The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (68 page)

Schlacht granted Morales and me about twenty minutes to get settled in the cupboard euphemistically called our stateroom, and then ordered us to get to work and start harassing our underlings. He communicated with us through a small chromed sphere in the ceiling of our quarters that produced an incredible amount of noise for its size. We called it the Bitch Ball. So we were thundered at to get our backsides to the barracks compartment soonest, where our leader awaited us, along with his alter ego, a dwarf.

Yes, a dwarf Big head, disproportionately long body, short bowed legs, small hands and tiny fingers. Probably spinal problems, the way he walked, lurching along. He wore some kind of nondescript clothes, had corrugated reddish skin and a pair of very intent dark eyes. On the rare occasions when Schlacht addressed him, he called him Cos, to rhyme with loss. As soon as the very odd pair departed, Morales named them Cos and the Boss; later on, when we really got to hate the general, he renamed them the Pig and the Pygmy.

At first I thought that Schlacht traveled with his own court jester. But Cos didn’t seem to make jokes or do pratfalls or anything of that kind. In fact, he hardly ever said a word, and yet whenever the Pig hove into view to make our lives a mite more difficult, there the Pygmy appeared also, giving us a fixed expressionless stare like a cuttlefish.

In their absence we settled down to work, getting to know the thirty-five guys of each platoon. There’s some kind of unwritten rule in the services that one example of every human type must appear in every unit, however small. I had people so clean I couldn’t catch them with dirt under their fingernails, and others so opposed to sanitation that their comrades had to throw them under a shower and scrub them down with brushes to deodorize them. I had guys and gals, I had homs and hets, I had thugs and sissies, I had drunks and drys, I had semi-morons and one offbeat Lawrence-of-Arabia type genius named Sosa who, for unknown reasons, preferred to live in the lower depths of the enlisted service, and turned down a promotion when I offered him one.

Morales’s platoon was the same, only totally different. That’s how the human animal is – all specimens different, all the same, sort of like snow-flakes, only not as pretty.

My sergeant was a big Irishman named O’Rourke, Morales’s a small but dangerous kickboxer called Chulalongkorn. Vastly different physical types, but indistinguishable in courage, cleverness, and utter amorality. From them I learned that sergeants form a subspecies and that officers, especially ignorant shavetails like us, are damn lucky to have them around to tell us what to do.

While the Zhukov got under way – I didn’t notice when we started to move; there was hardly a grunt or a quiver from the engines – we were spending our time in the Armory, a dimly lighted region that stank unmercifully of sweat, graphite, and machine oil. First we watched the sergeants guide the serfs in digging our weapons consignment out of packing cases, cleaning off the shipping gunk, assembling and disassembling and reassembling and polishing them up nice and pretty. Then we locked the weapons into racks, so that nobody could grab one to settle a conflict with a comrade over own ership of an interactive comic book or the favors of a “douche,” meaning one of the several barracks whores who fattened their incomes by bartering sex for pay.

(Why were they called douches? Because “they get your tail wet.” Military humor.)

When everything had been racked up and locked away, Morales and I had about ten minutes to put on dress uniforms for the big social event of the day, dinner with the rest of the cadre. Except for the General and Jesús and me, who wore Security gray, all the officers showed up in the blue togs of the Space Service. As the highest ranker present, the Pig presided at the head of the table. The pilot, Colonel Delatour, sat at his right, the celestial navigator at his left, then the fire control officer, the chief engineer, the surgeon, and all the rest lined up in descending order of importance as defined by the Table of Ranks, down to Jesús and the Jew, with Cos the dwarf seated between us at the foot of the table.

Conversation was constrained, as you might suppose, because the General didn’t converse, he issued communiqués, and the only person who dared to disagree with him was Colonel Delatour, a shrewd-looking fortyish Frenchwoman with short bleached hair who liked to tell him in the politest possible way what an ass he was. Thus, when he opined that Newton’s third law of motion sounded like bullcrap to him, she murmured, “I’m sure you could make the universe operate in a much more plausible way than it does, General, if only you had the opportunity.”

