Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (57 page)

*

Neither Baker nor Jackson slept during the sixty-five hours of the flight. Their military nets could keep them awake for more than a week, switching consciousness back and forth between the right and left hemispheres of their brains. Sometimes Baker would feel a little sluggish and his saliva would taste strange, but there were no other side effects.
Jackson didn't stay mad at him, but she remained wary. It wasn't his fault that she had activated the defense routines. They were there to protect the collective's investment. He told her this, and that he was happy and liked the life he had been given, but it only provoked a torrent of abuse. He wished that he had his sidekick to explain things, to help sort out the muddle, but Jackson had suppressed it— he had the horrible feeling that she had in fact erased it. When he asked her about this, she said that it was time he started thinking for himself. He could never be the man he'd been when she had known him, but he could be his own man now.
She did unbend enough to tell him a little of her life. While he had been drifting in the crippled singleship, neither alive nor dead, she had used her sign-off pay to start up a haulage company. When that had failed, out-competed by rail guns, she had joined a collective long enough to know that it wasn't for her, and then had become a smuggler, intercepting packages of forbidden technologies in the rings while on apparently innocent cargo runs. An industrial spy had broken up the cartel she had mostly worked for, and someone in the cartel had given her up to protect himself, and that was how she had ended up in the vacuum farms of Phoebe.
She was still bitter about it. During the Quiet War, the Outer System colonists, split into more than a dozen rival enclaves, had hardly been able to fight back at all. In only three months, their infrastructures had been so devastated that they had been forced to surrender their hegemony. But what had happened since made you wonder who had really won after all, Jackson said. The tweaks had the upper hand in the Outer System, even if their various assemblies, moots, councils, conclaves, and congresses were now in principle subservient to the Three Powers Occupying Force. Despite incentives and tax breaks, the various emigration schemes sponsored by the victors of the Quiet War had mostly failed; new settlers couldn't compete with established cooperatives and collectives, and unless they signed away their right to return to Earth in exchange for gengineering, they were not allowed to have children and tended to die young of problems associated with living in microgravity. Meanwhile, the central administration of the Outer System was falling apart as adapted colonists began to spread through the thousands of dirty snowballs and rocks of the Kuiper Belt.
There was talk of another war, one in which Jackson wouldn't be able to fight. She was too old and slow for combat now; she had been sidelined by history.
Baker listened patiently to her rants. He tried to talk with Berry, too, but Jackson had set up a feed of lemon-flavored alcohol and the man was only partly coherent. In one of his more lucid moments, he said, "You shouldn't go near my mother. She's dangerous. All of her are dangerous."
"You mean she has other children?"
"You could call them that," Berry said. "They're crazy bad." His voice, muffled by the air mask, sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a well.
"How many brothers and sisters do you have?"
"It isn't like that. Alder would know, I guess… they look after me, always have, so maybe they're not so bad. Not to me. They saved me other times."
Baker felt a faint stirring, as if his sidekick was about to waken. He wished it would, if only to say that it told him so. When nothing happened, he said, "Other times? What happened, Berry?"
Berry was silent for a while. Then he said, "I should get out of here now. My skin is all puffy."
Baker tried to imagine what the life-system would be like with a hundred and sixty kilos of dripping wet Berry crammed into it. He said, "You hang in there. Play your sagas."
"It isn't the same," Berry said. "The emulation in this system is horrible. When can you get me back to the hotel?"
"Well, I'm not sure. Soon."
"I'd like margarita. That always goes down smooth."
"Maybe you should stop drinking."
"What's the point of stopping? Get me some margarita and I might help you out."
Jackson was amused by Baker's attempts to talk with Berry. She said that you couldn't get any sense out of the man. His brain had been fried in alcohol, most of the switches jammed open or jammed closed, whole areas dead and blasted. Like a low-grade robot, he could follow his routines, but had trouble with anything outside them.
"You want to know anything, you ask me," she said.
Baker thought that he had already learned something useful from Berry. He said, "What will happen after we insert into orbit?"
