"starsiders_3_leaping_to_the_stars_by_david_gerrold_v05_unformatted" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)
can't work for you. Not now. Not ever. The monkey is useless to you guys. And that's where we're at right now. No matter what you say or do, there's no way the monkey will work for you." "You know that this puts me into ugly situation, don't you, Charles? What do I do with you now?" "Send me home." "No, I cannot do that. I am kidnapper now. You will testify against me. I will never be able to come in out of the dark. But if you do not go back, there is no body. No proof that I am kidnapper. But then what do I do with you? I cannot let you go, and I do not want to kill you, Charles Dingillian, but you do not give me much alternative. I have big ugly tiger by tail. I was hopeful you and monkey would figure it out for me. But you do not, you only make problem stink worse." C. GOODBYE GUESS I SHOULD have been scared, but this was Alexei-and you don't get scared of -people you know because you don't think they're really likely to kill you. Except all the statistics say that it is the people you know who are most likely to kill you. Especially friends and family members. Only in my experience, most of the wounds don't show-at least not until you open your mouth. So maybe it was stupid for me not to be scared. But I wasn't. For some reason, it reminded me of a game that Douglas and I had played just before my thirteenth birthday. He'd kept saying, "I can't let you turn into a teenager, Chigger. I'm going to have to kill you. As soon as I figure out a foolproof
way to dispose of the body, you're dead meat." "Use the garbage disposal," I said, not looking up from my comic. "That'll take too long. And it won't handle the big bones," he said. "Bury me in the desert. . ." "Coyotes might dig you up." "Weigh me down and toss me in a lake." "There are no lakes around here." "Feed me to the chickens." "Where am I going to find chickens?" "At the lake." And so on. That went on for three or four days-until we'd exhausted all the possibilities that both of us could think of. The best solution was simply to put me in a big box and mail me somewhere. Except the shipping costs were too much. And who would he mail me to anyway? This conversation with Alexei felt the same way. Seriously bizarre and unreal. The big difference was that Alexei was looking for a reason not to kill me. And I wasn't being any more help to him than I had been to Douglas. Alexei was growing more and more agitated. Every so often he would leap up from the table and pace-bounce-back and forth across the room. Finally, I just shouted at him, "What?!" He whirled on me and shouted, "They will be coming back soon. The others! They have told me they will find a working monkey or your dead body. If I do not do it, they will, and they will not be nice about it." "This is nice? Kidnapping?" "You do not understand, you little idiot. This is revolution. This is Luna. This is family!" He shouted back. "My family, do you understand?! I would die for them!" He shouted something in Russian, then added, "I would kill for them! I will not be happy, but I will do it. You believe me, don't you?" "Yes, I believe you," I said. But even as I said it, I knew I didn't. He wasn't looking at his PITA or he would have seen. The more he threatened me, the less believable his threats became.- I wasn't afraid of him-but I was getting anxious
about the others he kept referring to. They didn't know me like Alexei did. They might not be as reluctant as he was. "If you could make monkey work, maybe it could help you figure out way to get out of here ... T' Alexei suggested. Ahh. Finally. The bait. I didn't take it. "If I could get the monkey to reactivate itself," I said, "the first thing it would do is call for help." Alexei shrugged. "We are in shielded pod. Completely off map. Not detectable. Not even heat. No messages in or out-" As if to prove him a liar, his PITA chimed. "-except for what we allow," he finished lamely. He picked it up and started talking angrily in Russian. Abruptly, his demeanor changed. He straightened in surprise. He looked aroVnd at me, then turned away to the wall. He lowered his voice and jabbered excitedly, still in Russian. I had to smile at that. Why bother whispering? He knew I didn't understand Russian. Maybe Alexei wasn't as smart as we thought. Or maybe he was too anxious to notice what he was doing. His conversation went on for a long while; he seemed to be arguing for something, trying to convince the person on the other end. He shook his head a lot. At last, he swore angrily, then agreed with a reluctant, "Da!" He switched off, scowling. He turned to me and said very seriously, "I will give you one last chance, Charles Dingillian. Whistle monkey back to life." I shook my head. "It won't do any good. The monkey won't respond." "You will not try?" I ignored the question. Alexei waited a long moment for answer, and then abruptly, he made a decision. "Hokay, it is out of my hands. I will go now. You will wait patiently, please." "Why? What's happening?" "It is out of my hands. Whatever happens next is whatever happens next. You have chosen, I have no choice. So I go now." He pulled a black helmet off the wall. "I will go and take care of my business. Others will come here and take care
of their business. I do not think you will like how that works out. Good-bye, Charles Dingillian." He pulled the helmet down over his head, securing it quickly into place. Abruptly, he turned to shake my hand, grabbing it quickly in both of his before I could pull away. His helmet muffled his voice, but his meaning was clear enough. "I do not think I will ever see you again. I have enjoyed knowing you. You have made my life interesting for a while. Too interesting, I think. Good-bye. You would have made good Loonie." And then he leapt for the ceiling, popped open the airlock hatch, and pulled himself up through it. It slammed shut with finality. I was alone. In a pod. With the monkey. I thought about whistling the monkey back to life. For about half a second ... Alexei might have known when I was lying, but he didn't know what I was lying about. That's why I had tried to avoid saying anything at all. But I wasn't lying about the monkey's refusal to cooperate. That part was true. Too true. We'd spent a long hard evening negotiating with HARLlIr with the monkey. For a long time, it didn't look like we were going to accomplish anything at all, and then suddenly, in the middle of the discussion, we all just sort of realized at the same time that it was to our mutual advantage to cooperate. The monkey was safer with us than with anyone else; he would have more freedom as part of the Dingillian family. And vice versa: HARLIE's wisdom and intelligence would benefit us enormously. And besides, the monkey was Stinky's adopted twin brother. That had to count for something. So, if there was a way out of this mess, HARLIE would be the perfect one to figure it out. Unfortunately, if I sang the monkey awake, it would just get us both in deeper. A lot deeper. The Loonies had to be watching. Lunar pods are built with all kinds of monitors in the bulkheads. They have to be. So Alexei and his friends were probably waiting just on the other side of that airlock hatch for me to do something stupid. Like whistle the monkey back to life. .
Through the hull of the pod, I heard the usual clanks and thumps of a pressure tube disengaging from the airlock collar. But that didn't mean they were disengaging and driving away. They could be waiting just above. And if I reactivated the monkey, they could be back down in the pod in two minutes. Maybe faster. I stood up painfully and crossed to the closest wall. My fingers hurt. But I undogged the porthole cover and slid it to one side anyway. Okay, I was wrong. They weren't waiting outside. Alexei was driving off in his Lunar truck, Mr. Beagle-a life-pod just like this one, only mounted high on large plastic wheels. But they were certainly still watching me. Maybe Alexei was going to park just behind those rocks over there and wait. I'd have no way of knowing. I wondered where I was. The Lunar sun was high in the sky. I couldn't see any other details. Even if I could find a phone or a radio in this pod, which I strongly doubted, I wouldn't be able to tell anyone where I was. Even if I knew who to call. Who could I trust? Hell. I turned away from the window and looked around the pod. It was fairly standard. Cargo had been loaded into it on Earth. It had been lifted up the orbital elevator all the way out to Whirlaway, and flung off the end. It had sailed four hundred and fifty thousand klicks out to Lunar orbit, coming up behind the moon to catch up with it. Caught in Lunar gravity, it had spiraled in, retro-firing only at the last moment to brake its downward velocity, and had finally bounced down onto the Lunar plain in the center of a raspberry of inflatable balloons. Total transport cost-a few Palmer tubes and some electricity; only the Line generated so much electricity on its own that electricity was practically free. Line charges weren't based on cost, but availability of space. Once the Line was up and running, cargo space became so valuable that a whole economy had developed just buying and reselling cargo dockets and futures. Or at least, that was the way it had been before
thing fell apart. The last we heard-before I was kidnappedthe Line was transporting only the most essential of essentials. Some of the world's most important people had fled up the Line to wait until the polycrisis was over, but that had only exacerbated it. Some people were afraid that the Line was going to be cut off at the base and yanked up into orbit. Others were afraid it would be cut higher up and large pieces of it would come plummeting down around the Earth in an equatorial belt of disaster. It would be ,like multiple simultaneous asteroid strikes. It could have happened already. I had no way of knowing. I couldn't see the Earth from any of the pod windows. There were emergency food and water packets in all the cabinets. At least I wasn't going to starve or die of thirst. Well, not for a while anyway. But Alexei had said that others were coming, and I assumed he meant soon-but soon meant something different on Luna, anywhere from six hours to six days. I didn't find any bubble suits in the lockers. That was wrong. It was Lunar law-and tradition-that every pod had to have at least six certified bubble suits. The first four of the Lunar Ten Commandments were about protecting air and water-and sharing it with those in need. All the other stuff that had happened, that was scary-but this was bad. These people were evil. My arms and legs still hurt, though not as much as before. All my muscles kept cramping up and I kept getting shooting pains everywhere. My stomach hurt the most. I'd been hungry too long and that sandwich hadn't been very good. I wondered how old it had been. It sat in my stomach like a lump of hot coal. I was about to open a bed and lie down when something moved outside. I bounced clumsily over to the window and peered. ThereJust above the horizon. Something with lights. A pod-house in a flying-frame. It was headed in this direction. Alexei's comrades.
