The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma (2 page)

“Black Thunder has spoken,” Kupi Landau said to the crew, over the comm-radio. She was referring to what the SciOs called the black barrel of every Janus Machine, more commonly referred to as a Splitter or a Splitter Cannon. Janus Machine technology was secret and closely guarded; only the SciOs could build new units, and if anyone tampered with the machines, the units would self-destruct.

Kupi was particularly well suited for her job, still able to vent her simmering anger against the foul remnants of Corporate civilization. Splitting was an anarchist specialty, one of the few GSA-authorized professions that the government haters actually seemed to enjoy. It was a union job, of course, like every profession in the Green States of America. Even soldiers in the Army of the Environment were unionized.

Now it was Joss's turn. The bright green barrel had a SciO name as well: The Seed Cannon. Most people called it a greenformer, though, and the process was known as greenforming. He sat at another instrument panel behind that barrel, tapped the opening sequence to make the turret spin around slowly. He made subtle, last-minute adjustments to the seed mixture, tailoring it to this locale more than he'd already done in the setup, further eliminating any elements of vegetation that, even though native, he had now decided were not appropriate for the site. Like the work Kupi did, this was an art form, though one that religious radicals liked to call, derisively, “playing God.” He didn't pay attention to such comments. They came from scofflaws, fugitives who were on the run from Greenpol.

Over Joss's headset, pre-war rock music surged on, the hard-driving beat of an old Grateful Dead song, harking back to a time of fantastic idealism in the prior century, when the seeds of rebellion were sowed, and ultimately cultivated. His job gave him a good feeling that he was doing something significant, something important. Brave Greenies had died in order to provide him with this opportunity. He held a privileged, high-level job, and appreciated having it.

He had the turret in position now and ran the test circuits through their course, causing an array of colored lights to dance across the top of the instrument panel. Using a viewscreen, Joss sighted along the top of the long, glistening green barrel and aimed carefully at the center of the gooey amalgam of elements that Kupi had left for him. Taking a deep breath, he held down a button at the center of the panel, then felt a percussive thump as cartridges spewed into the air and detonated over the landscape like a green fireworks display in the sunlight, scattering micro-organisms, infinitesimally tiny seeds that would grow quickly, replacing the factory eyesore with beautiful vegetation.

He fired twice more to fill in bare spots, using smaller bursts. Finally, his task completed, he rose and tilted back his owl helmet in satisfaction. The music went off, and he heard the applause of the onlookers. On one side of the turret, Kupi stood at the rail gazing out on the landscape, as if imagining she could already see the new plants sprouting. Joss chuckled. He had used a fast-grow recipe, but it was not
that
fast. In a matter of weeks, maple and oak trees would be half a meter high, and soon the animals, insects, and birds of the forest would reoccupy their habitat. It was only justice, he thought, returning the land to its rightful inhabitants, after humans had carelessly abused it for so long.…

*   *   *

LATER THAT AFTERNOON,
the Janus Machine crew was on its way to the next site. Inside the dome, Kupi sat on a cushioned bench with Joss. She took a long drag on a juana stick, exhaled the smoke, and said, “This rig has only been on fifty-seven missions, and it's already getting long in the tooth. I felt more than the normal vibration when I fired the cannon. Did you notice it, too?”

Joss shook his head. “No, not when you fired, nor when I did, either.”

“Well, I sure noticed it. Damn thing shook my chair, hurt my teeth, and made my bones feel like they were turning into jelly.”

“Part of the mystery of Dark Energy?” he asked, referring to the term for the destructive splitting technology, a power that reportedly was not fully understood by the SciOs who had discovered and harnessed it. The stuff was like a wild bronco, he'd been told, but on an exponentially higher level. The strange technology was rooted in the days of the revolution, when it enabled Chairman Rahma and his ragtag army to defeat Corporate armies—using the black cannons of early-model Janus Machines as weapons.

Kupi scowled and said, “Damned SciOs build these rigs so that they have to be replaced frequently. Just like the old Corporate crooks and their diabolical theory of ‘planned obsolescence.'”

