“Look at those corners and edges!” Sven gestured at the cabinets. “Humans built those. And from old records I’ve seen, I’m sure I know what they are! Embryo banks. Egg banks. Incubators and placentas. They must be from Long Pass.” Sven pounded on the window in frustration. “Is there a way to deduce the stepping-disc address for inside?”
Embryo banks! Eric shook with rage, unable to speak. He sliced a door-sized opening with his laser. The slab teetered, then toppled inward with a crash.
Sven rushed to the cabinets. “This one has sea life: sea turtles, squid, all kinds of fish. Some names I’ve encountered, more I haven’t.” He looked at the next case. “Big mammals: lions, polar bears, elephants.” And the next case. “Dozens of bird species, including ducks.”
“Courageous,” Eric called. “We’ve sent all the people. Now we have cargo for you.” He ignored Sven’s oblivious excitement at some seed findings.
“Copy that, Eric. Standing by.”
Sven’s computer clattered to the floor. His face was ashen. “More human embryos. Almost a thousand.”
He’d found what Eric feared—and somehow knew—they would.
They did not step back onto Long Pass Two until they had teleported every earthly seed, egg, and embryo to the cargo ship hovering overhead.
* * *
ONCE MORE THE nothingness lay in wait, inches away.
Eric scarcely noticed. Maybe, he thought, he was getting used to hyperspace. Or maybe he had not realized just how many emotional scabs the mission to NP3 would rip open.
He only knew that he could not wait to get home to New Terra.
Sven also ignored what lay outside, lost in data he had recovered from the lab. Every few minutes he would murmur or nod or exclaim cryptically.
“Take over for a while. I’m going for some soup. Anything for you?” Eric took the shrug he got to mean, who has time for food?
He returned to the bridge to find Sven smiling strangely. “What now?” Eric asked.
“One of my uploads is a genealogical database. Breeding records—for NP3 and also from Arcadian hospitals.”
Eric couldn’t understand why that made Sven smile. Then Sven showed Eric an excerpt from the database, and Eric grinned, too.
He and Kirsten had decided to name their baby Diego or Jaime. They meant it as a token of respect.
It was a far more fitting choice than they had known. Diego and Jaime, Eric now read, were Kirsten’s great-to-the-sixteenth grandparents.
42
Sudden murmuring among his aides, the words indistinct but the significance unmistakably familiar. Nike sighed. Another problematical state of affairs, about which those in the next room debated whether to disturb him.
They already had.
The universe was strange, Nike thought. The most significant changes could manifest themselves in the subtlest ways. Only two NP worlds presently hung overhead, and yet their slightly increased spacing shouted that another world was set free to wander.
He would be happier when it had wandered farther. A fraction of a light-year still made the rebels close neighbors.
He stood alone on the grand balcony of his favorite mountainside estate. The view down to the sea was as spectacular as ever. The wind, blowing now from just the wrong direction, carried a hint of something rank—another of those small but essential reminders. Removing a world from the Fleet had complications. Ocean surges had washed ashore great piles of still-rotting sea life.
So many changes, Nike mused. Nessus would adjust quickly—when he returned to the Fleet, that was. It was best for them both that Nessus stay away for a while.
When would his doubts, anger, and loss finally sort themselves out? Nike stared upward, determined to consider anything other than his feelings toward Nessus.
Five worlds, not six—surely a small thing. Within his grandfathers’ lifetimes, the Fleet had comprised but five worlds. Within his grandfathers’ lifetimes, those worlds had coped without human servants.
The exquisite irony delighted Nike. Everything returning to so recent a norm had swept out the Conservatives and brought in the Experimentalists. Of course it was a Conservative government that had allowed the Colonists to get antimatter. His security forces had yet to determine how, but Nessus had had it right: How else could Preserver’s GP hull have been destroyed?
No wonder the people had rebelled.
Still the aides murmured inside. Nike pressed through the weather-resistant force field into their room. “What now?” he warbled impatiently.
“Apologies, Hindmost,” one of them offered. “Vesta insists on speaking with you now.”
“Then bring him!” Nike blasted enough harmonics to make a point. To this Hindmost, foreign affairs mattered. Vesta was now the Deputy Minister directing Clandestine Affairs.
