Authors: Christopher McKitterick
But Herrschaft’s charitable goals did not mean he had learned to care about humans, no; it only meant he grieved for the vulnerability of youth. Behind his nobility lurked revenge: By creating fundamental change, he would destroy the world that had brutalized him. He could not give a damn about adults; they had molded him into a shell filled with nothing but emotional scar tissue.
And more. His father would endure a new form of prison within the mind that would not even allow the freedom of personal thought. But Herrschaft would appear noble: By immobilizing and reeducating criminals right in their own homes, he would save taxpayers many billions in hard currency each year.
Less than 100 years later, his ad agency did all this and much more. Authority figures devolved into puppets. He, alone, ruled half the Solar System. But only half. That would change on the night of
Lone Ship Bounty
’s special broadcast, when he would move a final piece into position on his vast game board.
On that August day, in an office overlooking Chicago, he erupted into laughter so brutal that his employees shrank back from his massive wooden desk. He had become a prophet. When the laughter mutated into uncontrollable sobbing, all but one of them left. The remaining woman came around his desk and held him in a way not unlike how his mother had held him the night before her death.
That was the last time he had openly wept, until after the assassination attempt. The rest of his story is readily available in any history subscription.
Herrschaft cursed himself as he felt the weight of years burden his mechanical shoulders. He felt unstuck in time, struggling to overcome the vertigo of seeing the four-dimensional stretch that had brought him to this crossroads. He was an artifact of a previous century and bore power accumulated like dust over the years. Almost singlehandedly, he had pulled together the frayed strings of humanity in his fist and created something he considered beautiful. EarthCo and its Feedcontrol, whose billions of fingertips stretched out across worlds, with dense nerve networks on each end; to his eye, they were a piece of work unmatched by any other human masterpiece.
“
. . .don’t you think, Luke?” Mrs. Jackson said.
Herrschaft shook himself back into the year 2197. As planned, he forced himself to continue the gracious-host routine with the wife of one of his puppets.
“
Certainly, my dear,” he responded, sure that would satisfy whatever triviality she had asked. He realized with a start that they were standing inside his private projection booth. Red velvet curtains encircled the cozy space, deadening noise.
“
Close the doors, please,” he said, and two human servants who had remained unseen did his bidding. The room made a small huff as it was sealed against sound and electronic intrusion. Except against Luke Herrschaft, of course. A tendril of his mind reached into the projector and booted it up.
“
Have a seat, my lady,” he said. By the pale light of Neptune, which flickered into existence in the air before them, he offered her a seat near the 3VRD screen. Herrschaft sat beside her. Eight other feed-enhanced seats were still empty in a semicircle behind them.
“
Saturn looks so different on a projector,” Mrs. Jackson declared. She oohed at the slowly growing orb that hovered amid a bath of stars.
“
That’s Neptune, my dear,” he said, correcting her. He tried not to grunt in disgust. Already bored with this woman, he expanded his consciousness in the Feedcontrol room that was currently handling
Lone Ship Bounty
’s raw feedback.
A new feed-angle probe detached from the gleaming ship to replace its predecessor, ruined during a brief battle near Mars. It took up “stationary” co-trajectory position 200 meters away, according to a row of numbers reeling along the right-hand side of his pov:
>>PRELIM EarthCo VERIF FEED
ECoNAUT F/B VESSEL 011 BOUNTY 3.20.197
19:25:03 NKK CORP NEPTUNE BOUNDARY<<
Herrschaft felt an organic response in himself: excitement. He dipped into a pov inside the ship.
The first camera showed Pehr Jackson lying idly in his zero
g
hammock. Herrschaft cringed; the man was much flabbier than he had been last episode. He touched up some of the feed himself, tightening the man’s abdomen and thickening the skeletal muscles. That kind of programming was simple. Jackson’s dreary expression had to go, but such minutiae were best left to his controllers to modify. He asked them to give the Captain his usual confidence, or at least the impression of it. A few seconds later, Jackson again looked capable of defeating foes, even though he lay motionless. Herrschaft called up data on what the man was feeding on: a message from Mrs. Jackson. Herrschaft was very pleased. He opened direct feed of this pov to his private projection booth, where it was displayed in an inset box. Jackson’s private room seemed to grow out of pure space and hover beside Neptune.
“
Mrs. Jackson,” Herrschaft said, “your husband is currently feeding on a message you sent him.” He watched the woman’s face go blank then light up with pleasure.
“
Oh, what a treat!” she said, leaning forward to stare at a full-size projection of her husband. “What’s on, Pehr?” she asked the four-hour-old ghost, then chittered at her little joke.
To avoid cursing at this woman, Herrschaft abandoned his presence with her and went back to presiding over the raw feed. He checked a chronometer running at one corner of the 3VRD display. Less than five minutes until action. Herrschaft’s excitement swelled inside him like something trying to get out. Too much excitement could spoil his carefully laid plans, so he began to pull up each pov. He would be pragmatic about all this. This was only a plan, a program played out by human components.
>>Cameras P2 and P3 now both fully functional; P2 transmits telescopic views of patches of seemingly calm Neptune sky and a cluster of unidentified craft, magnified 100X, approaching pov. P3 utilizes a fish-eye lens which transmits a dome marked at one extreme by the torch-shape of
Bounty
, another by a diminished Neptune, another by our bright star Sol.<<
As Herrschaft watched, bug-programs ran all necessary checks of feedback transmitted; all systems functioning perfectly. Herrschaft had feared that the direct hit
Bounty
sustained in combat near Mars with NKK’s late fighter Koi had damaged remaining stowed probes.
