Endgame (5 page)

Alas, the head was crushed to a pulp. “Damn,” I griped. “Even if we can somehow revive its body, it can't tell us anything if its brain is destroyed.”

Sears and Roebuck knelt to examine the body.
“The brain appears intact,” they said, poking at the chest.
Duhh!
I mentally kicked my butt; I knew they didn't keep their brains in their heads, but it was hard to remember. Klave didn't either, as I recalled.

“Can you fix it?” asked Arlene. “It'd be icy to know what the hell happened.”

Sears and Roebuck held the body down and drew a cutting laser, casually slicing away the head, legs, and arms. I nearly lost my lunch! The Klave were pretty cold from our point of view; even so, carving up a dead body just for laziness, to avoid hefting heavy stones off the limbs, was a bit much!

They dragged the torso out of the rubble, knocking over a few stray stones with it. I winced with sympathy . . . even dead, I knew it could feel the pain of every blow. With the body tucked underneath their arms, Sears and Roebuck humped back toward the Fred ship, Arlene and me forming a Goddamned parade behind the macabre Klave pair.

The Freds didn't divide their ship into separate departments, as humans do; they used something more like an old “object-oriented” approach to spaceship organization: different sections, like different counties, each had their own essential services—food, water, navigation, engines, and medical equipment. God only knows how they divvied up the workload; maybe they fought for it! But Sears and Roebuck wandered around with the Fred body until they found a batch of machines that they claimed were “MedGrams,” tossed the torso inside, and began poking blue and red buttons on a control panel.

A couple of hours later—I watched, but Arlene went to sleep on one of the beds—the torso was flopping around, trying to move its nonexistent arms, legs, and head.

“Great,” I said, “but now what? It has no mouth; how can it tell us anything?”

“Vocoder,” said Sears and Roebuck, speaking for the first time since finding the body. They clipped a
few more leads onto the chest of the Fred, palmed a touchplate, and a mechanical voice sounded through the speakers.

. . . 
DARES STAND AGAINST THE MIGHTY . . . WHO DARES THE DEMONS OF UNBEHEADED SUNLIGHT WHO FOOLISHLY TEMPTS THE . . . PEOPLE OF THE DARK AND THE HOT THE PEOPLE OF THE CRACKS OF—”

Sears and Roebuck turned it off. They fiddled with the settings and played it again, this time all in a weird language that made my teeth ache—presumably Sears and Roebuck's own language.

Arlene had jerked awake at the first noise. She stared wildly, still trying to cold-boot her brain and figure out who was just shouting.

“Pretty impressive,” I said. “How did it know English?”

Sears and Roebuck stared at me as if I were a particularly slow child. “Fly, you and Arlene have been talk around English for eight week now. What you did think the compu-nets were doing?”

I got a creepy feeling in my gut, like a couple of poisonous centipedes had got loose in there. “You mean that thing has been
listening
to every word we say? Jesus.”

Arlene looked around nervously. “Has it been . . . watching us, too?”

“Sometimes.”

“Even when . . . during my private moments, in the
bathhouse?”

“Sometimes,” admitted Sears and Roebuck, adding nonchalantly, “we spent time observing you two, too. We are curious how you mates if you will demonstrate use of your mate apparatus.”

Arlene turned red as a radish; I'm not kidding! For years in the Light Drop, she had showered around men, used the toilet (or the ground) in front of men, and even had sex with Dodd in front of the guys when
she got drunk once . . . and here she was flushing fire-engine red at the thought of an alien and a computer having seen her naked! I couldn't help laughing, and she glared M-14 rounds at me.

“Need to find tuning,” muttered Sears and Roebuck, fooling with the buttons. I stared, reminded of about a thousand and one cheesy sci-fi movies that Arlene regularly made me watch while she gave running commentary about which star's sister was the mistress of the head of Wildebeest Studios. (“Jeez, it's Dr. Mabuse,” whispered Arlene in my ear.)

