21st Century Science Fiction (84 page)

The citymind steered us to a landing area. It was fortunate that the cat was flying: I just stared at the buzzing things with my mouth open, afraid I’d drown in the sounds and the smells.

We sold our plane for scrap and wandered into the bustle of the city, feeling like
daikaju
monsters. The social agents that the Small Animal had given me were obsolete, but they could still weave us into the ambient social networks. We needed money, we needed work.

And so I became a musician.

• • • •

The ballroom is a hemi sphere in the centre of the airship. It is filled to capacity. Innumerable quickbeings shimmer in the air like living candles, and the suits of the fleshed ones are no less exotic. A woman clad in nothing but autumn leaves smiles at me. Tinkerbell clones surround the cat. Our bodyguards, armed obsidian giants, open a way for us to the stage where the gramophones wait. A rustle moves through the crowd. The air around us is pregnant with ghosts, the avatars of a million fleshless fans. I wag my tail. The scentspace is intoxicating: perfume, fleshbodies, the unsmells of moravec bodies. And the fallen god smell of the wrong master, hiding somewhere within.

We get on the stage on our hindlegs, supported by prosthesis shoes. The gramophone forest looms behind us, their horns like flowers of brass and gold. We cheat, of course: the music is analog and the gramophones are genuine, but the grooves in the black discs are barely a nanometer thick, and the needles are tipped with quantum dots.

We take our bows and the storm of handclaps begins.

“Thank you,” I say when the thunder of it finally dies. “We have kept quiet about the purpose of this concert as long as possible. But I am finally in a position to tell you that this is a charity show.”

I smell the tension in the air, copper and iron.

“We miss someone,” I say. “He was called Shimoda Takeshi, and now he’s gone.”

The cat lifts the conductor’s baton and turns to face the gramophones. I follow, and step into the soundspace we’ve built, the place where music is smells and sounds.

The master is in the music.

• • • •

It took five human years to get to the top. I learned to love the audiences: I could smell their emotions and create a mix of music for them that was just right. And soon I was no longer a giant dog DJ among lilliputs, but a little terrier in a forest of dancing human legs. The cat’s gladiator career lasted a while, but soon it joined me as a performer in the virtual dramas I designed. We performed for rich fleshies in the Fast City, Tokyo, and New York. I loved it. I howled at Earth in the sky in the Sea of Tranquility.

But I always knew that it was just the first phase of the Plan.

• • • •

We turn him into music. VecTech owns his brain, his memories, his mind. But we own the music.

Law is code. A billion people listening to our master’s voice. Billion minds downloading the Law At Home packets embedded in it, bombarding the quantum judges until they give him back.

It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made. The cat stalks the genetic algorithm jungle, lets the themes grow and then pounces on them, devours them. I just chase them for the joy of the chase alone, not caring whether or not I catch them.

It’s our best show ever.

Only when it’s over, I realise that no one is listening. The audience is frozen. The fairies and the fastpeople float in the air like flies trapped in amber. The moravecs are silent statues. Time stands still.

The sound of one pair of hands, clapping.

“I’m proud of you,” says the wrong master.

I fix my bow tie and smile a dog’s smile, a cold snake coiling in my belly. The god-smell comes and tells me that I should throw myself onto the floor, wag my tail, bare my throat to the divine being standing before me.

But I don’t.

“Hello, Nipper,” the wrong master says.

I clamp down the low growl rising in my throat and turn it into words. “What did you do?”

“We suspended them. Back doors in the hardware. Digital rights management.”

His mahogany face is still smooth: he does not look a day older, wearing a dark suit with a VecTech tie pin. But his eyes are tired. “Really, I’m impressed. You covered your tracks admirably. We thought you were furries. Until I realised—”

A distant thunder interrupts him.

“I promised him I’d look after you. That’s why you are still alive. You don’t have to do this. You don’t owe him anything. Look at yourselves: who would have thought you could come this far? Are you going to throw that all away because of some atavistic sense of animal loyalty? Not that you have a choice, of course. The plan didn’t work.”

The cat lets out a steam pipe hiss.

“You misunderstand,” I say. “The concert was just a diversion.”

