Oddly, I had not seen another soul in the park. Now children of every size, every shape, every gender, every species, were tramping through the gate, holstering their pistols, slipping outsize daggers into scabbards, their smartsuits scuffed or dusty, but with grimly satisfied expressions across their grimy little faces. Judging from their numbers, I ought to have seen at least a few inside the park. I wondered how much of that had been real, how much of it holographic illusion.
I planted my behind against the other gate-post, my back bent, my hands on my thighs, trying desperately to blow some oxygen into my lungs.
“I was a musician, sir.”
“You shoot like it. And your tactical sense leaves a lot to be desired. One thing I’ll say for you, you learn fast. You wound up right on the average line for beginners, even counting your early losses.” He struck me lightly on the shoulder. “Congratulations, son, today you are a five-year-old. Take fifteen minutes, we’ll crank you back through the course again. It’s a little different every time, you know.”
I stared helplessly at the waist-high warriors surrounding us. Running sweat still stung my eyes, making it hard to see. “God help me!”
“Somebody’d sure better, or you’re going to wind up with your head sticking out of some Afdiarite hunter’s trophy-wall. What I’d really like to know is how you managed to take care of those troopies back on Sca.”
I had been thinking the same thing, myself, all day. “Dumb luck. Adrenaline.”
“Horse manure, son. You’ve got a natural fighting talent in there somewhere. We just have to find the right stresses to bring it out again.”
“Gee, Captain, how can I ever thank you?”
“Call me Coup. And think nothing of it, son, it’s my pleasure. Say, what you got wrong with your smartsuit?” He threw his cigarette aside.
“Sir?” I said reflexively. Looking down at my left forearm, I saw that the inset control panel was ablaze with lights. Red lights. They had fuzzy haloes around them. The repeaters on the right arm were the same.
He seized my arm, began pushing buttons. “Great Albert’s ghost, boy! No wonder you look like something the government dragged in!” Abruptly, I began to cool off. My vision cleared. Breathing became easier.
My fatigue started slipping away.
Looking at me, Couper shook his head. “This thing’s supposed to help you out, Corporal, not hinder you. How long has it been like this?”
“I do not know, sir—Coup. I did not notice.”
“You didn’t?” He looked at me oddly. “Well, the blasted thing’s an antique. It’s probably been on the fritz all morning.” He stood for a moment, apparently deep in thought, one hand still on my arm. “I guess I’ll have to revise my estimate, son, if you fought your way through that course roasting alive and with your body filling up with deadly toxins.”
He stepped back. “Whitey, your smartsuit’s supposed to maintain correct temperatures, cleanse your system continuously through the pores, take care of sanitary functions, heal wounds, and tend to half a hundred other things. But it can’t do it if you don’t bother to look at the telltales when they light up blazing red. And it’s a whole lot safer if the suit is simply allowed to communicate directly with your body.”
Almost without my noticing, my feet had begun to swell up at the beginning of the morning. Now the pain of that, the feeling of an impending explosion in my feet, began to ebb away rapidly. My bladder filled. The suit went through its automatic sanitary cycle without prompting.
I felt a hundred years younger. “Another commercial for brain-implants?”
“Look, Whitey, this suit you’re wearing is over half a century old. They hauled it out of mothballs just for you, for nothing, and that’s about what it’s worth. Like I said, it’s your funeral, but in your place, I’d consider an implant. Think about the Lieutenant. Or that you’ll never have to wonder what time it is again, or use a calculator—”
I looked around at his oddly wordless world. Across from the park exit, a restaurant was filled with gaily-chattering individuals. There were a dozen shop-fronts in sight. Nowhere a single sign, or simple advertisement.
“Or see a billboard, or read a book,” I answered. Or think for myself, I thought. I had been considering little else. I opened my mouth.
“Nonsense, boy!” Couper interrupted, “I’m reading a book this very minute.” He closed his eyes, then began to recite: “ ... night had already fallen. O was naked in her cell, and was waiting for them to come and take her to the refectory. As for her lover, he was dressed, as usual, in a—” He stopped, reddened, then started a cough that turned into a splutter. “Wrong file,” he explained sheepishly. “Now how the state did Pauline Reage find her way in there with ... here we are—”
“... The best-explored alternative universes pivot on Gallatin’s decisions regarding the Whiskey Rebellion—or more correctly, on Jefferson’s choice to include the phrase ‘unanimous consent of the governed’ in the Declaration of Independence. Outwardly similar, the two worlds are entirely different respecting their inhabitants’ view of life.”
He held up a finger. “Third Century interaction between North America and the United States had noteworthy consequences. Millions of refugees began pouring into the Confederacy, which, in turn, began—on a purely private basis—to subvert otherworld governments. The authoritarians struck back, constructing a 230-ship escape-fleet in 223 A.L. One Voltaire Malaise—incredibly, a Confederate native and popular media figure—with Hamiltonian co-conspirators, kidnapped thousands of young women for breeding stock, controlling them through primitive thought-processors. Enlisting statist help, they plunged recklessly into yet a third continuum, the so-called ‘Little Bang’ universe ... ”
He stopped abruptly. “That’s enough for now. Malaise and his crew came from one universe—ours—enlisted help from another, and attempted to escape into it. The reading is from the introduction to Grossberg and Hummel’s
A History of the NeoImperialist Party.
I find that it never hurts you to brush up on your classics now and again, Corporal.”
Primitive thought-processors. “You keep all of that inside your head?”
“Just the introduction—which I happened to write. You see, I founded the NeoImperialist faction of the Gallatinist party, very nearly a century ago. The idea was that government is a disease that nobody has a right to start or to spread. We wanted to declare war on governments everywhere, to wipe them off the face of the earth. I admit I don’t think even I ever intended that we’d be out here doing it.”