"I'll tell you on a need-to-know basis, just like the old times."
But the old times were gone forever. His original self must have loved her fiercely for a residue of that love to have survived death, and Baker, who was vicariously fascinated by other peoples' lives, and watched a lot of the old psychodramas when he wasn't working, thought wistfully that once upon a time they must have been like Romeo and Juliet. But whatever they'd once been, that was then and this was now.
The scow accelerated for more than forty hours. The idea was to come in on a fast, short trajectory, decelerating hard at the last moment. Baker spent
much of that time watching the view, a thumbnail of the life-system in one corner to let him keep a eye on Jackson— he was worried that she might suddenly try something stupid.
Phoebe's orbit was not only retrograde, but inclined to the equatorial plane of Saturn. As the scow drove inward, the entire system was spread out ahead and below; nine major moons and more than a hundred smaller bodies, Saturn a pale half-disc at the center, circled by rings like an exquisite bit of jewelry.
Baker never tired of this privileged view. He spent a lot of time watching it while working through his options. He wasn't as brain-damaged as Jackson thought, and the enhancements to his net gave him a lot of computational power. He worked up several scenarios and played the simulations over and over, finally choosing the simplest one with a sense of doors closing irrevocably behind him. He wondered if Jackson had inserted a parasitic eavesdropper into his net; if she had, she gave no sign that she knew what he was planning.
As Saturn grew closer, the ring system began to resolve details in the sunlit arc that swept out beyond the planet: two unequal halves separated by the gap of the Cassini division, each half further divided into fine parallel bands, with dark irregular spokes in the bright B ring that could be seen to rotate if watched long enough.
Then the motor cut out and they were in freefall again. There were only a couple of hours in turnover. Jackson spent much of them supervising the decoupling of the scow from the cargo train. Normally it would recouple on the other end of the train, thrusters pointing ahead for deceleration. But Jackson's manual link closed down halfway through the maneuver and the scow fired off several orientation bursts, turned end-for-end and immediately lit its main engines in a brief burn. At the same time, the thrusters of the cargo train started to fire.
Berry started complaining over the link; Jackson snarled at him to shut up and was suddenly right in Baker's face, swarming down the life-system cabin against the pull of the thrust and grabbing his right wrist. A Trojan horse smashed its way into his net, spilling voracious subroutines. For a panicky minute, he was deaf and dumb and blind— it was like being raped from the inside out.
Light and sound came back. Baker discovered that he was in freefall again. Jackson had shoved away from him and was studying him intently, her blue eyes cold behind the tendrils of red hair that drifted loose over her face.
Baker closed up all the indices and files she'd pulled open and said shakily, "You shouldn't have done that."
"Christ, they really did a number on you, Baker. You're not a man anymore. You're a bundle of routines. You're a lapdog. This is your chance to get free of the leash, and you're fucking it up."
Baker's net was suppressing adrenaline production; otherwise he would have been trembling with flight reaction and stinking up the life-system with sweat. He said, "We're in this together. I've accepted that. I thought it would be a good idea to dump the cargo in a high orbit. Makes us more maneu
verable and saves reaction mass. We'll get there earlier than the flight plan allows, so we can surprise Berry's mother."
It was the best lie he had been able to come up with. He sipped at a bulb of orange-flavored glucose solution and watched her work it through. At last, she said, "I know you're trying to fuck me over, but I can't figure out how, not yet. But I will, and then I'll know what to do with you. Meanwhile, climb into your pressure suit. There's a chance that Berry's mother might have changed her defense systems since he left."
"I thought you got the codes from him. And she knows we're bringing him here."
"The codes are twenty years old, and she might not believe us. We've got fifteen minutes before the main burn, so get moving."
They only just made it.