Permitted access, Vesta arrived immediately. They brushed heads, and Nike led Vesta back to the balcony. “What has happened?”
“We have a problem on NP3,” Vesta said. He bowed heads submissively. “A Colonist raid. The breeding compound was evidently not so secret. They removed everyone and everything.”
Overhead on NP5, cyclones raged worse than ever. Energy from the recent ocean surges must have strengthened the storms. Nike listened to the report. “Are our people safe?”
“Yes, Hindmost.”
At the base of the mountain, great combers washed in. The tide: now one of eight daily, not ten. Another reminder to embrace change. “Perhaps it is for the best,” Nike decided. “If we still had the ability, we would surely be tempted to create new servants. Recent events suggest we are better off without them.”
Vesta pawed at the marble tiled floor. “We should punish the Colonists.”
“No,” Nike said adamantly. “And it would be best, my friend, if you stopped thinking of them as Colonists. The humans reclaimed their own. I think I respect them for that.”
“Understood, Hindmost.”
“And of your human agents on New Terra?” Nike asked.
Vesta straightened. “They radio according to schedule, Hindmost. Our hyperwave buoy just beyond their planetary singularity continues to relay. I expect regular updates to continue.”
“Excellent.” Citizens could also play tricks with hyperwave radio buoys. Would Baedeker appreciate that? Probably not, Nike decided. Hard labor in the fields of NP1 left little time or energy for such abstract musings.
In a few hundred years, the Fleet would rise above the crowded galactic disk. A consensus no longer existed as to which way to turn next.
Of course, that was a decision the “liberated” humans would now have to make first.
Perhaps, according to planted hints, they would turn toward the galactic center. Inward, to where they could at least hope to encounter their ancestors. Inward, to where myriads of newly sterilized worlds lay fallow. Inward, and away from the now-hated Fleet.
But inward was exactly where Nike meant for the Fleet to go. How much better, then, if an unwitting world of scouts could first draw the attention of any intelligent races that still survived in the core.
These Colonists were quite mistaken to believe their fate and the Concordance’s fate could be so easily disentwined.
• Turn the page for a preview of •
JUGGLER of
WORLDS
Larry Niven
AND
Edward M. Lerner
Available now from Tor Books
A TOM HARDCOVER
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1826-8 ISBN-10: 0-7653-1826-1
Copyright © 2008 by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner
. 1 .
Sigmund Ausfaller woke up shivering, prone on a cold floor. His head pounded. Tape bound his wrists and ankles to plasteel chains.
He had always known it would end horribly. Only the when, where, how, why, and by whom of it all had eluded him.
That fog was beginning to lift.
How had he gotten here, wherever here was? As though from a great distance, Sigmund
watched himself quest for recent memories. Why was it such a struggle?
He remembered the pedestrian concourse of an open-air mall, shoppers streaming. They wore every color of the rainbow, clothing and hair and skin, in every conceivable combination and pattern. Overhead, fluffy clouds scudded across a clear blue sky. The sun was warm on his face. Work, for once, had been laid aside. He’d been content.
Happiness is the sworn enemy of vigilance. How could he have been so careless?
Sigmund forced open his eyes. He was in a nearly featureless room. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were resilient plastic. Light came from one wall. I could be anywhere, Sigmund thought—and then two details grabbed his attention.
The room wasn’t quite a box. The glowing wall had a bit of a curve to it.
There were recessed handholds in walls, floor, and ceiling.
Panic struck. He was on a spaceship! Was gravity a hair higher than usual? Lower? He couldn’t tell.
Plasteel chains clattered dully as Sigmund sat up. He had watched enough old movies to expect chains to clink. Even as the room spun around him and everything faded to black, he found the energy to feel cheated.
* * *
COLD PLASTIC PRESSED against Sigmund’s cheek. He opened his eyes a crack to see the same spartan room. Cell.
This time he noticed that one link of his chains had been fused to a handhold in the deck.
Had he passed out from a panic attack? Where was he?
Sigmund forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply until the new episode receded. Fear could only muddy his thoughts. More deep breaths.
He had never before blacked out from panic. He could not believe that this blackout stemmed from panic. Yes, his faint had closely followed the thought he might be aboard a spaceship. It also had occurred just after he had sat up. Sigmund remembered his thoughts having been fuzzy. They seemed sharper now.