The cat moves like a black-and-yellow flame. Its claws flash, and the wrong master’s head comes off. I whimper at the aroma of blood polluting the god-smell. The cat licks its lips. There is a crimson stain on its white shirt.

The zeppelin shakes, pseudomatter armour sparkling. The dark sky around the Marquis is full of fire-breathing beetles. We rush past the human statues in the ballroom and into the laboratory.

The cat does the dirty work, granting me a brief escape into virtual abstraction. I don’t know how the master did it, years ago, broke VecTech’s copy protection watermarks. I can’t do the same, no matter how much the Small Animal taught me. So I have to cheat, recover the marked parts from somewhere else.

The wrong master’s brain.

The part of me that was born on the Small Animal’s island takes over and fits the two patterns together, like pieces of a puzzle. They fit, and for a brief moment, the master’s voice is in my mind, for real this time.

The cat is waiting, already in its clawed battlesuit, and I don my own. The
Marquis of Carabas
is dying around us. To send the master on his way, we have to disengage the armour.

The cat miaows faintly and hands me something red. An old plastic ball with toothmarks, smelling of the sun and the sea, with a few grains of sand rattling inside.

“Thanks,” I say. The cat says nothing, just opens a door into the zeppelin’s skin. I whisper a command, and the master is underway in a neutrino stream, shooting up towards an island in a blue sea. Where the gods and big dogs live forever.

We dive through the door together, down into the light and flame.

K
AGE
B
KER
The death of Kage Baker in 2010 cut short one of the most promising careers of the new century. But in the thirteen years she actively wrote, she created a large and rewarding body of work.

Born and raised in Southern California, Baker worked in theater and in the insurance industry before publishing
In the Garden of Iden,
her first novel, in 1997. Like much of the rest of her work, it is a tale of the Company, a cadre of twenty-fourth-century time travelers who interfere with human history, ostensibly to preserve the heritage of Earth but in fact, as gradually becomes evident, for less admirable reasons as well. Many Company novels and stories followed, as well as a smaller amount of fiction set in other milieus.

Alternately hilarious and disquieting, “Plotters and Shooters” is
Lord of the Flies
meets
Ender’s Game,
and it’s not obvious which strain is going to be dominant. It is in the great tradition of SF stories arguing with previous SF stories, and brilliantly done.

I
was flackeying for Lord Deathlok and Dr. Smash when the shuttle brought the new guy.

I hate Lord Deathlok. I hate Dr. Smash too, but I’d like to see Lord Deathlok get a missile fired up his ass, from his own cannon. Not that it’s really a cannon. And I couldn’t shoot him, anyhow, because I’m only a Plotter. But it’s the thought that counts, you know?

Anyway I looked up when the beeps and the flashing lights started, and Lord Deathlok took hold of my little French maid’s apron and yanked it so hard I had to bend over fast, so I almost dropped the tray with his drink.

“Pay attention, maggot-boy,” said Lord Deathlok. “It’s only a shuttle docking. No reason you should be distracted from your duties.”

“I know what’s wrong,” said Dr. Smash, lounging back against the bar. “He hears the mating call of his kind. They must have sent up another Plotter.”

“Oh, yeah.” Lord Deathlok grinned at me. “Your fat-ass girlfriend went crying home to his mum and dad, didn’t he?”

Oh, man, how I hated him. He was talking about Kev, who’d only gone Down Home again because he’d almost died in an asthma attack. Kev had been a good Plotter, one of the best. I just glared at Deathlok, which was a mistake, because he smiled and put his boot on my foot and stood up.

“I don’t think I heard your answer, Fifi,” he said, and I was in all this unbelievable psychological pain, see, because even with the lower gravity he could still manage to get the leverage just right if he wanted to bear down. They tell us we don’t have to worry about getting brittle bones up here because they make us do weight-training, but how would we know if they were lying? I could almost hear my metatarsals snapping like dry twigs.

“Yes, my Lord Deathlok,” I said.

“What?” He leaned forward.

“My lord yes my Lord Deathlok!”

“That’s better.” He sat down.

