounded a paw against the deck plates.

He longed to sense the familiar, to feel Jazen and Kit. He tried to bring their threads forward out of the newly enlarged mass. But in the vast tangle of real and false human threads, he often followed false trails.

He brought forward one female’s thread because the forest that played in her head closely resembled his home. Then the female, who he assumed was Kit, ingested a contaminated fruit and fell unconscious. He roared in anguish. She recovered, then sang and danced, delighting seven undersized males with whom she cohabited. He discarded the false thread.

At last the grezzen found Jazen’s thread. Jazen was in motion within the larger nest, tingling with the hunting reflex, but at the same time uncharacteristically melancholy.

Seventy-one

I stepped off the tuber at Lockheed Station, in Shipyard. The basic look and smell of Lockheed Station hadn’t changed in the two years since my first visit, when I was a laid-over Legion basic skinhead bound for his first duty station.

Lockheed Station was a fifty-foot ceilinged neon and steel cave hollowed out of the nickel-iron captive meteor that was Mousetrap. Music and voices echoed out of a half dozen bars, and four establishments with active picture windows offered other distractions for hire if you didn’t need a drink. The crowd that boiled in all directions across the deck plates was as unruly, uncaring, and unsober as ever.