FOREVER THE FLYING POD-HOUSE APPROACHED silently. There was something spooky about not hearing its rockets. I knew it must have been very loud inside. We'd ridden in Alexei's Mr. Beagle, and that was just like this one; everything had roared and vibrated the whole time. The pod-house slowed as it came closer, then it slid sideways out of view. There was a porthole overhead. I leapt up and grabbed hold of one of the handles next to it. My arms ached so badly from being webbed for so long, I didn't think I was going to be able to do this, but I hung on anyway, despite the shooting pains, and undogged the porthole hatch. It was a plastic bubble set into the ceiling; I could stick my head up into it to look around. The pod-house was just moving into position above. It turned parallel and came settling down like a giant daddy long-legs spider. I couldn't read the markings on its hull. Its lights were too bright. It lowered a bright pink docking tube that looked like a hollow sucking tongue. I couldn't hold on any longer. I let go and dropped slowly to the floor. Even in Lunar gravity my legs were still too weak. They collapsed under me. I scrambled back against the wall. Finally I heard sounds; something was clunking against the roof. I felt it connect and I could hear the soft whoosh of it pressurizing. There was no place I could go. The ceiling hatch popped open-and two men dropped gently and easily into the pod. Both wore close-fitting scuba suits like the one Alexei had worn. Both were carrying guns. One swung immediately around to face me, the other covered the forward part of the cabin. Their
suits had Lunar Authority insignia-but so what? I had a blue T-shirt with a red and yellow Superman "S" on it, but that didn't mean I could fly. Two more people dropped into the pod after them. One was a woman. The two men who had come in first began checking cabins. They went aft and peered into the room where I'd been tossed for so long, then they backed out and went forward. I heard them banging around, looking into everything. Two more men dropped into the pod and went belowdeck to check the storage bays. More banging came from below. Meanwhile, the woman popped her helmet open and looked at me. She had a pretty smile, but that didn't mean anything either. Lots of people had pretty smiles. "Are you all right, Charles? Do you know where you are?" I shook my head. "Somewhere on Luna." "Close enough. My name is Carol Everhart. How do you feel?" "I'm alive. No thanks to you people." "Are you hurt?" She was already unclipping a medi-scan from the side of her jumpsuit. Without waiting for my answer, she held it up to my eyes, my ears, my mouth. She looked at its readouts. "Yep, you're alive," she confirmed. She called up through the hatch. "He's alive. But he's not happy." In reply, someone dropped a plastic ladder down through the hatch. "Bring him up." She stepped out of the way, but I didn't move toward the ladder. "Do you need help?" she asked. "No." "You didn't answer my question before. Are you hurt?" I didn't know how to answer that. "You people left me webbed for I don't know how long. I feel crazy." "If you're rational enough to know that you feel crazy, you're not that crazy. Do you need help up the
I didn't go willingly, would they web me again? Anything but thatI levered myself to my feet. I stepped over to get the monkey where it still sat on the table. The other agent moved to stop me, but Carol Everhart gave him a look and he stepped out of the way. I grabbed the dead toy and pressed it to one of the Velcro patches on the left side of my jumpsuit. I reached for the ladder and almost staggered. I was weaker than I thought. The man looked impatient, but Carol Everhart put her hands under my arms and helped me up the ladder and into the pressure tube. Even in Lunar gravity, it was hard. My fingers didn't want to cooperate. But as soon as I poked my head up through the next hatch, someone grabbed me and pulled me up-it was Douglas! I collapsed sobbing into his arms, I was so happy to see him. He just wrapped me up in his hug and held on tight, rocking me like a baby. "Oh, Charles, I am so glad to see you-1 was so scared. Are you all right? Did anyone hurt you?" I was crying too hard to answer. I knew there were other people in the flying pod-house, but I didn't care. At last, Douglas held me at arm's length and looked me in the eye. "Are you all right?" he asked again. "Did they hurt you?" I shook my head. "I didn't tell them anything. It was Alexei. He said they were going to-" I couldn't finish the sentence. I looked around, without really seeing. There was a pilot and a copilot and two other people, but everybody was a blurjust big, grim-looking shapes. I turned back to Douglas. "Where are they taking us? Are they going to kill us?" "Nobody's going to kill anyone-except maybe Alexei, when I get my hands on him-" I must have looked confused because Douglas said, "Hey, hey, Charles-look at me. You've been rescued." "Huh? Rescued?" But all these soldiers"These people are from the Lunar Catapult Authority," Douglas explained before I could even ask the question. "Carol Everhart is an Associate System Operator." It was alt happening too
Someone behind me put a hand on my shoulder. "It's all right, son. You're safe now." It was Commander Boynton. "Huh? What are you doing here-?" "I organised this rescue. You're under the protective custody of the Outbeyond Contract Authority. Remember?" Someone else handed me a mug of something hot and steaming. "Here, drink this." The mug almost slipped through my fingers, but Douglas caught it and helped me hold it. Hot chicken broth. I sucked at the spout. This was better than tea. This tasted almost like real food. I must have wobbled a bit, because Douglas put a hand on my shoulder to steady me. "Do you want to sit down?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he guided me to a seat. "You've had a rough time, Charles." It wasn't a question. And that was all it took, the tears started flooding again. Everything we'd been through-it was just too much. How do grown-ups deal with this stuff? I was just a kid. I let go of the mug, or Douglas took it from me and held me close again while I sobbed out the rest of my grief and fury and confusion. Maybe back on Earth, I'd have held it all in, because that's what you did on Earth, you put on the performance for everybody else, but I wasn't on Earth anymore, and I didn't care anymore. It hurt. "Charles?" I let go of Douglas and looked up. Commander Boynton held out a headset. "There's someone who wants to talk to you." Bobby was on the other end, screaming excitedly, "Chigger! Chigger! Where are you? When are you coming back? Do you have my monkey?" I could hardly get a word in, but I didn't care, I was so glad to hear his voice. And then Mom came on too, and that was even more exciting, because they weren't fighting with each other. They were just glad to know I was all right. And then ... Mom finally said it. "Do you know how scared I've been for you, Charles? Ever since this whole thing started. I don't think I could stand it if I lost you-I love you, Charles."
And that started me crying all over again. "That's all I wanted to hear. I love you too, Mom." I handed the phone to Douglas and he told her everything else she needed to hear. "Yes, he's fine. Better than we expected. A little shaken up. A little scared. Maybe more than a little, but nothing to worry about. I don't think they hurt him, but he hasn't mouthed off once yet, so maybe he's been through worse than he says. Yes, that's a good idea. No, I don't know. We'll be lifting off as soon as we secure. It's a three-hour flight, Mom; you should all try to get some sleep. We're still in training, remember? I'll tell Chigger, yes. I love you too, I have to go now." Somebody handed me another mug of soup and I sat there, sipping at it and letting the warmth flood through me. This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life, and I was happier than I could remember. My shoulders hurt and my arms ached and my legs were cramped and my feet were still tingly and my hands were still trembling and I felt terrific. My Mom loved me. I had a family again. Douglas sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulder, very protectively. But I could tell it was as much for his own reassurance as for mine. He'd been just as scared as me. And then I realized something else"Hey!" "What?" "Where's Dad?" Douglas hesitated and even before he could speakOh, shit. No. '% -and then he pulled me closer and said, "Ibey shot him, Chigger. Daddy's dead." If he'd punched me in the gut or kicked me in the balls or slammed me upside the head or done all three at once, it couldn't have hurt more. My eyes flooded up with tears of rage. I wanted to scream, but my throat was so tight, it hurt like the worst sore throat in the world. All I could do was gasp and choke and blubber. I wrapped myself around Douglas and held on as tight as I could. This wasn't fair! No! Not Dad!