“Try question them now,” suggested Sears and Roebuck, pretending for their own peace of mind that there were really two Fred aliens instead of one. As a double-entity, Sears and Roebuck never had been able to deal with beings other than in pairs, pairs of pairs, and so forth: they had no trouble dealing with Fly and Arlene, but when it was Fly and Arlene and Captain Hidalgo, Sears and Roebuck threw a fit!

I cleared my throat. “State your name for the record,” I began, just trying to provoke some response from the Fred.

“I will be Ramakapithduraagnazdifleramakanor—”

“You will henceforth be designated Rumplestiltskin,” I decided. Damned if I were going to try to repeat that horrible squabble of sound! “Rumplestiltskin, I am Taggart. You may also be questioned by Sanders and by Sears and Roebuck. You will answer all questions, or we'll leave you immobile on the planet surface forever.”

“Rumplestiltskin responds. What if he answers questions from the Taggart?”

“You'll be disintegrated and your spirit will be sent wherever it goes upon disintegration.”

“Rumple bumple mumple humple . . .”

“Do you accept the terms?”

“Rumplestiltskin answers questions. Bumple.”

I sighed. I had to keep reminding myself we were
peering directly into the brain of a Fred—a Fred that had lain dead for God knows how long, slowly going mad.

In fact, that was a good first question. “Rumplestiltskin: how long have you lain beneath the rubble?”

“Rubble bubble wubble tubble—”

“Rumplestiltskin will answer the question!”

“I—I—I—I—I—Rumplestiltskin answers questions. Rumplestiltskin lay for 19,392 suns.”

Arlene tapped at her watch calculator again. “This planet rotates four hundred and twelve times per orbit, so that's forty-seven Fredyears plus twenty-eight Freddays.”

“What's that in dog years?” I asked.

“For us, that's about forty years, six months.”

“Jesus. Rumplestiltskin, were your people attacked nineteen thousand suns ago?”

“Whack smack back crack whack smack back crack”

“Who attacked you?”

“Newbies soobies.”

“Was it a new species? Rumplestiltskin, how did you meet your attackers?”

“Rumplestiltskin's people met the news on their own world we expand our great empire we conquer all we shall pound the Others into hotrock.”

I closed my eyes, sorting through the Fred's tangled speech. Arlene whispered into her throat mike, so I alone heard her speculation: “Fly, think they found a new species on its own planet, and somehow it ended up attacking and destroying the Fred home planet?”

I grunted affirm; that was what I had figured from the yammering. But there were some real problems here; Sears and Roebuck had made it pretty clear that most species took millions of years to get from civilization to spaceflight—humans were such an exception that we caught the Fred by surprise. They first discovered us about four or five hundred years ago, while Spain and Portugal were still sailing out in
wooden wind-driven ships to map the “New World.” The Fred confidently assumed we were tens of thousands of years away from being able to offer any effective resistance.

They didn't like us; they feared us because we, of all the intelligent races known in the galaxy,
could die.
They decided to exterminate us—another move in the megenia-long chess match for control of the galaxy. In the battle between the “Hyperrealists” and the “Deconstructionists,” we played the role of Kefiristan, the poor unsophisticated farmer in whose backyard a minor skirmish is fought.

Hyperrealists, Deconstructionists—the terms were courtesy Sears and Roebuck, who searched long and hard through Earth philosophy and decided that wacko, effeminate, limp-wristed
literary critics
in New York were the finest, most refined philosophers of the bunch. What a kick in the nuts: this great, grand political war between two mighty empires turned on a doctrinal difference of aesthetics between two competing schools of literary criticism. Billions of lives hung in the balance between one dumbass way of dissecting “eleven fragment stories” and another, both of which missed the point entirely, of course. That much, Sears and Roebuck told us, but no more. I had no idea what the hell that meant; eleven
story
fragments? But try telling S and R that.

His species, the Klave, were members of the Hyperrealist tong; the evil Freds represented the slimy, dishonorable Deconstructionist tong. Someday, somehow, I was going to beat those sons of bitches, Sears and Roebuck, into explaining the whole damned thing to me. In the meanwhile, I just shrug and thank God we soldiers don't have to understand politics in order to follow orders.