So okay, you’re probably thinking I’m a coward. I’m not. It isn’t that Lord Deathlok is even a big guy. He isn’t, actually, he’s sort of skinny and he has these big yellow buck teeth that make him look like a demon jackrabbit. And Dr. Smash has breasts and a body odor that makes sharing an airlock with him a fatal mistake. But they’re Shooters, you know? And they all dress like they’re space warriors or something, with the jackets and the boots and the scary hair styles. Shracking fascists.

So I put down his Dis Pepsy and backed away from him, and that was when the announcement came over the speakers:

“Eugene Clifford, please report to Mr. Kurtz’s office.”

Talk about saved by the bell. As the message repeated, Lord Deathlok smirked.

“Sounds like Dean Kurtz is lonesome for one of his little buttboys. You have our permission to go, Fifi.”

“My lord thank you my Lord Deathlok,” I muttered, and tore off the apron and ran for the companionway.

Mr. Kurtz isn’t a dean; I don’t know why the Shooters call him that. He’s the Station Manager. He runs the place for Areco and does our performance reviews and signs our bonus vouchers, and you’d think the Shooters would treat him with a little more respect, but they don’t because they’re Shooters, and that says it all. Mostly he sits in his office and looks disappointed. I don’t blame him.

He looked up from his novel as I put my head around the door.

“You wanted to see me, Mr. Kurtz?”

He nodded. “New arrival on the shuttle. Kevin Nederlander’s replacement. Would you bring him up, please?”

“Yes, sir!” I said, and hurried off to the shuttle lounge.

The new guy was sitting there in the lounge, with his duffel in the chair beside him. He was short and square and his haircut made his head look like it came to a point. Maybe it’s genetic; Plotters can’t seem to get good haircuts, ever.

“Welcome to the Gun Platform, newbie,” I said. “I’m your Orientation Officer.” Which I sort of am.

“Oh, good,” he said, getting to his feet, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the viewscreen. I waited for him to ask if that was really Mars down there, or gush about how he couldn’t believe he was actually on an alien world or at least in orbit above one. That’s usually what they do, see. But he didn’t. He just shouldered his duffel and tore his gaze away at last.

“Charles Tead. Glad to be here,” he said.

Heh! That’ll change, I thought. “You’ve got some righteous shoes to fill, newbie. Think you’re up to it?”

He just said that he was, not like he was bragging or anything, and I thought This one’s going to get his corners broken off really soon.

So I took him to the Forecastle and showed him Kev’s old bunk, looking all empty and sad with the drillholes where Kev’s holoposters used to be mounted. He put his duffel into Kev’s old locker and looked around, and then he asked who did our laundry. I coughed a little and explained about it being sent down to the planet to be dry-cleaned. I didn’t tell him, not then, about our having to collect the Shooters’ dirty socks and stuff for them.

And I took him to the Bridge where B Shift was on duty and introduced him to the boys. Roscoe and Norman were wearing their Jedi robes, which I wish they wouldn’t because it makes us look hopeless. Vinder was in a snit because Bradley had knocked one of his action figures behind the console, and apparently it was one of the really valuable ones, and Myron’s the only person skinny enough to get his arm back there to fish it out, but he’s on C Shift and wouldn’t come on duty until seventeen-hundred hours.

I guess that was where it started, B Shift making such a bad first impression.

But I tried to bring back some sense of importance by showing him the charting display, with the spread of the asteroid belt all in blue and gold, like a stained-glass window in an old-time church must have been, only everything moving.

“This is your own personal slice of the sky,” I said, waving at Q34-54. “Big Kev knew every one of these babies. Tracked every little wobble, every deviation over three years. Plotted trajectories for thirty-seven successful shots. It was like he had a sixth sense! He even called three Intruders before they came in range. He was the Bonus Master, old Kev. You’ll have to work pretty damn hard to be half as good as he was.”

“But it ought to be easy,” said Charles. “Doesn’t the mapping software do most of it?”

“Well, like, I mean, sure, but you’ll have to coordinate everything, you know? In your head? Machines can’t do it all,” I protested. And Vinder chose that second to yell from behind us, “Don’t take the Flying Dynamo’s cape off, you’ll break him!” Which totally blew the mood I was trying to get. So I ignored him and continued: