Tony Daniel (17 page)

Sherman walked from the weather station to staff HQ along a worn path in the pebbly ground. Most of this region around Miranda Canyon was a combination of rock and frozen methane slush. The ground had a mushy consistency, like the sides of a volcano covered with snow back on Earth. Even in the thin atmosphere, each of Sherman’s footsteps produced an audible crunch.

The Triton temperature could get down to thirty-eight degrees Kelvin, which was –390 Fahrenheit. This was another reason New Miranda was growing. You could put a simple substance in the shade here, and it would become a superconductor. At the average temperatures and pressure on Triton, the nitrogen atmosphere hovered around its solid-gas-liquid triple point, and occasionally conditions would be right for the formation of the famous nitrogen rains. Triton was easily the coldest inhabited place in the solar system. Even Pluto, built on different geology, was warmer by a little.

Staff HQ had an airlock, since not all of Sherman’s soldiers were adapted to Triton’s rigors, and even those who were functioned better in an e-mix of gases.

The grist opened one portal and closed the other briskly as Sherman stepped through. Captain Quench was waiting at the situations table, engrossed in some problem on the knit. He noted Sherman’s arrival, took a moment to disengage, then stood up and saluted. Sherman nodded, and Quench quickly finished up what he was doing. Quench had been one of Sherman’s best pupils at the Point, and Sherman liked to watch him at his work. Quench was efficient in a kind of intuitive way that was different from Sherman’s thoroughness. He was ambitious, and a natural leader. He had also, once, been a woman, and, he claimed, would be one again when he got promoted. Quench had a theory that women were better lieutenants, men better captains, and women better majors. He hadn’t ventured any speculation, at least in Sherman’s presence, as to the best makeup of the higher ranks.

All of Sherman’s other officers were doing on-site supervision, and the room was empty except for Quench and Theory, who was now ensconced in the grist of the situation table.

“We’ve almost completed laying the Mill minefield, sir,” Quench reported. “Another two e-days, and stage one will be over. That relay is surrounded by a nest of hornets.”

“Very good,” Sherman replied. “Who have you got doing it?”

“Two units, one of them under Peoples, and the other is Ki’s calibration primary.”

“All right, Captain. Let’s have a look at that calibration unit.” Sherman walked to the grist-rich table and put his hands upon it, instructing his pellicle to make a physical link for both quantum and e-m transmission.

“Follow me, sir,” said Quench, and both men attuned themselves to the knit and entered full virtuality. Instantly, Sherman found himself (that is, an iconic representation of himself as an oak leaf cluster) floating in space next to Quench’s iconic captain’s bars. They were actually inhabiting the grist of the command pod that followed Lieutenant Ki around as she went about her tasks. The pod notified Ki that she was being observed, and she reported in.

“I’ve got the outer-periphery nukes ready to go,” she told them. “What’s taking time is working with the sentient units nearer to the relay satellite to tailor their bursts so that the satellite won’t be damaged.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” Sherman said. She showed Sherman the array she’d worked out, with the smarter explosives nearer to the center.

“Lieutenant, I want you to change those interior layouts,” Sherman said.

“Sir?”

“We haven’t got time to deploy and calibrate an entire core of sentients. I want you to layer them like an onion.”

“An onion, sir?”

“It’s a vegetable, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir. It’s a vegetable.”

“I want several layers of sentients spaced apart. Then set them to teaching the intervening layers, one mine at a time.”

“But that will take much longer than calibration, Colonel.”

“But not longer than deployment. We need this minefield up and running
yesterday
.”

To Sherman’s pleasure, Ki did not ask him what the reason was for the hurry. She merely replied, “Yes sir.”

“I want to have every crucial place or process in this system at least minimally protected in
forty-eight hours
.”

“Forty-eight
hours
?” said Quench. “Sir.”

“There are Met ships crossing the asteroid belt,” Sherman replied, “closing on Ganymede for ‘taxation enforcement.’ In case you have forgotten, the Interlocking Directorate doesn’t like us, and they are not going to let us alone.”

“Yes, sir,” Quench answered brightly. “They sure as hell are not going to let us alone, sir.”