What did she care? The ship couldn’t function without her, and anyway she wore blue and was only on temporary duty under the roaring wind machine seated at her left.

So our ill-assorted little community rushed headlong into the void, as the human species has a habit of doing. Most of the ship was empty, of course, ready to absorb the colonists. But soon Schlacht started us exploring every cubic meter of it, because – I didn’t know why at the time – he’d become convinced that we had a stowaway aboard.

The chief engineer began the search by closing the hundreds of safety doors that subdivided the ship’s interior to localize damage in case the hull was breached. Then we set out, walking like flies on sticky feet, because the coils of the pseudograv system ran through the decks which consequently were always “down.”

Making little popping sounds at every step, we prowled the semidark compartments one by one, Morales and I and O’Rourke and Chulalongkorn and our nervous young charges, all of us looking for the Stowaway – we started capitalizing the word in our thoughts – or other unauthorized inhabitants.

Well, we didn’t find any. But all the exploring at least gave us a picture of the Zhukov from inside. Christ, what a maze. Cavernous storage spaces near the hull, cold as hell, shadowy, vast. Scary in a way. Supplies shrouded in transplast covers, with Jack Frost patterns going jaggedly this way and that where moisture had gotten trapped inside and frozen. Then half-moon-shaped areas, barracks when the ship carried a full expeditionary force, with racks for bedding stacked four high and folded back against the bulkheads and locked in place. Empty latrines. Odd little rooms with drains in the floors – sickbays, I guessed. Connecting everything were narrow corridors, narrow ladders, narrow slider ramps, and small elevators sealed into tubes with locked doors at every level.

Running up the center of the ship from south pole to north pole was a nuclear-steel cylinder containing the standard-drive engines and the dark-energy generator and the life support machinery, all controlled from a mainframe computer sealed in a pod to which only the pilot, the celestial navigator, and the chief engineer had access. The heavy weapons occupied a sort of Arctic Circle – a doughnut-shaped region around the North Pole – with the topmost section of the central cylinder containing the particle-beam generator. Twenty steel silos lined the Arctic Circle’s outer bulkhead, four of them containing the Alpha missiles, the others empty. Fire control was managed by a big gleaming chunk of artificial intelligence also sealed into a pod, to which only the fire control officer had access.

That was the Zhukov as we came to know it. Enormous, enormously complex, insanely powerful, and absolutely barren. An image of the modern world, perhaps?

At first I thought Schlacht would gradually calm down and start acting human. But in that I was wrong.

As day after day went by – I mean, of course, the alternations of lights-on and lights-out – without anybody discovering our Stowaway, he got madder and madder and roared louder and louder. The result was that Morales and I stopped being afraid of him. When a volcano erupts once, it’s hard not to be impressed, but the three or four hundredth time, you figure, What, again?

Once or twice he threatened us with his fists, and I quietly resolved that if he hit me, I’d deck him and screw the consequences. Your Papa wasn’t nearly as big as me, but he had his black belt too, and he told me he’d already picked Schlacht’s Adam’s apple as his first target. I asked why.

“Even if I don’t kill him, he’ll have to shut up when I smash his *#%& vocal cords,” Jesús explained.

The blowup we were all waiting for came one day when the General was observing a personal-weapons training session. One of my guys was field-stripping a shoulder-fired missile launcher when he developed butter-fingers and dropped the pieces. They scattered all over the deck, clanging and tinkling, and the General stepped forward and slapped him so hard it made echoes.

Well, nobody was going to attack my people, especially not some son of a whore who knew they couldn’t hit back. I stepped between them, right fist closed, murder in my heart, and he swung back the same hand to use it on me. And then didn’t. We stood there, glaring and growling, and then to my surprise he lowered his hand, turned on his heel, and stomped away, followed by his shadow, Cos.

With that, some of the tension went out of the ship. Morales gave me a big abrazo. My platoon practically kissed my feet because I’d stood up for them and faced down the General doing it. Even Schlacht seemed to have learned something. That evening at dinner he treated me with minimal courtesy, and afterward he stayed more in his stateroom and yelled less when he was outside it. You never know how things will work out, do you?