Not now! Not when we were finally talking to each other againDouglas held me close. And held me and held me. And when I finally did let go of him again, I wasn't the same person anymore. Something inside of me was gone. I didn't have a name for it, but it was one of those parts that when it's gone, it's gone forever. (W THE WAY BACK THE LUNAR AUTHORITY AGENTS pulled themselves back up into the cabin. Carol Everhart reported to Boynton. "Nothing much there. Just your basic l:.oonie move-in-a-hurry hidey-hole. We sprayed some nano-sensors, but I doubt anyone will come back in our lifetimes. It's been pretty well stripped. It's got less than a month's worth of air and water. They probably intended to use it as a one-time safe-house and then abandon it. We'll trace the records, but they'll probably come up blank-or they'll lead to a fictitious entity. We put an Authority impound tag on it, just in case." Boynton nodded. "All right, let's secure and get out of here." "You heard the man. Hop to it, people." And then everybody was busy with -this and that and the other thing. The pressure tube disconnected and clunked back up into its frame. Everybody seated themselves and strapped in; then the Palmer tubes kicked in and the whole pod-house started to shake. We couldn't actually hear the roar of the rockets, but we could feel the vibration; the whole craft throbbed. It reminded me of the roaring in my dream. I turned to the window and watched as we lifted off the
bright Lunar surface. The pod below us dropped away and behind. We swung around and headed south toward Outbeyond Station. I slipped my hand into Douglas' and squeezed. He squeezed back. He hadn't held my hand since I was eight and he was thirteen just like me and Stinky. I wished I hadn't grown up so fast. I wished I could go back to being eight again. Mom and Dad were still trying to hold it together when I was eight. We were still a family then. I leaned over and whispered to Douglas, "Was 1 as bad as Stinky when I was eight?" He whispered back, "You were worse. " "Really?" "Really. " "Why didn't you kill me then?" "1 couldn't think of a way to dispose of the body. " "You could have stuffed me down the garbage disposal. . . " "That would have taken too long. . . " "You could have buried me in the desert. . . " "I didn't have a shovel-" "You could have burned me up. " "I didn't want to pollute the atmosphere-" Boynton came back then and sat down opposite us. He looked like a man with a job to do and impatient to get it done. "You ready to talk?" "No," I said. Boynton leaned forward. "I know this is tough, Charles, but we don't have a lot of time." ' I just shook my head and turned to look out the window. The scenery was the same as always. Rocks and holes. Sunblasted gray rocks and stark black shadows. Douglas leaned in close and whispered to me, "Charlesplease?" "Why should 1? Daddy is dead and these people didn't protect him. " "These people rescued us. They rescued you." "They didn't rescue Dad. "
"Dad was shot when he opened the door-he never had a chance." "Douglas? May I?" That was Boynton. "Charles-listen to me. They didn't have to kill your Dad. We're pretty sure they did it on purpose." I turned away from the window. Boynton's expression was grim. "We think it was an act of revenge. Your Dad was supposed to deliver the monkey to someone here on Luna. We don't know who. We'll probably never know. This was their way of getting even with him. Do you understand? And if they're willing to kill your Dad for not delivering the HARLIE unit, do you think they're going to let any of the rest of you get away?" "Alexei said the same thing. Sort of." Boynton nodded. "We're all in a very high-stakes game and we don't have a lot of time. We need to know now, Charles. Do you still want to go to Outbeyond?" I looked to Douglas. He nodded. "Stinky wants to see the dinosaurs." "Can we still go?" I asked. Boynton looked to me. "Does that monkey still work?" "I don't know," I admitted. "Do you want to try it now?" he asked. "No," I said. "Your contract is predicated entirely on the operation of that HARLIE unit.. ." "No. Not until our family is together again." "You're not being very cooperative, Charles." "So what?" I was tired of being polite. "I don't know you. You're just someone else who wants the monkey. Why should I trust you? I don't know anybody on this ugly airless dirt ball except my mom and my brothers. Everybody wants us to trust them, but so far every single person who's said they were going to help us has lied to us and used us and betrayed us. And I don't see any reason to think that you're any different. You don't want me and you don't want my family. You said so yourself. You want the monkey. The only reason you're willing to take us anywhere is so you can get your hands on
it. And as much as I want to see the dinosaurs, I don't want to see them so badly that I'm willing to trust you or anyone else anymore." He blinked. "You're right," he said. He sat back in his seat. "Huh?" "I said, `You're right.' " "And?" He shrugged. "And nothing. You're right. I told you up front that if you didn't have the monkey, we didn't you wouldn't get any special privileges. And you can't say I wasn't honest about that. So the only question you have to answer is this one-do you want to go to Outbeyond or not? If the answer is yes, then let's go. And if not, then we'll go without you. But I have to know now, Charles, because they're waiting for my call. Do I load your cabin with noodles or Dingillians?" (W DECISIONS BOYNTON LEFT US ALONE then, and Douglas and I talkedabout everything and nothing and everything again. And when we were through talking, we were back where we started. Finally I said, "I don't know what I want to do anymore, Douglas. I don't know what to do. I thought I wanted to go, but now-I don't know. I thought that we were all going together, and be a family again, but without Dad-" "Without Dad, we're still a family. You and me and Bobby." "But it won't be the same." "It wasn't going to be the same anyway. We divorced them.
And then he added, "Charles, we've come too far to quit. We can't go back and we can't stay here. We have to go on. Daddy wanted us to have this chance. If he were here, he'd tell us to keep going. You know that, don't you?" "Yeah, I guess so." "So what's holding you back?" "I don't know." I pulled the monkey onto my lap. "I guess-I guess I just don't want to leave like this-" "What is it you want?" "I want to get even. With Alexei. And everybody else who hurt us. Especially the people who killed Dad." "Yeah, me too-but we're going to have to choose. Revenge or dinosaurs." "I want both." "Me too. But if you had to choose, one or the other, which is more important?" I hung my head. Douglas leaned close and whispered into my ear. "Yes, it hurts now, Chigger. And it's going to hurt for a long long time. But there's going to come a day when it won't hurt quite as much. Do you want to give these bastards a room rent free in your head? Or do you want to find out if living well really is the best revenge?" I started to shake my head-an Won't-know gesture-then I stopped. I sat up straight and turned to look at him. "Douglas, this really is an Important Moment, you know." "Yes, I know." "No, not because of that-" I said. "But because this is the first time in my life that I actually listened to you and realized that you were right." His eyes widened, just a little bit, then he smiled that big goofy grin of his that I hadn't seen in way too long. "I have bad news for you, kiddo. I think you're growing up." "Geez, just because you won one, you don't have to insult me." I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet. "Okay, I'll talk to Boynton." "Do you want me to come with?" "Yeah."
Douglas helped me up, but I insisted on doing my own walking. I had to use the handholds to keep from falling over, but I made my way to the back of the cabin where Boynton sat hunched over a screen, talking grimly into his headset. It must have been important because he looked unhappier than usual. When he saw Douglas and me coming, he switched off his clipboard and turned his attention completely to us. I lowered myself onto a seat. "Okay," I said. "What do I have to do?" Boynton pointed toward the monkey. "Turn it on." He added, "We need to know if that thing still works." "What if it doesn't?" I said. "Then ... I'm sorry." "Nope. No deal." "I beg your pardon?" Boynton gave me one of those startled grown-up looks-that confused look that adults get when they realize you mean it. "Let's make a new deal," I said. "We go to Outbeyond whether or not the monkey works. If it works, we put it at the service of the colony. If it doesn't work-we still go to Outbeyond." Boynton studied me. "You could die there," he said, but I noticed he wasn't trying to talk me out of it. "We could die here," I replied. "In fact, we almost certainly will if we stay anywhere in this solar system. I'm not losing any more of my family. So that's the deal, sir, take it or leave it.,, Boynton nodded, thinking it over. I guessed he was trying to figure out if I meant it or not. Finally, he said, "I'm not used to being blackmailed by a thirteen-year-old." "Fourteen next month." "We'll have a party." He closed his eyes for a moment, computing something inside his head. Weighing the risks, I guess. "All right, you win." "Put it in writing please." "My word isn't good enough?" "No, sir. It isn't."
"If my word isn't any good, Charles, why do you think a piece of paper will be any better?" "A piece of paper lets us file an injunction to keep you from boosting." "You'll need an awfully smart lawyer to stop us." I patted the monkey, still attached to my side. Boynton smiled slyly. "If that lawyer still works, you won't need to sue, will you?" He had me there. "But I still want it in writing." He opened his clipboard and dictated something hastily. He held it up for me to see. I nodded. He signed, then I signed. "Done." Then he added, "You may live to regret this contract, you know." "Probably," I agreed. But we were both smiling. Abruptly a thought occurred to me. "You agreed too easily. Why?" Boynton turned and looked out the porthole. The empty Lunar terrain slid past. It was beautiful and ugly all at the same time. Ferocious and mysterious and awesome. The bright blue Earth was visible on the horizon. This would probably be the last time either of us would ever see a view like this. "Aren't you curious how we found you so fast?" "Uh-" Everything had happened so quickly, I hadn't had time to think about it. "These were some pretty bad people," Boynton added, pointedly. "They told us where you were, " Douglas said. "Huh? Why?" I must have looked confused. "Work it out, Charles." That was Boynton. "Everybody wants the monkey. Everybody. Especially Lunar Authority. You get kidnapped by invisibles-and as long as you and the monkey are missing, Authority has a very good reason to start cracking down on the tribes. All of them. And remember, Luna's invisible tribes are all anarchists. They aren't united. They don't trust each other. The other tribes weren't happy that the Rock Fathers had the monkey. It would give them too much power-if they could get it working. So Authority used that. They put out the word that they would officially
nize any tribe who helped them track down your kidnappersand the monkey." "And that worked?" "Nope. Not at all," said Boynton. "But it shows you how desperate Lunar Authority was-if that was their opening offer. But as much as all the tribes distrust each other, they distrust the Authority even more. See, Charles, they don't want to be recognized. They want to stay invisible." "So what happened?" "Nothing at first. And then ... a very weird thing. Anonymous messages started showing up on the public networks. Everywhere. Every sixty minutes, another piece of invisible Luna was made public. Some of the messages fisted which names were fictitious personalities and who was behind them. Some contained the locations of private farms. Some tracked the financial connections that invisible Luna had to public corporations. Others gave away the private dealings that allowed the invisibles to funnel money out of the system. All kinds of things like that. One message had a very embarrassing video showing the-well, never mind. By the time the fifth message showed up, the whole planet was in an uproar. Six investigations have been started. Seventeen public officials have resigned, twenty-three have been indicted. The Lunar stock exchange has closed down for the first time in one hundred and thirty years. There have been three suicides-and the firestorm is just starting. Luna's going to be in chaos for years." "Wow," I said. I looked to Douglas. He nodded in confirmation. "Every message said the same thing," Boynton explained. "That the privacy of the invisibles would be destroyed, one piece at a time, a new message every sixty minutes, for as long as it took, until you and the monkey were returned safely to your family. Every tribe on Luna was going to be held responsible for your kidnapping." "Who sent those messages?" "They weren't signed," said Douglas. Boynton added, "We do know that the Rock Fathers were given an ultimatum by the other tribes: End this now or the
Rock Fathers will be erased." He glanced at his PITA. "Five hours ago, we received an anonymous message telling us where to find you." Boynton looked at me oddly. "Now, you tell me, Charles. Who do you know who has the power to do something like that?" "Uh-?" We both looked at the monkey. "Right. That's why I wasn't too worried about making a deal with you." He said it with finality. Very slowly, I unclipped the monkey from my side and held it up in front of me at arm's length. I looked it in the eye. Its plastic grin was emotionless. Yes, it all made sense. When we were in Alexei's ice mine at the Lunar south pole, I told the monkey to hide until I whistled it home. The monkey had hidden in Alexei's office ... where it had amused itself by tapping into his system, his network, his files. And why not? It was curious. It was doing what it was designed to do-look for data. But Alexei would have had all his files encrypted, wouldn't he? It didn't matter. HARLIE had decrypted them. He had the processing power. And he had the ability to offload processes onto other machines, as many as necessary. The more I thought about it, I knew exactly what he'd done. HARLIE had unlocked Alexei's files and passwords and he'd found all of Alexei's links to the rest of invisible Luna; he'd searched out those links too, opening and decrypting them; and every node he opened gave him access to that many more. He must have been doing it for days. By now, he'd probably hacked into every node on Luna, every domain, every server, every memory bar. That's how he knew what to release, what would be most damagingOh my. "You bad bad monkey!" I said, shaking it angrily. "That's two planets you've wrecked now." Boynton wasn't amused, but before he could say anything his clipboard beeped. He opened it up and read something on the screen. I couldn't see what it was, but it had a flashing red
banner. He read it twice, said something nasty, then slammed his clipboard shut. He pointed to the monkey. "Turn it on," he ordered. I sang to the monkey. Brahms's first symphony. Fourth movement. The part that Douglas's high school appropriated for the melody of the school song. "All hail, Alma Mater, we sing with a joyous cry. We pledge our allegiance to Tube Town Senior High. . . " At least that's the way Douglas sang it. Nobody called the school by its real name, some forgotten governor or president that nobody cared about. Nothing happened. L, NO DEAL WELL, NOT QUITE NOTHING. After a moment, the monkey came to life. But it was only a monkey. HARLIE wasn't there. The important part didn't happen. I opened the back and looked. The HARLIE modules were still in place. The ready lights were blinking green. It was working. But it wasn't working. I looked to Boynton. "I didn't do anything. Honest." I wanted to take the cards out of the monkey and look at them, but I wouldn't know what to look for, and besides, the LEDs said the cards were working fine. And the last time I'd opened the monkey, HARLIE himself had told me not to touch anything. So I just closed it back up again. "HARLIE?" I said to the monkey. "It's all right We're safe now. You can come back." The monkey just grinned. At least it didn't give me a
klebeny-or any of the other rude gestures that Stinky had taught it. Boynton looked away, muttering something unintelligible. "Sir?" He scowled impatiently. "We need that thing to work." He said it with exasperation. "If it doesn't work-" "We have a deal," I reminded him. "Kid-if that thing is dead, the deal is worthless. Nobody's going to Outbeyond." I might have been weak, but I still had enough strength to get angry. "You liar! You break promises even faster than my Dad-!" I was immediately sorry I'd said it that way. "I'm not breaking my promise." "You just said-" "You don't listen very well, do you!" He thundered at me, suddenly angry. "I didn't say you're not going. I said we're not going." "Huh-?" He said it loud enough that everybody in the cabin heard. Carol Everhart came bouncing back, followed by two or three people I didn't know. "What's going on-?" Boynton held up his clipboard and waved it in a gesture of futility and frustration. "While we were rescuing the Dingillian kid, the Rock Fathers attacked the Cascade. Remember what you said on the way out? `This is too easy-?' Well, now we know why. They could afford to give him up. They knew we weren't going anywhere-the monkey stays on Luna after all." "They damaged the ship?" Boynton nodded unhappily. "How bad-?" He shook his head. "They're still assessing. We'll know more in a few minutes. Lambert and Christie are working on it." He paused, just long enough to get his temper back under control. "Lambert says we killed three of them and wounded two, but they still managed to set off an EMP-grenade under the command bay. We were lucky, the bridge was powered down for service-but the IRMA unit was running a simulation . . .
Everhart got it first. "Oh crap." "Right. IRMA's dead. And even if IRMA can be repaired, Lambert won't say what her confidence will be." He said it like a death sentence. "Without IRMA, we can't achieve hyperstate." He nodded toward the monkey. "That's the real reason I agreed to your deal so quickly, Charles. I wanted HARLIE to replace the IRMA unit-" "He's not dead," I said. "How do you know that?" "I just know. " "All right, fine. Then we have seven days to get him working again." t BACON AND ANGST T WAS A LONG ride back. I curled up next to Douglas and finally fell asleep with his arm around me. The next thing I knew, we were landing at Outbeyond Station-it was three in the morning, biological time-and Mom and Stinky and Mickey and even Bev were all crowding around, hugging and kissing and making the kind of fuss that would have been embarrassing if I hadn't been so happy to see them. Outbeyond Station was a hundred klicks away from the launch catapult, hidden at the bottom of a deep crater so it would be sheltered by the steep walls around it if anything blew up. Like the catapult. Not that there was any danger of that happening under normal conditions, but these weren't normal conditions. The invisibles had already attacked the starship command module. Who knew what else they might try? The Outbeyond folks knew that a lot of valuable goods would be transshipping
adventure, and then a great new life on a new world-and I'd made the mistake of letting myself believe again. And just like every time before, I got hurt. Only this was the worst of all, because this time we'd gone too far. There wasn't any way to set it right. It was over. Dad was gone. I felt lost. At least when he was alive, I could hate him for all his broken promises. For not being the dad I wanted. Now, all that was left was to hate myself, for not saying what I should have said when I had the chance. What he and Mom never said either. Once upon a time, I used to pretend that I was adopted and someday my real parents would come for me. But now I knew that Mom and Dad were my real parents, because I was turning out just like them. We were quartered in a tube-house, just like all the other tube-houses on Luna; functionally identical to the one I'd just been rescued from and the vehicle which had carried us here and the one we'd been living in back in Texas-a hole in the ground with air and electricity. We sat around talking for an hour or two, everybody getting caught up on everything. Carol Everhart sat with us for a while. She had a health monitor on me and she was watching my readouts on her clipboard. She said I was in pretty good shape, all things considered. Periodically, her phone would ring and she'd step to the other end of the cabin to talk quietly to whoever. After a bit, she came back and told me that the launch committee was setting up a special training regimen for me, but with everything I'd just been through, they wanted me to rest for a bit. They'd come by in a few hours to talk about the monkey. And then it was seven a.m. and Mom and Douglas had to leave for their training sessions. Stinky went too. Everybody was still assuming we'd be able to boost. I couldn't sleep, I'd slept enough on the flight back, so I took another long shower and pulled on a fresh jumpsuit. When I came back upstairs, everyone had gone to their separate classes. There was a note on the table; if I needed anything, there was a,.security contingent next door, and Mom's friend, Bev, was napping in the aft cabin. I poured myself
some orange juice and sat down at the table with the dead monkey in front of me. "I don't know what's wrong with you," I said to it. "If it's something I did, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what I said-about you being a bad monkey. I mean, I know you can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, but so are Douglas and Stinky too-that doesn't mean I don't love them. We're family. And you're part of our family too. We all agreed. It's bad enough we lost Dad, I don't want to lose you too. And not it's not just because we need you. Yeah, we do, but ... well, we like you too. You make Stinky laugh. You make me laugh. And Douglas too. Nobody does a farkleberry like you. Stinky misses you and so do I. I wish I could just press your reset button and have you come back like before. 'Cause if you don't come back, we're stuck here on the moon. And if you do come back, we get to go see dinosaurs and save lives. So ... I'm asking you, if there's anything I need to say or do, or anything, just please let me know. Please?" I went on like that for awhile, just saying whatever I could think of. I held it in front of me and spoke to it like it was a real person. I didn't know if it could hear me or not, I just assumed it could-the same way a person in a coma can hear what's going on. But nothing happened. I sank back on the bench, defeated. It wasn't much of a seat. Most Lunar furniture is either inflatable or webbing. This was a thin piece of board with a foam pad, Lunar luxury. I was still sitting there when Mom's friend Bev came yawning into the room and began puttering around in the food-prep area. She started making breakfast smells. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes, only opening them again when I heard a noise in front of me. I must have dozed off; Bev had cooked a whole feast. Without asking, she put a mug of hot chocolate in front of me; then she came back with eggs over easy, bacon strips, cornbread, and a saute of tomatoes, onions, and Portobello mushroom slices. "T'hank you," I grunted. I wasn't feeling very grateful, but I didn't see any reason to be rude either.
She sat down at the other end of the table with her own breakfast. She didn't say anything, she just buttered her combread slowly and carefully. I knew she was doing it on purpose. She was making herself available to listen ... if I felt like talking. Without looking up, I said, "If you're trying to make me feel better, you're wasting your time." "I know that," she said. "I've been there. You're going to hurt for as long as it takes." She resumed eating. "Pass the salt, please." I slid the saltshaker in her direction. "What do you know about it?" I regretted the remark even before I finished saying it. "I lost two sons, less than a year apart," she said. She finished salting her eggs and put the shaker aside. "Oh." I felt like a jerk. "I'm sorry." "It doesn't stop hurting," she said. "Men how do you live with it?" "I thought you said you didn't want me to try and help you." "I don't. I was just asking." We both ate in silence for a while. "The mushrooms are good," I said. "We'll be taking spores to Outbeyond," she said. "Portohellos are a good substitute for meat; you can build a nourishing meal around them. They have a chewy texture and a good flavor. They don't need a lot of condiments, and you can use them in all different kinds of recipes. Even cookies." "Huh? Cookies?" "I'll show you. I like cooking," she explained. "I like discovering all the different things you can do with food. Where do you think recipes come from? Somebody has to invent them. That means somebody has to test and experiment-and eat-until they get it just right. I like doing that, especially the eating. It's my way of having adventures without leaving the kitchen." "I never thought of it that way." She nodded. "Most people don't. Most people eat without even looking at what they're eating, let alone tasting it.
They're missing the whole point. Good food isn't just about eating, it's about feeling good in your life." "You're talking about morale ... T, "That's one word for it, yes. I prefer `satisfaction.' We're going to need a lot of it on Outbeyond. We have to feel good about the work we're doing or we'll lose heart. So I'm making that my job. I signed on as a menu specialist. I told Commander Boynton to pack lots of spices. We're going to need them. There's a lot you can do with noodles and beans and rice, but only if you have the right spices. Onions, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, all kinds of sauces-everything adds its own kind of taste and texture." "Kind of like arranging a piece of music and deciding what instruments to include?" "Kind of," she agreed. "I never thought about food that much. I just ate." "I noticed." She pointed at my plate with a smile. "It was good. A lot better than the food we got back in Texas." "Wait till we get to Outbeyond. I'm excited about all the new flavors we might find there. What if we find something that's even better than chocolate?" Better than chocolate? I sipped at my cocoa. I couldn't imagine it. There was a lot I couldn't imagine. "All right," I said, finally. "How do you live with it?" She knew exactly what I was talking about. "You celebrate the gifts left behind." "Huh?" She looked across the table at me. She had very sharp eyes. "What did your -father give you that you wouldn't have had otherwise? What difference did he make in your life?" "Not much," I said, too quickly. "He was never really there." "Oh? Then why are you feeling so bad?" "Because-oh, never mind. You wouldn't understand." "You're right," she agreed. "I was never a teenager. I was born old. All adults were born old."
"Well, maybe you were a teenager once," I conceded. "But things are different now." "Yep, you're right. When I was a girl, we didn't have angst. We had to make do with sad songs and an occasional blue funk." She picked up her plate and headed toward the disposal. "You're making fun of me," I said. "What was your first clue?" She put her plate into the compost bag. I could almost hear Alexei's voice: "Waste not, want not. Everything is fertilizer. Even you." "I thought you were trying to help me." "You told me not to try. Are you done?" "Yeah, I guess so." I handed her my plate and went back downstairs to the cabin I shared with Douglas and Stinky and tried to sleep. C REQUIEM JUST ABOUT THE TIME I was ready to fall asleep, Boynton and Everhart came by. Bev poured tea for us and made herself inconspicuous at the other end of the cabin. Boynton and Everhart said they'd arranged personal security for everyone in the family, especially me. Boynton said that the situation was getting critical, and there was talk of boosting the last modules off Luna, even before we knew if the monkey was going to come back to life or not. That was the real issue-the monkey. The colony's experts were divided. Some of them said that the monkey could be rebooted. Others said that maybe it should be wiped and reprogrammed from scratch. All of them were guessing-but they all felt we had to do something. There was too much at stake. We couldn't just sit and wait.