“I wouldn't go that far,” Joss said. “Our cannons have unknown key components. Maybe the SciOs don't have any other way to build them.”

“Yeah, yeah. True Green Joss, accepting everything you're told to think. You'd better wake up, sweetie. Our lives could be at risk running these machines, and do you think the SciOs give a rat's ass what happens to us? Do you think Chairman Rahma does?”

Joss fell silent, knowing he didn't accept everything blindly at all, though she seemed to think he did. Even so, he didn't want to argue with her. He gazed forward as the truck sped south, with peace symbols and stylized tree designs sparkling on the hood, and triangular green GSA banners fluttering on the front fenders. He liked Kupi personally, as a lover and as a friend, but when she started talking politics, she invariably made comments that made him uncomfortable.

Politics often put her into a bad mood, and he saw no point in debating with her. At times like this, his lover needed to be left alone.

He wished Kupi would watch her tongue. It could get her into a lot of trouble—and by association, him, too.

 

2

Animals are not lower life-forms than humans.
They are in fact superior to us.
Count the ways.

—Chairman Rahma,
The Little Green Book

THE MAN CROUCHED
low as he peered over a snowbank at the bleak white landscape sloping up to the ridgeline. A cold gray fog was beginning to settle over the mountain, though some patches of sunlight remained. Moments earlier, he'd seen movement at a higher elevation by the body of a freshly killed ibex, a blur of motion. Now, nothing. Looking in that direction through binoculars, the gray-bearded man didn't even see prints in the snow where the cat had been, feeding on its prey. The creature seemed to float over the surface, moving entirely in another realm.

There were countless legends about the magical powers of snow leopards, but legends were one thing and reality quite another. Because of the animals' reclusive, solitary nature, attacks on humans were rare. Even so, the man's heart beat rapidly. These rare animals were powerful and fast—and if this one decided to turn on him at any moment instead of avoiding him, he might not have a chance. So far the creature was keeping its distance, while remaining close enough to watch over the bloody body of the horned ibex, preventing other predators from taking it away.

With a start the man remembered he was in EVR—enhanced virtual reality—and wasn't actually on that faraway slope, except as a three-dimensional, projected avatar. Such magnificent technology, and so realistic that if persons really in that remote mountain region saw his projection they would think he was actually there, too. In addition, if his avatar was near any other people there, he could see them, hear them, and speak to them, and they could do the same with him. Animals could see and hear avatars as well, and had even been known to go after them, though they usually relied on scent, and that was one thing the Chairman's EVR figure did not have. Now he reimmersed himself into the action on the snowy mountain—a speck on the white snowfield watching the predator and its ibex.

A snow leopard was not able to consume a kill of this size in one feeding. For that reason it often lingered nearby for days, going back repeatedly and eating from the carcass, while watching warily in all directions.

It was the Achilles' heel of their species, a weakness that a hunter could use to advantage—and he'd seen evidence of hunters in the area. But Chairman Rahma Popal was not like other human beings around there. Snow leopards were an endangered species, with only a small number of them known to exist on Earth. He needed to capture this one alive, which he could do even in EVR, with the aid of two men and a woman collaborating with him on the ground—GSA operatives who had taken great physical risks to slip into the enemy state of Panasia, far across the globe from the GSA. Rahma had sent operatives into enemy territory before on such ventures, as well as on spying missions, and he'd gone there as an avatar, too—aided by clever technology that the SciOs had surreptitiously inserted into one of the Panasian satellites, secretly compromising the orbiter so that some of their transmissions were put to GSA use.

The three others were arrayed on the slope near him, in their sealed survival suits. For these brave citizens, this special assignment was much more dangerous than any threat from bad weather or from a predatory animal. Because of the hostile nature of the Panasian government and its cavalier attitude toward animal protection, the rescue squad had to get in and out as quickly as possible.

Anger filled the Chairman now. The Panasians—ruling over Asia, Australia, and most of the Pacific islands—allowed their people to hunt and kill these beautiful animals for organs and other body parts, using them for traditional medicine, talismans, and trophies. How could anyone be so ignorant and short-sighted? What did they intend to do when there were no more snow leopards left to harvest?