A night or so later we got the inside story of the episode. I was in the canteen having a beer with Morales, when in lurched Cos. He looked especially small and lonely and rather lost. After all, he was odd man out on the ship, a civilian among all the uniforms, a little guy among all the big ones. Nobody really knew him except the General, so he had nobody to drink with, because Schlacht drank alone.

I invited Cos to join us, not just to be nice but because I was curious about what he was doing here. I waited until he’d poured a couple of half-liters of Pilsener into his inadequate body, then started asking him casually about himself Turned out that, like most isolated people, he was bursting to talk. We got a barrage of information: about his physical condition (scientific name achondroplasia) and about the problems of growing up small. About how his parents had kept him at home to protect him from the big bad world; and how, when he was fifteen, he’d run away and joined a circus.

“A circus,” I said in a neutral voice.

“It wasn’t a freak show.”

“That’s not what I was thinking,” I protested.

“That’s exactly what you were thinking. But it’s not true, I had my own act. Mind reading. My ESP rating is off the charts.”

I asked him if that meant he heard everything everybody was thinking all the time. He said of course not.

“It’s spotty, just like any other sensory system. You make judgments unconsciously, filter out things that don’t seem important. And you get distracted and you get weary and you get confused. Still, all in all, I’m good at what I do. The general saw my act in New Vegas and hired me to sit in the next room while he was playing nine-card stud and tell him what the other players were seeing in their hands through a mike the size of a peppercorn he’d had installed in his inner ear. He won a lot of money, so he got me a clearance and put me on full retainer to do the same thing during staff meetings at Security HQ.

“Wow, did I get an earful! You’d be amazed, all those high-rankers, how much time they spend plotting against one another. I was really shocked.”

“Why were you shocked?” asked Morales. “Everybody knows they’re like that.”

“You got to remember, Jesús, his parents protected him from the world,” I put in.

“Oh, yeah. I guess that would make anybody kind of naive. So what do you do for our maximum leader here on the Zhukov?”

“Same thing. He’s gotten in the habit of listening in on other people’s thoughts. Few days ago I warned him to back off that confrontation with you,” he said, nodding to me. “I told him you were ready to kill him. He’s not a coward, but he’s not a fool either. You’re as big as he is, and you’ve got forty years on him, so he backed off.

“And of course,” he added casually, “I’ve been telling him about the Stowaway.”

“The one we can’t find.”

“That really browns him off. There’s somebody aboard this ship who shouldn’t be here, and they’re hostile to him. Really hostile.”

“They meaning more than one?”

“They meaning either he or she, I don’t know which. It’s all this nuclear steel,” he complained. “It’s baffling. Even ordinary metal’s bad enough, it tends to short out whatever kind of frequency ESP exploits. Assuming it’s electromagnetic at all – the experts differ about that. But super-dense metals are even worse. Well,” he said, knocking back the last of his third beer and sliding off his bar stool, “see you guys later. Laughable as it sounds, I need my beauty sleep.”

When he’d gone, Morales and I just sat there, looking at each other, both of us thinking, What have I gotten myself into?

“A telepathic dwarf,” he said, starting to count our ship’s oddities. “A demented general officer. A hostile and apparently invisible Stowaway. Seventy enlisted people who include thugs, jack-offs, cretins, geniuses, sergeants, and whores. Armament enough to obliterate two or three civilizations. Have I missed anything?”

“Us,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “And us.”

Well, Jesús, when two guys live as close as your Papa and I did, they start acting like a married couple. It’s called bonding.

You get to know what your roommate’s going to say before he says it. You hate the way he snorts and grunts in his sleep, and then one night when he’s away you can’t sleep at all, because he’s not there snorting and grunting. You bicker over incredibly minor things. Morales almost drove me crazy speculating about the nature of pseudograv – was it electrostatic, or what? I was more like Sherlock Holmes, who didn’t give a damn whether the Sun went around the Earth or the Earth went around the Sun, because it had nothing to do with his work. I told Jesús he wasn’t qualified to speculate about technical stuff, or to understand it even if somebody explained it to him. He told me I was lucky to be free of intellectual curiosity.