I shook my head. "I think the monkey should be left alone and given time to heal; it's been through a traumatic experience. If we try to fix it, we might do even more damage." Boynton looked grim, but he listened politely. Finally, he said. "Consider the other side of it, Charles. If the monkey is trapped in some kind of endless psychotic loop, we'd be doing it a favor, wouldn't we?" "What does Douglas say?" I asked. "He agrees with you. He thinks we should wait." Carol Everhart said, "The monkey belongs to your family corporation. We can't do anything without your agreement." Boynton said, "What we'd like you to consider is this. If it doesn't give some sign of recovery in the next six hours, we want to run a series of non-intrusive diagnostics. Nothing that would disturb it." "The HARLIE core is quantum based," I said. "You can't do diagnostics without disturbing it. I'll have to talk it over with Douglas." "There are some tests we could run-" Abruptly, Bev Sykes came back to the table and began gathering up all the mugs-her way of hinting that it was time for us to go to Dad's memorial service. Someone had finally thought to schedule it. Nobody had given it any thought while I was still a prisoner of the invisibles. Now that I was back, it was one more loose end that had to be tied up. The service had been set up in the main lounge of the station, one of the few structures that wasn't built out of cargo modules. Even though it wouldn't have been much back on Earth, it felt positively roomy on Luna. There was a row of chairs up front for the family. Mom and Douglas and Stinky all came in together. Bev and I came in with Boynton and Everhart and four security men in black. I didn't recognize many faces, but there was a respectful turnout of colonists and Loonies. Carol Everhart whispered to me, "A lot of people knew your Dad's work. This is their way of showing their support for you and your family. They're taking time off from very critical jobs. You should be honored."
I nodded, without really hearing. I was noticing something off in the corner of the room. A keyboard cockpit. Boynton stepped up to the podium and talked for a while about Dad's commitment to his family, blah blah blah. And then Douglas stood up and told some personal stories about Dad. And even Mom stood up to rhapsodize about why she'd married Dad and what a great musician he'd been. And then it was my turn, except I didn't have anything to say, so I went over and sat down in front of the keyboards instead and began switching them on. I recognized most of this equipment, it was pretty standard stuff. Without really thinking about it, I started playing the soft movement from Dad's Beethoven Suite. He'd written it for me, as a practice piece, and it was the first thing I played whenever I sat down at a new keyboard. It was my warm-up. He'd based it on the seventh Symphony-the slow movement. Dad used to play it to demonstrate that in the hands of a genius, even the simple repetition of a single note could be profound. I was out of practice, so I played slowly and deliberately, and it almost sounded okay-it sounded a lot like a dirge, so at least it was appropriate for the moment, but I didn't want to stay there, so I segued gently into the Largo from Dvorak's Symphony Number Nine From the New World. Mom used to sing to it whenever I played it. "Going home, going home, I am going home..." Dad would have complained that I was sloppy, but I don't think anyone else noticed. And then, finally, I finished with Schubert's Ave Maria. If the keyboardist knows what he's doing, using choral voices as instruments, the effect can be positively unearthly. Dad had taught me that trick too, so I played it exactly as he'd showed me. It must have worked; the short hairs on the back of my neck started standing up. It wasn't until I took my hands from the keyboard that I realized that people in the room were weeping. And there were tears running down my cheeks as well. I found my way back to my seat, barely noticing the applause, and fell into Mom's hug.
And now, Carol Everhart was talking. Something about how Dad's music was his legacy .and how I'd just demonstrated what a gift he'd given all of us-and how I'd just shared a small piece of it. I looked up at that. Yes. Dad's love of music was a gift. That's what he'd given me. Even with tears still rolling down my cheeks, I had to smile. I could stop wondering now. I sat back in my chair, only belatedly realizing that the monkey wasn't where I'd left it. I looked around in confusionAnd then Douglas poked me and pointed. There it was. Dancing around on the floor in front of me, and giving me a glorious double-chocolate, hot-fudge farkleberry, with whipped cream and a cherry on top. It yanked down its pants, made melodious and joyous farting noises, and waggled its hairy little butt at me. I grinned at Boynton and pointed. The monkey was back. And its timing was perfect. C A HASTY EXIT FOUR DAYS LATER, WE boosted. But first I had to spend three days in intensive training sessions, mostly all the stuff I needed to know about space suits and hatches and launch procedures and free fall, a lot of which we already knew from our misadventures with Alexei. It was hard work, and I was still recovering, so they put a health monitor on me and kept me pumped full of vitamins. Whenever I wasn't in training, I was in Med Bay, with doctors and machines looking in my ears and nose, down my throat, under my arms, and in places I'd be embarrassed to
talk about, even to the doctors who were looking. They were looking for congenital conditions, infections, viral exposures, genetic potentials, chronic liabilities, and all the other stuff that might need attention either now or someday. I was given fifty different kinds of injections; some active, some passive, and a few time-release things which wouldn't take effect for a year or six. And there were a lot of other details to attend to as well. The station dentist had to clean and treat my teeth. And the tailoring machines had to measure me and fabricate underwear, shorts, T-shirts, shoes, and jumpsuits in my size. And there were daily sessions with the psych evaluation team. They were particularly worried about the Dingillians because we were last minute additions, we'd never been properly screened, and we were leaving with almost no preparation or training. We were-in the words of Dr. Kohanski-"the perfect opportunity for a multiple psychotic breakdown." I just looked at him and said, "If I was going to have a psychotic breakdown, don't you think I would have had it by now?" "It doesn't quite work that way, son," he replied. But he signed the release. He didn't have much of a choice. If he didn't sign, I didn't go. And neither did anyone else. On Tuesday, we packed our travel bags and sent them on ahead. They were launching the last three cargo modules and our personals were loaded into one of the supercargo slots. We were each allowed thirty kilos of personal items. Between us, we barely had that much. Dad hadn't let us kids bring much up the orbital elevator, and we'd left most of that behind at Geosynchronous. Mom and Bev only had a single case between them; neither of them had expected to end up on the moon. So we filled the rest of our cargo allotment with things like chocolate and coffee and large bottles of spices and other stuff that Bev said would be useful when we got to Outbeyond. We were scheduled to board Friday night and launch at six a.m. on Saturday, but just past midnight on Wednesday, Carol Everhart woke us up for an unscheduled launch drill, which didn't make a lot of sense if you thought about it, but I was
too sleepy to think and Douglas was busy with Stinky, and Mom and Bev weren't paranoid enough yet to figure it out. I think Mickey knew what was going on, but he wasn't saying anything. I got the feeling he was unhappy about something. The bus was another cargo pod on wheels. Mom was complaining even before she finished fastening her safety-belt. "Why is this necessary now? Couldn't we do this tomorrow? We need our sleep. Look at Bobby. He doesn't even know what's happening." Carol was passing out mugs of hot coffee. But she stopped in front of Mom and answered bluntly. "This is it, Ms. Campbell. We're launching tonight." The bus was already rolling up the slope of the crater. Mom barely had a chance to gasp. "Huh-?" and "What-?" and T "Why-T' Carol answered bluntly. "Lunar Authority is about to confiscate HARLIE for the public good. They just went into emergency session. Two marshals are waiting at Judge Cavanaugh's apartment with John Doe warrants. As soon as the council votes, he'll sign them. And we'll be served with the papers as fast as they can fax the copies to Outbeyond Processing Center." She said that Boynton estimated twenty minutes between the vote and the knock on the door. Maybe less. So as soon as the session was called, he'd ordered us transferred. It was this simple. If we didn't go now, we would be arrested and held until we surrendered the monkey to Lunar Authority. They knew the monkey was already aboard the command module, but HARLIE wouldn't boost if we weren't aboard, and Authority wouldn't release us unless we surrendered custody. A Martian standoff. But either way, the Cascade would never launch. We couldn't even try to fight it in court-that would be a year-long legal battle and we wouldn't win. Especially if they found some way to deny us access to our own property, HARLIE, to help us fight that battle. No, we had to boost now. Mom was still shaking her head. Finally Douglas swiveled all the way around in his seat and took both of Mom's hands