The scow, decelerating, fell behind the cargo train. The string of half-silvered beads dwindled against the sweep of the rings, vanishing into the planet's shadow as the scow swung in around the nightside. Vast lightning storms illuminated sluggish bands of storm systems that could have swallowed Earth without a ripple. Then the rings appeared, a silver arc ahead of the dawning diamond point of the sun. The scow's motor rumbled continuously, decelerating at just over one gravity. Baker was heavier than he had been for years. Lying flat on the padding of the life-system, he tried to find a comfortable position within his pressure suit to wait it out, but there always seemed to be some seam or wrinkle digging into him. Jackson lay beside him, her ungloved right hand holding his ungloved left so that she could access the ship through his net. They lay there like spent lovers.
"Seems hard to remember how we stood this on Earth," Baker said at one point. "I almost envy Berry, floating in that tank."
"Just keep quiet," Jackson said. "I'm watching everything. If something goes wrong, you're toast."
She didn't say it with much conviction, Baker thought. For the first time, he felt that he might have a chance to win back from this. It was clear that she hadn't been able to work out what he had done. He felt pity for her— she was out of date, left behind by the accelerating changes that were sweeping through the Outer System. She should have returned to Earth; out here, the aggression that had helped win the Quiet War was not a survival trait. Individualism counted for nothing in the Outer System. To survive, you had to commit yourself to helping others, who in turn would help you.
Baker said, "What's wrong? You said you remembered how good I was. I'm even better now."
"I remember you always thought you were a hotshot, but you didn't have much to back it up. You were a company man, Baker, even when you were in the service. You were always happiest following orders. You had no initiative. That's one thing about you that hasn't changed."
"Nothing you can say can hurt me more than what you tried to do to me," Baker said, with a fair imitation of wounded pride, thinking that
her
initiative had got her into prison, and now into this. He pulled down the view to shut her out.
The rings spanned the curve of the planet in a thousand shades of gray and brown and white, casting a shadow across the bulge of its equator. The scow was coming in at a narrow angle above the plane of the rings, which spread to port like a highway a million lanes wide. Zooming in with the scow's telescope, Baker could see the seemingly solid plane break apart in lanes of flecks that grew into rocks and bergs flashing in the sunlight as they tumbled, a storm of motes forever falling around the planet.
The scow plunged stern-first toward the gap beyond the outer edge of the narrow F ring. Jackson started a looped broadcast of the code she had dug out of Berry. Their target was still around the curve of the planet, coming toward them out of night; they would rendezvous with it just at its dawn. Baker wanted to look for the cargo train, but wasn't sure that he could do it without Jackson catching on.
"I was wondering," he said after a while, "what you'll do if this works out."
"That's none of your fucking business."
"We might not survive it."
"I intend to. You could have set yourself free, Baker."
"Things have changed."
"This is the frontier, Baker. It's far from the ant farms of Earth. It's where people can walk tall and make their fortunes if they have the intelligence and the backbone."
"Or end in the vacuum farms."
"I had some bad luck. I'm going to turn that around. You might be content to give up your free will to a bunch of farmers who sit inside rocks like bugs in a bad apple. Well, I'm not."
She said more, but Baker tuned it out. The scow was just about to begin its final course correction. He patched telescope scans into a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perspective. The rings stretched away ahead and behind, flattened into a narrow line that bisected the sky. A single speck was bracketed ahead: their target.
Janus was roughly the same size as Phoebe, an irregular body like the profile of a fist. It was pockmarked with craters, most eroded by billions of years of micrometeorite sleet and further softened by patches of vacuum organism growth. One small circular crater had been tented over, and shone greenly with internal lights. There was a ring of silver around it. The scow spotted one of the defense drones a hundred kilometers out and presented Baker with a grainy image of the tiny, deadly thing: a slim body less than two meters long, with a flat radar dish at one end and the swollen bowl of an oversized motor at the other. No radar probed the scow; nothing moved to intercept it. The broadcast code must be working.
The scow shuddered, spinning this way and that, making a series of short burns before finally shutting down its motor. Now it was falling in the same orbit as the little moon, barely twenty kilometers away.
Jackson started what seemed to be a one-sided conversation— she had made contact with someone on Janus, it seemed, but she wouldn't allow Baker to switch into the channel.
"I have him right here," she said, "just like I told you. You must know he's