“
Why isn’t anything happening?” Mrs. Jackson asked.
Her voice was no more than a ghost whispering in one of his myriad ears. Herrschaft backed 20% of himself out of the control room and looked at her. Was there anything in those bright eyes that suggested the child? Of course not. He could not see anything of the sort in her, and was angry at himself for seeking it
. A man can see anything when he looks for it
, he thought,
and I can’t afford to see that in her now
.
“
This is just preliminary feed,” he said, abruptly. “We’re adjusting our receivers and transmitters so that when the show begins, we can confidently feed it live to a currently estimated eight billion subscribers.” He didn’t mention that tailoring the feedback would delay the “live” program feed by nearly two seconds.
“
Oh,” she said, and turned back to the projections.
Herrschaft left her alone again.
>>Netcom verifies approaching craft to be NKK-owned intercept/torpedoes built by Z-Tech.<<
“
Windfall! Perfect!” Herrschaft said aloud. Part of him saw Mrs. Jackson face him, another part of him saw his controllers do the same, but only for a moment.
“
Our men will be provoked, er, were provoked.” Suddenly, he felt a bit nervous. What if the
Bounty
had been destroyed before delivering its payload? What if he were only watching a shipload of the damned, useless and long dead? What if—
No, he would no longer allow his emotions to control him. Luke Herrschaft, Director of Feedcontrol, acting ruler of EarthCo, took over for the lost and lonely young Luke. The boy had tried to possess the man. That would be the last time he allowed such behavior in himself. He was strong. He was the strongest man alive. No dead boy would control him.
Herrschaft savagely switched his presence completely to the control room.
The saucer-shaped escape pod, which had once been excess payload aboard
Bounty
, shrieked back into Triton’s atmosphere after its third and final pass through. Loud as lightning, the main atomic rocket was consuming the remains of the pod’s fuel. The underside of the craft heated red again as the last fragments of ablative heatshield sparkled and fell away. The magnetic shield had failed during the second pass.
Pehr’s splice looked down at a blurred landscape. The pov showed as much horizon as land since Janus had instructed the ship to flatten an already highly elliptical orbit each time. This orbit would intersect the surface.
“
Now,” Janus whispered, as if to herself.
He discovered what she meant a moment later. The rocket began to sound as if it were some great drum, reverberating in the cabin with a rapid thud rather than a constant roar.
“
Down to the bottom of our tank,” she stated without really looking at him. Her eyes had that faraway stare Pehr was so accustomed to in his fellows.
A brief image of Susahn crossed his mind, though he couldn’t understand why. He didn’t spend time pondering it.
Instead, Pehr tried to find a sense of control by watching Triton rear its humped back higher. Then the engine’s pounding ceased, and he felt lighter by a half. Only the occasional puff of retros, keeping the ship steady, and atmospheric deceleration provided sense of weight. Pehr concentrated on the surface, hoping to catch a glimpse of some detail his eyes could grasp hold of.
Again, an incongruous thought intruded:
Have I always been an observer? Of course not
, he told himself.
So when did it happen?
Even these thoughts fell away as the day side of the world was swallowed by night. That dark surface only revealed itself when a particular crag or polished formation reflected the now orange glow of the pod’s underside. When he could see how close they were now to their destination, Pehr felt himself go weak.
As always. The planetside disease, he called it. As yet, he believed no one knew about this weakness, this flaw in his armor. He had hoped it wouldn’t happen again, since this was not Earth. Triton was not the world which always made his guts feel pulped, as quickly as the first night in bed. Triton was not the world that had infected his powerful body with the worms of weakness. But it was a world, an inhabited world. He nearly jumped when Janus spoke.
“
Jack?”
“
Yeah?”
“
In case we don’t make it,” she continued, her look suggesting that her splice was shut off, “I want you to know that I’ve always cared about you, ever since that time you stood up to Eyes and Feedcontrol. I respect how you don’t just blindly follow feed, how you don’t make me do anything I don’t want to do just because it’s in the script. You know, et cetera. I also wanted to say that I was thrilled when you asked me to be your partner in the tourist show. That would have been a fine plan. That’s a lot closer to what I had dreamed of when I was a kid. I would have done it.”
She looked flushed, nervous, and maybe even happy—something he had never seen in her. This was all so strange, especially now, especially here.
“
We still might have our show,” Pehr responded, ashamed to acknowledge the other things she had said. “If we can get out of this. . . . I have a lot of faith in your piloting skills. You’ve always—”
“
Shut up,” Janus said, detaching the web of belts across her front. She climbed out of her couch as gracefully as possible under the turbulent conditions and leaned over the arm of Pehr’s.
Without another word, she put her hands on his bare shoulders and her lips on his. Pehr felt a thrill whip through him like none he had felt in two decades of sexual encounters—the ship rocked and buffeted, wind screamed madly across the hull; Janus breathed against his cheeks, her lips so firm and sure, her hands so strong on his shoulders and arms, massaging deep. . . .
After a minute or so, she pulled back with a distant smile. Then she strapped herself back in her couch.
“
Touchdown in approximately 31 minutes,” she said. “It’ll be rather rough.”