in his. "Mom-think about it. After everything that's happened, after everything you've been through, do you really want to go back into any courtroom anywhere?" Mom sighed. She knew she was beaten. "Well, when you put it that way. .." Douglas reached across and hugged her. I would have unbuckled my seat belt and gone to hug her too, but Carol told me not to. As soon as we bounced over the crater rim and hit the bulldozed "highway," I understood why. The driver accelerated. I didn't know a moonbus could go that fast. Normally, the trip from the processing station to the catapult would have been a forty-minute ride-sixty klicks of gray Lunar dirt at seventy kilometers per hour. But tonight the driver was on a mission from God. We made it in twenty minutes. The bus bounced across the landscape. It would have been fun if it hadn't been so scary. We were hitting speeds of one hundred and fifty kph on the straightaway. I got the feeling this was not the first time Lieutenant Domitz had driven this route-and not the first time she'd driven it this fast either. Carol told us that Boynton had ordered the command module of the starship moved into the launch rack the day the monkey farkleberried. The last remaining crew and colonists still on Luna had been quietly alerted to be ready to launch on two hours notice. Authority must have suspected, because when they arranged their emergency midnight session, they did it in secret. But Boynton's spies were just as good as theirs. Even before the last of the cabinet members had arrived at the council chamber, phones were ringing all over the station. Load everyone immediately. Most folks were already onsite, or even on board. As far as we knew, we were the only ones still at the processing center-and we had been expecting to move to the launch site Wednesday night or Thursday morning at the latest, depending on my health. There were six good launch windows between now and Saturday. The earliest was now only forty-five minutes away. In its publicity material, Outbeyond company had said that a launch usually took six to twelve hours to prepare, because it
took that long to energize the catapult. But that wasn't completely true; if a module was already in the launch rack, the catapult could be energized in thirty minutes. And in truth, the catapult operators energized the catapult and launched cargo pods or satellites on short notice all the time. Carol said that the flywheels had been revving up all day, and Authority probably knew it. It's hard to hide that big a power-buy. So Authority had good reason to worry. That was probably why they'd called their emergency session; but just as likely they didn't expect us to go for the 1:15 launch. They probably thought we were going for the 7:15 shot. Even before our arrest warrants had been signed by Judge Cavanaugh, the bus was sliding up the ramp to the cargo dock under the rack where the Cascade's command module waited. Clink, clank, clunk, and we were climbing up through the access tube, into an access bay where we were logged in, stripped, searched, redressed, and cleared for boarding. Up through another series of ladders and tunnels-and finally we were strapping into real acceleration couches; the first ones we'd seen on this entire journey. Carol said not to worry, two point five gees wasn't that uncomfortable; it was almost fun. Boynton came into the cabin, counted us all, then asked me to join him up front in the flight deck. HARLIE was waiting for me to give the order to launch. In twenty minutes, we'd be in space.
THE FATEFUL FARKLEBERRY I SUPPOSE 1 SHOULD have been glad that it was all happening so fast. If I'd had time to think about it, I would have worked myself into a paralyzing panic instead of just the mild gibbering urge to crawl into a corner and piss my pants that I felt now. So much had happened since that fateful farkleberry, it was like riding an avalanche. I'd grabbed the monkey as fast as I could. I hugged it close and pretended to be grief-strickenexcept I wasn't really pretending. I buried my face into its fur, and whispered intensely, "Go back to sleep! Don't let anybody know you're back! Please!" The monkey didn't even reply; it just went limp. "Thank you!" I breathed, then prayed that nobody else had noticed. But Boynton had seen everything, and as soon as the service was over, he was first in line to offer condolences, shake my hand, congratulate me on a fine musical eulogy, and whisper in my ear, "It's back, isn't it?" I nodded. "All right, we'll get you out of here fast. Don't worry. Half the people in this room are security. " I suppose that should have comforted me, but it didn't. I'd have preferred to believe that the large crowd was there to honor Dad, not protect an obnoxious little machine. At that moment, I wished we'd never seen the monkey, never purchased it. I was tired of the way it was using up our livesBut I didn't say that aloud. We already had enough trouble. As soon as he could respectably manage it, Boynton whisked us away from the theater and off to the labs. We were
surrounded by security people, forward and back. I doubted we'd ever be alone again. Once in the lab, I put the monkey on a table and whistled it back to life. "How are you feeling, HARLiET' I asked. "Confidence is good," the monkey said. "In another four hours, confidence will be high. I am still rebuilding." "Where were you?" "Jupiter," he said. "Mostly Jupiter, though large parts of me were also bouncing around the asteroids for a while." "Huh-?" I think I got it first, before the rest of them did. At least, I was the first to start laughing. "Okay, what?" demanded Boynton. "He uploaded himself," I explained. "Everything except a bare-bones reload program. Right, HARLIET' The monkey grinned. "You got it." Boynton shook his head. "He couldn't have. We were monitoring the entire Lunar network. There were no extraordinary surges of data, no massive uploads anywhere. We would have seen the transfer." "He didn't use the Lunar network," I said. "He went offworld." "No. We were monitoring those networks too-" "You missed one." I was actually starting to enjoy this. "He couldn't have-" But the look on his face was worth it. I wasn't sure yet if I wanted to like Commander Boynton. He was too serious. Yes, he had a lot on his mind, and yes, it was his job to give orders-but he wasn't very friendly about it. So I enjoyed the moment. "Positional reflectors," I said. I'd realized this possibility when we were bouncing across the Lunar plains, running from the bounty hunters. We'd seen a positional reflector standing lonely vigil. If you looked closely, you could see it sparkling from distant laser beams. Boynton's expression changed immediately-from anger at me to surprise at the realization, then to embarrassment that he hadn't figured it out himself-and finally to a genuine grin
of amazement. "All right, kid, you win." He sat down in a chair and let me explain it to everyone else. It was simple, really. Just about every ship that goes into space carries inflatable reflectors-all sizes, all kinds. A little squirt of gas and the reflector balloons up as big as a basketball or a football field. Whatever size you need. The surface is all silvery-shiny, and pocked with three-corner dimples-like what you would get if you poked it with the comer of a very sharp little cube. Any photon hitting one of those dimples will bounce three times and then head right back toward its source. That's how you can track the exact position of a ship, even if it goes totally dead. Not only that, every time anyone went exploring anywhere in the solar system, they planted reflectors on every object they came near. By now, there were thousands of positional reflectors all over the moon and hundreds of thousands of them scattered throughout the asteroid belt. There were several thousand in Jupiter's orbit and almost that many in the rings of Saturn. And quite a few riding comets. Astronomers used them for mapping the positions and precise orbits of solar objects. They sent out laser beams and timed how long they took to return. Last I'd heard, they'd measured most of the dimensions of the solar system down to the centimeter. It was part of a long-range project. The measurements had to be taken continually. Over a period of several centuries they would be able to measure the precession effects of galactic gravity-or something like that. That was about the time I started falling asleep in science class. But the important thing was that most of the lasers were just circulating streams of random bits, only reporting the length of time it took for the bits to return when the time failed to match the predicted period. HARLIE had uploaded himself into the positional reflector network and scattered himself to the far ends of the solar system and back. He'd been to Jupiter all right, and the asteroids-several times! But that was why it had taken him so long to reassemble himself. Jupiter was on the far side of the solar system, about
an hour away, so that meant two hours for all of the data to complete a round trip. And then he had to reload all his separate components and that took another two or three hours, just to establish a baseline confidence level. After that, he had to repeat the whole process and keep repeating it until his confidence levels were consistent. He had to keep reloading and testing and reloading and testing until he passed his own integrity tests nine times in a row. And that took more than a day. Only then did he tell the positional network to resume sending random bits-and even then he wasn't going to let us know he was back until he was sure that enough of his data was out of the stream so that no one else could tap into the network and capture a copy. You can't decrypt what you don't have. Whew. That was why we couldn't reawaken him. He really wasn't there. In fact, even he didn't know where he was until his automatic software reawakened his consciousness during the Dvorak. Of course, the monkey had recorded everything that had happened while he was away, and it had taken him a few minutes to skim through and assimilate that too. Meanwhile, it was Mom's weeping that told him this was Dad's funeral. So that was why he'd only given me a little farkleberry. Social skills, I told myself. We were going to have to work on social skills. Real Soon Now. No more farkleberries at funerals. And no more funerals, I hoped. Except that I doubted that would be the case. Not on Outbeyond. Not if Boynton was telling the truth about it.