“Do you regret it?” I asked.
“Not a minute of it. But it just goes to show you that intentions count for nothing in the real world, it’s only the results that count. There was a fellow in that other universe—the United States—named Henry Ford. He invented cheap, mass-produced automobiles, and put everybody and his brother-in-law on wheels. He accomplished a lot of good, but the main thing he did was take romance out of the front parlor, under the baleful gaze of Daddy Dearest, and put it in the rumble-seat of a Model A, giving sexual Victorianism the deep-six forever. He probably didn’t intend for that to happen—shucks, he might even have been against it happening—but it’s the results that count.”
“In other words,” I suggested, “the ends justify the means?”
“Non-sequitur. Intentions constitute a third category altogether, entirely separate from means or ends. And they usually don’t have much at all to do with what eventually happens, anyway. Look at the market system, for example. Individuals seeking a profit help others because they inevitably must in order to make a living. However those with an altruistic bent invariably do great damage. They focus on intentions, rather than results, and this represents a severe dissociation from reality that other folks usually end up having to pay the consequences for.”
I laughed. “Is that why you are all out here ‘curing’ governments, trying to end wars? I have been to the lectures on strategy, Coup. I have heard all the plans for Sodde Lydfe, to pass government ciphers, other military secrets between the two sides so that nothing can be a surprise. Why are you doing all of that stuff, if not for altruistic motives?”
He started another cigarette, began pointing me gently toward the watering-hole across the street. Perhaps my labors were over for the day. “For future profit,” he explained. “We know from experience that private individuals are always a lot easier to do business with than governments are, so we’re liberating the former by eliminating the latter.”
The idea of a light meal with an ice cold drink on the side had sudden irresistible appeal. “That is the real mission of
Tom Paine Maru?”
He grinned. I did not know whether to take him seriously. “None other.”
“I do not believe it for a minute.” On the opposite side of the avenue, we entered a crowded restaurant. Approximately a hundred delicious smells hit me all at once. My mouth watered. I looked around for an empty table, only paying half-attention to my conversation with Couper.
“Then believe this, son. I just received a bulletin via implant. It was for you. I seems the operations team is planning a twenty-mile orientation hike through jungle mud in a solid, typically Afdiarian, downpour.
”They want you to join them in five minutes.”
afdiar
Notes from the
Asperance
Expedition
Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording
Page Thirty-three:
Outline of Confederate History, continued.
The infamous Voltaire Malaise escape plot was only discovered at the last moment. Although it was not fully interrupted, the electronic slave-controls it depended upon to pacify its human breeding-stock suffered deliberate sabotage before departure. Its crude stardrive only operated with partial success, stranding 230 “authoritarian” starships in a partial state of feminist revolt, not only throughout the stars, but randomly distributed over ten centuries by temporal displacement.
The Broach dilated upon a torrent.
Aboard
Tom Paine Maru,
in a comfortable, loungelike debarkation chamber, we could not see a meter past the aperture, its rim a circle of azure brilliance against a curtain of liquid steel gray. Although a perfectly ordinary wooden-planked door—supposedly—lay not much further away than that meter, the other side of this tunnel through reality.
Like a billion tiny hammers on a billion tiny anvils, a relentless roar filled the chamber, broken by a
flash!
The roll of thunder that followed was scarcely louder. A moving wall of chilly dampness swept in upon us, dragging the odor of ancient mildew in its wake. It was an unusually dry summer morning on Afdiar. We had awaited this letup in the regular downpour for thirty hours. It had rained steadily on this horrible planet for a million years. It would rain like this a million more.
So the geologists had maintained, anyway, orienting the team of which I became a part over the next several days. The sun glared down upon Afdiar as mercilessly as that of Sca. The planet possessed more water. In consequence: eternal thunderstorms. Someday, nine tenths of its surface would be ocean. At present, half of that moisture hung as vapor or continually fell as rain, most evaporating before it hit the ground.
“There’s no use postponing the inevitable!” I shouted against the mind-numbing, hammering torrent. I freed my brand new shiny shortsword from the tangle of my specially-treated cloak, loosened it in its scabbard, then gave it a hitch where the shoulder-sling cut off my circulation.
Uncomfortable without a smartsuit that I had never worn, or even conceived of, before a few weeks ago, I summoned up whatever courage I possessed, stepped through the Broach. I groped blindly for the door, lifting, then dropping the green tarnished ring of the knocker onto the green tarnished plate that had been bolted to the rough-hewn planking.
The building, of gray stone equally rough-hewn, sat encrusted with a thick carpeting of slimy moss. Others of the team guarded my back—that I had to take on faith—I could not see behind me. Water sluiced down my forehead, running into my eyes. Drenched fabric clung to my body, hampering my movement. I banged again, not quite as happy with my status of “primitive expert” as I had been. It would have been helpful to know whether “primitive” was being used as a noun or an adjective.
It would have been helpful to know a lot of things.
It had been repeatedly suggested during my training that I try one of the brain implants I worried over so much, on the same experimental basis as this mission, especially as we would have to struggle along without our accustomed smartsuits. Afdiar was a “critical” world where the slightest betrayal of superior technology meant death in a number of particularly unpleasant ways. I had considered accepting the offer. If I could overcome the presumed indoctrinatory influences of the device, it would be better than the crude notes that I had been making from hand-fashioned materials in an apparently illiterate culture. A complete knowledge of the Confederate stardrive system alone would be priceless.
But the plain, ugly truth was that I was afraid. By the time I really knew the truth about implants, it would be too late. I could be just another slave, sharing an illusion of freedom with all the other slaves.
Circumstances had forced me, just before departure, to make the choice for the Lieutenant. I could not let him die, or even take the chance. He would have his implant. Or the implant would have him. It seemed prudent to preserve mental independence for one of us, at least.