Anyway, the Freds miscalculated . . . catastrophically. When they returned to Fredworld, raised an invasion force (taking about a century to do so), then returned, a mere half a millennium had passed—but
to the Freds' shock, they found not a planetful of ignorant, superstitious farmers and sailors, but a technologically advanced, planet-wide culture with missiles, nuclear weapons, particle beams, spaceflight, and a brain trust unfrightened by horn and fang, scale and claw.

Even after Arlene and I kicked their asses, when we left Earth, humanity was on the ropes . . . just like the old heavyweight Muhammad Ali. We played rope-a-dope with the “demons,” and if Salt Lake City and Chicago were nuclear wastelands, so were the Fred bases on Phobos and Deimos. Worse, the last remnants of Fox Company—not only me and Arlene but Albert and our teenage hacker Jill—had managed to rescue the former human, now cyborg, Ken Estes, which gave us the
potential
to tap into the Fred's entire technology base. The Freds were genetically engineering human infiltrators, but we were training
einsatzgruppen.

God only knew what was going to happen, since we left Earth right at the exciting part. Or what had happened already, actually. I had to bear in mind that by the time we could return to the mother planet, four hundred years would have passed!

The Freds made a critical miscalculation when they assumed humans evolved at the same rate as everybody else in the galaxy. Was it possible they made the same mistake again, this time to far more disastrous consequence?

Time to get a bit more specific with Rumplestiltskin: “When you found the Newbies, what was their technological level?”

“Techno tackno crackno farmer harmer—”

“Were they industrial or agricultural?”

“Culture vulture nulture—”

“Rumplestiltskin will answer. Were the Newbies technological?”

“Evils! We came to herd as they herded we came to
harvest as they harvested we came to wander as they wandered we came to herd as they herded!”

Herding . . . harvesting—nomads? Farmers, just discovering animal husbandry?
I prodded the undead Fred for another half hour, eliciting little other information. The best I could tell was that the “Newbies” had evidently just discovered agriculture and ranching; they were just settling down from their nomadic life when the Fred scoutship observed and studied them. They made contact with the Newbies and fought a few skirmishes, just probing them.

The Freds returned to Fredworld; this was probably three hundred or more years back, just around the time the first Fred expedition returned from contact with Earth. The Freds horsed around for a while, not long, then they returned to the Newbie system, just a couple of hundred years after they left . . . only to find that the Newbies had gone from the beginnings of agriculture to a heavily armed, spacefaring culture in just
two centuries!

And that's where Rumplestiltskin started to get hazy. The rest of the interrogation was long, tedious, boring, tedious, dull, and tedious; even Sears and Roebuck lost interest and started monkeying with the navigational system . . . which was unlocked, now that we'd reached the preprogrammed destination. I figured Sears and Roebuck had never interrogated a prisoner before; it's not a process for the impatient.

I got
a
story, but I had no idea whether I got
the
story. This is what I finally dragged out of old Rump, with me and Arlene making a lot of intuitive leaps and filling in the background as best we could: when the Freds arrived at the Newbie planet, ready to take the “empty” square in the giant chess game between the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, they discovered a weird, unknown piece on the board. The Newbies must have an accelerated evolution that is as fast compared to us humans as we are compared to
the rest of the galaxy! The Newbies were so stellar that they tore through the Fred fleet like a cat through a fleet of canaries.

And then—this was the part neither I nor Arlene really bought, though it was such a lovely thought it was hard to resist—the Newbies
backtracked
the Freds and invaded Fredworld itself, utterly annihilating it in revenge for trying to conquer the Newbies!

What a beautiful picture—the Freds, in a panic, desperately defending their homeworld against an unknown foe who had been herding sheep and building twig-and-wattle huts just two (subjective) centuries before! Arlene and I laughed long and loud at that one. Sears and Roebuck must have thought we were loons, since the Klave have nothing remotely like a “sense of humor” defense mechanism; they just look at each other.

The last part of the story I got was the creepiest: Rumplestiltskin insisted, over and over, that those damned nasty Newbies were
still here.
But where?