“So you think we’re going to war, Colonel?” Ki asked.

“I think we already are at war,” Sherman replied. “We just don’t know it yet.”

from

Quatermain’s Guide

The Advantages of the Strong Force

A Guide to and History of the Met

by Leo Y. Sherman

The Met is the system of space cables, tethers, planetary lifts along with all the associate bolsas, sacs, armatures, and dendrites that comprise the human inhabited space of the inner solar system. The Met, at its widest, extends 186,000,000 miles from the sun, but it is far bigger than that in actuality. It has been calculated that if all the cables of the Met were laid end to end, they would reach out of the solar system and another AU or so (the distance from the sun to the Earth) toward Alpha Centauri. While the Met is long, it is thin. None of the space cables averages more than a kilometer in diameter. When seen from a vantage point above the planetary ecliptic near the asteroid belt, the Met shines like a spiderweb, wet with dewdrops, hanging in space between the wheeling planets.

By the time Claude Schlencker was eight years old, he had come to despise Shakespeare. First, there was the smell of the must and mold on the pages of his father’s
Complete Works
. It had gotten wet sometime during the move, and was three e-months in a trunk before being unpacked. The dank atmosphere of Polbo Armature didn’t help matters either. The family’s two-room flat constantly leaked, and the humidity controls had long since given up the ghost. And if you didn’t have humidity control in Polbo, you sweated like a pig all year long. The armature was an agricultural complex, and the atmosphere was determined by the needs of the plants, and not the humans who tended them. Of course, the more affluent could afford to have their bodies adapted to take into account the heat and the constant hanging mist. Claude’s family was, to say the least, not among the more affluent. His mother was a quality-control monitor at the workstation, and his father was a trimmer—one of the humans who must still be employed to cut off the lower leaves of vegetable seedlings in the greenhouses. It was not a job for a robot, and besides, a robot would get bored with it.

Delmore Schlencker was not bored with his job, he was furious at it, and at his life in general, including his wife and son. The Met was just being constructed, and he’d left Earth determined to make something of himself on the newly forming Mars-Earth Diaphany. He’d taught literature in junior college for a year until he’d lost his job because of (he claimed) cutbacks and faculty politics. There had been no help forthcoming from his family (Claude’s grandfather, whom he’d never met, was a policeman somewhere in Europe—the details were unclear), and Delmore had had to take whatever work he could find. He’d met Claude’s mother, Janey Beth, when she corrected one of his mistakes at the greenhouse. The baby had quickly followed, and Delmore, now in his late thirties, was stuck, stuck, stuck.

For him, Claude was both the cause of all his problems and his only hope for some escape.

Each night, from the time the boy was six, Delmore had had him deliver lines from Shakespeare while he, Delmore, drank himself to sleep. Despite his drunken state, Delmore had a near-perfect recall of the lines of the plays, and when young Claude made a mistake, well then the boy must be made to learn the lines.

Claude remembered one night in particular when his father had gotten a new bottle of real whiskey from the liquor store in the habitat and had polished off two-thirds of it in an hour and a half. Claude was delivering the Joan of Arc monologue from
Henry VI, Part 1
. His father insisted that he only learn the female’s parts entire, since that was the way young actors in the bard’s own time came to the stage. Boys were women, until they earned their dramatic stripes, and then they were allowed to play men. In the play, Joan was meeting with the Duke of Burgundy to try to win him back to the French cause (he had been siding with the English). All this meant next to nothing to young Claude, but he dutifully remembered the facts as well as he could. Once he had been beaten even after delivering a faultless scene because he later could not explain what it all meant.

“Besides, all French and France exclaims on thee,” Claude said, having reached the point in the monologue where Joan is appealing to Burgundy’s patriotism. “Doubting thy birth and lawful proficiency—”

And with that mistake, substituting
proficiency
for the correct
progeny,
something inside Delmore seemed to have broken open, like a swollen wound that suddenly splits and spills out its cankerous fluid. Claude later reasoned that it was not the mistake, but the words, which set off his father. Delmore had often doubted Janey Beth’s claim that Claude was actually his, and not the son of another worker whom his mother had occasionally seen. Claude never found out this other man’s name, but he liked to imagine that the story was true, even though, in his own squat form and round face, he bore a striking resemblance to Delmore.