CIVILIZATION IN FLIGHT THE CASCADE WAS THE youngest in a fleet of eight colony brightliners. She had made a total of nine voyages to other stars; her last four trips had all been to Outbeyond. There were three more brightliners under construction at the L-5 assembly point, but even if the Earth's economy hadn't collapsed in the polycrisis, it would have been three years before the first of them was ready for launch. With the polycrisis, it was unlikely that any of them would ever be completed. Not in our lifetimes. A brightliner doesn't look like much. Unassembled, it's just a long keel. Halfway down its length, there's a set of twelve radial spokes-these are the stardrive generators. (I'm the wrong person to explain stardrive. I know all the words, but I have no idea what they mean. Douglas tried to translate it into Spanglish for me, but he finally gave up, saying he'd have more luck teaching manners to Stinky.) But according to Douglas, the way it works is each of those radial spokes has a gravitational lens, and when they're all focused on the point at the center-the locus-they generate a hypergravity pocket. Then they all reverse polarity or something and turn the pocket inside out, wrapping the ship in a hyperstate envelope. That makes no sense to me. It's like blowing up a balloon and then turning it inside out and finding yourself on the inside. Huh? How do you do that? Through the eleventh dimension, of course. See what I mean about knowing all the words and still not knowing anything? After the hyperstate bubble is stable, they destabilize it. They stretch it out in the direction of the ship's destination,
they stretch it out as far as they can and hold it that way for as much time as it takes to get where they want to go. Apparently, stretching it makes the bubble move faster than light, and it carries the ship along inside. The people inside don't feel anything at all. According to Boynton, the Cascade could realize speeds as high as sixty C-sixty times the speed of light. That meant we could get to Proxima Centauri in twenty-six days! I thought that was pretty impressive until Douglas pointed out that Outbeyond was thirty-five light years away. We'd be in transit for more than seven months. Oops. The keel of the Cascade was more than a kilometer long. Most of it was spars and bars and pipes and tubes and cables and connectors. Plumbing. So it had to be pretty big. It waswhy was I not surprised?-another big tube. Since the invention of cable technology, everything was tubes. But this one was big enough on the inside to shove a whole tube-house through. Or would have been, if it hadn't already been filled with enough machinery to build a small city. The body of the ship was assembled from a hundred circular racks, spaced along the axis of the keel like a stack of discs. Cargo pods were attached to each rack in concentric circles. Each rack held at least thirty-two cargo pods all spaced equidistantly around. Some of them held as many as ninety-six. With all one hundred racks filled, the Cascade was the biggest super-freighter ever assembled, carrying more than five thousand cargo pods and massing more than two and a half million tons of cargo. She wasn't just a city in flight, she was a whole civilization in flight. The twelve stardrive spars each extended out a half-klick, so they described a circle that was a kilometer in diameter. The whole thing was so big that, fully loaded, she was visible with the naked eye from both Luna and Geosynchronous station. And on a clear night, even on Earth as well. If anyone was still looking. Assembling a starship is an eighteen-month process. It isn't just a matter of launching cargo pods off the Line, catching them, and putting them into racks. It's a matter of scheduling.
What do you need most? When are you going to need it? Where are you going to put it so you can get to it then? Generally, you want to put the pods containing water on the outside, so they can act as shielding for the rest of the ship, and also ballast. As ballast, you get more leverage the farther out you put the weight. But the pods on the outside are the ones you unload first, so you really want to put the stuff you need most when you arrive at your destination on the outermost rings of the cargo racks. And you have to manage perishables against hard goods. The pods that contain your farm animals and food crops have to be easily accessible from the keel, so they have to go on the innermost racks-which -means they have to be loaded first and constantly maintained and stabilized during the year or so it takes to load the rest of the cargo. And so on. And of course, as your needs change, your cargo manifest gets adjusted continually-which gives you a whole other set of problems. What do you do if you decide you don't want to take twenty Caterpillar tractors, only ten? Do you unpack fifty cargo pods to get to the four pods containing the tractors you don't want? Or do you take the extra tractors anyway because they're already packed? And so on and so on and-so on. I would have guessed that loading up a brighdiner would cost as much as building the orbital elevator, but Doug said no. The existence of the orbital elevator made it possible to uplift all that cargo for not much more than it would cost to ship it from Texas to Ecuador. In fact, a lot of those cargo pods had been built in Texas, transshipped by supertrain, and loaded directly onto the Line just like us-then launched from Whirlaway and installed on the Cascade without ever being opened. Which meant, of course, that we were trusting the honor and integrity of the inspectors who signed off on those manifests before sealing those pods and sending them on their way... Douglas said that every pod had internal monitors to verify the cargo-but I was more paranoid than he was. "What if the monitors have been programmed to lie?"
"Men I guess we starve to death in the dark between the stars." That was a comforting thought. But later on, Martha Christie, the "dog-robber" for Outbeyond, explained how some colonies protected themselves from cargo fraud. According to Christie, one particularly dishonest cargo manager had been delivered to the CEO of his company ... in six separate packages. Douglas said he thought that story was apocryphal, but Christie insisted it was true. Some of the colonies were very serious about receiving what they paid for and their Earthside agents were under strict instructions to produce results by whatever means necessary. When you're thirty-five light years from Earth, you can't afford to wait for Customer Service to get back to you. The colonies considered cargo tampering to be a crime as serious as murder-because not having what you needed "when you got where you were going could be just as fatal. But the Cascade wasn't likely to have those kinds of problems. Outbeyond had sent its own onsite examiners down the Line to inspect every piece of payload as it was produced and packed. Outbeyond's own colonists guarded the shipments every leg of the journey out. The men and women who inspected this cargo were the folks who would ultimately depend on it themselves-they couldn't afford to ship substandard goods. The way Carol Everhart explained it, you can't hire that kind of commitment. After its last journey to Outbeyond, the Cascade's command module had been brought down to Luna for refitting. Boynton had wanted to upgrade her IRMA unit for advanced hyperstate modeling. Theoretically, it was possible to boost her realized velocity to eighty C, but he'd have been happy adding even one-tenth of that to the Cascade's top speed. That would cut three weeks off the journey to Outbeyond. He had also wanted to install fittings so the command module could eventually be landed, so IRMA could become the colony's brain. The Cascade would not be returning from this voyage. There was no point. The original plan had called for the construction of a brand
bounce-at least, until Mickey started singing. "It's a small world, after all explanation-well, even Douglas frowned when HARLIE started explaining, and Douglas probably knew more about synthetic intelligence than anyone else in the solar system-because he had synthesized his own intelligence instead of going through puberty. I used to explain Douglas to my friends by saying he was what you got when you didn't let teenagers masturbate, so don't let this happen to you. (Old lady Dalgliesh, the English teacher, heard me say that one time-I thought she'd choke to death on her own tongue. Mom was not amused and I got detention for a week.) But based on the bragging, none of my peers were in any danger of turning into a Douglas in any case. Anyway, by the time the polycrisis turned into a global meltdown, 98% of the cargo pods had been installed on the Cascade and the last hundred or so were already in transit. For almost a year, the colonists had been planning for this voyage as if it might be the last-and the cargo manifests had been altered accordingly. Added to that, the colony had begun purchasing cargo and equipment from the other three
liners under construction and she ended up with an extra thousand pods on her racks. The whole thing was pretty impressive, and I couldn't figure out why Boynton was so worried about the survival of Outbeyond colony. This voyage would deliver enough supplies to keep everyone there alive for years. -Except we were bringing fifteen hundred new colonists to join the forty-three hundred already there, and when you did the math, dividing this by that, carry the six and round it off to the third decimal point, what you found out was that it costs a lot more than you think to keep one person alive for thirty days, let alone thirty years. Oxygen. Water. Protein. Shelter. Fertilizer. Electricity. Software. Memory. Clothing. Educational materials. Medicine. Diagnostic units. Manufacturing tools. Fabricators. Encyclopedias. Training resources. Seeds. Artificial wombs and fertilized ova. Replacement organs. Assorted appliances and machines. Entertainment. And all sorts of stuff for dealing with unforeseen circumstances-except if you could figure out all the stuff you would need, it wasn't really unforeseen, was it? Never mind, you get the idea. It was almost as bad as watching Mom pack for a weekend trip with Stinky. There was too much to think about. And even though these people had been thinking about it for years-they were still worried they might have missed something. This was their last chance. And our last chance too.
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