Eco-criminals on a huge scale, the Panasian government did not care a whit about the welfare of endangered species, and their polluting industries were the worst in the world, no matter the propaganda they issued to the contrary. The Eurikans weren't much better, ruling over the continents of Europe and Africa. They just put on a better public persona, posturing and acting as if they were environmentalists, when in fact they were not. To a large extent the Eurikan leaders were blue-blooded aristocrats, tracing their roots to noble lineages and old money, and taking political and economic steps to protect their own interests.

Breathing hard in the simulated atmosphere of his EVR survival suit, the Chairman glanced at a holo-screen that hovered in the air by him, showing a satellite zoom of the snow leopard. It was a barely discernible mound of fur perhaps a couple of hundred meters above him on the slope, a tight ball of gold, black, and white. He saw the other team members, and himself, on the satellite image as well, and knew that the cat could close the distance to the nearest operative in a matter of seconds.

Since the fall of the Corporates, there had been increasing tensions between the Panasians and the Green States. The two governments had been sponsoring terrorist attacks against each other, using surrogates that could not be traced easily to either side. Rahma knew he had a technological advantage over his enemies—his alliance with the SciOs. But it was a tenuous advantage, because of the secrets that the arrogant SciO leader Arch Ondex and his cronies kept to themselves. The Chairman sometimes suspected—but could not prove—that Ondex was playing both sides. And yet no matter how much he disliked the patrician man, he didn't want to believe that could possibly be true.

Rahma scanned his instruments. The outside air temperature was dropping quickly as the fog continued to settle. Visibility was worsening, and his people would need to get off the mountain sooner than anticipated.

The avatar stepped onto an air platform near him and powered it up, a virtual-reality craft. A control bar rose in front of him, and he gripped it in simulation. The three other team members did the same for real, on separate craft.

The four of them rose into the air on triangular wedges of technology. A slight wind from the valley floor below buffeted the craft, but the units compensated and sped smoothly toward the snow leopard. From his remote position of safety the Chairman watched the altimeter reading on his control bar. Over 4,300 meters now, more than 14,000 feet. He felt the simulated oxygen level increase inside his suit.

The animal held its ground for several seconds, then bolted away upslope. This time the Chairman saw the tracks it made in the snow, confirming that the creature was not anything supernatural. Quickly, the cat moved out of deep snow onto rocky surfaces, leaping great distances from one ledge to the next, rising ever upward in elevation, heading for a jagged line of ice caves.

The pursuers had anticipated this; the satellite report had told them the path the snow leopard would probably take, toward one of those icy habitats where it lived. But they needed to divert the animal, keeping it from reaching the safety of an area that might be honeycombed with escape routes.

Pressing a lever on the control bar to accelerate, Rahma Popal caused the platform to surge past the animal. He then turned in the air and headed back toward the snow leopard, diverting the cat and causing it to take a lateral course along a ridgeline, with the two male team members flying close behind. They were too close, and the Chairman signaled for them to fall back a little. They needed to be careful. The leopard appeared to be panicking, and he didn't want to kill it.

He motioned for the female operative, Agent Trumbull, to come alongside his craft. At his further command, she touched a button on a transmitter, firing a shaft of emerald light at the snow leopard, a lasso beam that slowed it down. For a moment the animal became the color of the light, a running, struggling blur. Trumbull fired a ray of bright red light now, a powerful sedative. The leopard went limp, only a short distance from the edge of a precipice, where it might have gone off.

Accompanied by his team, the Chairman hovered over the leopard, a few meters above it. He watched as Trumbull unsnapped the transmitter from the handlebar and made it a hand-held unit. Then, leaning down and using the electronic lasso to lift the animal into a cradle that tightened on contact, she made it snug against the undercarriage of the air platform. A screen on his own control bar showed Rahma the vital signs of the sedated animal, a male. The readings were good, but he did not breath a sigh of relief yet. He still needed to get the large cat out of the country.