Delmore suddenly rose from his chair and loomed over Claude. For a moment, Claude didn’t realize what was happening, that he had made a mistake.

“Progeny,” Claude said in a low voice.

“Progeny!” his father screamed. Claude immediately covered his head with his hands. There was nowhere to run. His father locked the door. It was probably his hands over his face that prevented Claude from being immediately knocked unconscious by his father’s blow. Delmore had struck him with the butt end of the whiskey bottle. Claude reeled, and his father hit him again on the shoulders. The bottle broke against Claude’s shoulder blade, and the jagged glass cut into his back. The remainder of the whiskey spilled into the wound and burned like fire. Claude sank to the floor, whimpering, and this angered Delmore even more.

“Get up,” he called to his son. “Be a fucking man, for the love of God.” When Claude failed to respond, Delmore kicked him, laying him out flat on the bare concrete floor of the flat.

“Shit, shit,” he heard Delmore grumbling, and he risked a peek to see that his father was examining the ruins of the bottle. “Fucking glass,” his father said. “It’s made of fucking gristless glass.”

Delmore reached down and pulled Claude up by his hair. He held the boy between his knees and put the broken whiskey bottle in front of Claude’s face, inches from his eyes. “See what you did?” Delmore said. “See what you did, you little bastard.”

And then Delmore had torn Claude’s shirt from his torso. Still holding the boy firmly between his legs, he spun Claude around so that his back was to his father. Then, using the sharp edge of the bottle, Delmore began to carve into his son’s back. In all, he made nine score-marks upon Claude, each time pressing a little harder, cutting a little deeper. And with each pass of the bottle, he spoke the word
progeny,
as if he were a patient teacher and Claude was a difficult student for whom he only wanted the best.

Finally, it was over. But it wasn’t. Delmore made his son once more stand before him and recite from start to finish the speech of Joan of Arc to Burgundy. Claude concentrated. He concentrated as hard as he ever had on anything in his life.

And, it was as if a cold breeze passed through him. As if the flat were air-conditioned and its air dried. Claude’s hands, bunched into fists, uncurled. And the words came—all of them. He delivered the monologue flawlessly.

After that, Claude seldom made mistakes when memorizing or delivering Shakespeare, and his father beat him for other reasons. But he had discovered something that night, something that would always stay with him. It was a power of concentration. After that, no matter how bad the circumstances became, Claude never panicked or forgot anything. He concentrated. And the cool, dry air would course through him, and he would be able to perform whatever he was called upon to do.

Claude did not tell his mother about the cuts on his back the next day. He knew what she would say: “Why, Claude, what did you do to yourself?” And it was about a year later that he woke up one morning to find that his mother was gone. She had left the armature, and it wasn’t until many years later that Claude knew what had become of her. He was left under the tender ministrations of his father until he was fifteen years old. By that time, Claude had learned Shakespeare backwards and forwards, including the sonnets.

When Claude turned ten, his father got him an after-school job working the greenhouse, trimming leaves alongside Delmore. With his smaller hands, Claude was faster and more accurate than his father, but he always took care to work at the same pace, and never to outdistance him. Delmore kept Claude’s wages and gave the boy an allowance, which he was constantly cutting off for weeks at a time as punishment. At such times, Delmore would blame the withheld money on a computer foul-up.

“It looks like those computers hate you,” his father would say to Claude. “I wish I could do something about it, but my hands are tied.”

Claude imagined the “computers” as small imps who burned his money and bathed in the flames. The image had come from one of the books Claude had read in the school library. He could not bring such “trash” literature home, but he found that he could devour an entire book, if it was of a medium length, just in the library period he was given at school. He was, of course, proficient at remembering the details. Claude knew what real computers were, and how to use them. But by the time he was eleven, they began to disappear, and Claude was given lessons at school on how to interact with a new kind of computer, which wasn’t really a computer at all. You kind of “thought” your way into it, and, instead of you working on it, in a way, it worked on you. At least, that is the way Claude began to picture it. It wasn’t until several e-years later that his new kind of computer began to be called the grist.