He’d been drugged! Doped up and barely awake, he’d sat up too fast. That was why he had passed out.
More cautiously this time, Sigmund got into a sitting position. His head throbbed. He considered the pain dispassionately. Less disabling than the last time, he decided. Perhaps the drugs were wearing off.
Some odd corner of his mind felt shamed by his panic attacks. Most Earthborn had flatland phobia worse than he, and so what? True, he’d been born on Earth, but his parents had been all over Known Space. Somehow they took pleasure in strange scents, unfamiliar night skies, and wrong gravity.
On principle, Sigmund had been to the moon twice. He had had to know: Could he leave Earth should the need ever arise? The second time, it was to make sure the success of that first trip wasn’t a fluke.
He listened carefully. The soft whir of a ventilation fan. Hints of conversation, unintelligible. His own heartbeat. None of the background power-plant hum that permeated the spaceships he’d been on. Gravity felt as normal as his senses could judge.
Recognizing facts, spotting patterns, drawing inferences . . . he managed, but slowly, as though his thoughts swam through syrup. Traces of drugs remained in his system. He forced himself to concentrate.
If this was a ship, it was still on Earth. Someone meant to panic him, Sigmund decided. Someone wanted something from him. Until they got it, he’d probably remain alive.
They.
For as long as Sigmund could remember, there had always been some they to worry about.
But even as Sigmund formed that thought, he knew “always” wasn’t quite correct. . . .
IN THE BEGINNING, they were unambiguous enough: the Kzinti.
The Third Man-Kzin War broke out in 2490, the year Sigmund was born. He was five before he knew what a Kzin was—something like an upright orange cat, taller and much bulkier than a man, with a naked, rat-like tail. By then, the aliens had been defeated. The Kzinti Patriarchy ceded two colony worlds to the humans as reparations. In Sigmund’s lifetime, they had attacked human worlds three more times. They’d lost those wars, too.
Fafnir was one of the worlds that changed hands after the third war. His parents had wanderlust and not a trace of flatland phobia. They left him in the care of an aunt, and went to Fafnir in 2500 for an adventure.
And found one.
Conflict erupted that year between humans on Fafnir and the Kzinti settlers who had remained behind. His parents vanished, in hostilities that failed to rise to the level of a numeral in the official reckoning of Man-Kzin Wars. It was a mere “border incident.”
Everyone knew the Kzinti ate their prey.
So they, for a long time, were Kzinti. Sigmund hated the ratcats, and everyone understood. And he hated his parents for abandoning him. The grief counselors told his aunt that that was normal. And he hated his aunt, as much as she reminded him of Mom—or perhaps because she did—for allowing Mom and Dad to leave him with her.
The same year his parents disappeared, the Puppeteers emerged from beyond the rim of Human Space. A species more unlike the Kzinti could not be imagined. Puppeteers looked like two-headed, three-legged, wingless ostriches. The heads on their sinuous necks reminded him of sock puppets. The brain, Aunt Susan told him, hid under the thick mop of mane between the massive shoulders.
So they came to include these other aliens, these harmless-seeming newcomers, because Sigmund didn’t believe in coincidence. And then they came to include all aliens—because, really, how could anyone truly know otherwise?
That was when Aunt Susan took him to a psychotherapist. Sigmund remembered the stunned look on her face after his first session. After she spoke alone with the therapist. Sigmund remembered her sobbing all that night in her bedroom.
He had a sickness, or sicknesses, he couldn’t spell, much less understand: a paranoid personality disorder. Monothematic delusion with delusional misidentification syndrome. He didn’t know if he believed the supposed silver lining: that it was treatable.
What Sigmund did believe was the other consolation Dr. Swenson offered Aunt Susan—that paranoia is an affliction of the brightest.
In time, Sigmund understood. Trauma can cause stress can cause biochemical imbalances can cause mental illness. A day and a night asleep in an autodoc corrected the biochemical imbalance in his brain. But a single chemical tweak wasn’t enough: Knowing the world is out to get you is its own stress. Three months of therapy with Dr. Swenson addressed the paranoid behaviors Sigmund had already learned.
Dr. Swenson was right: Sigmund was very smart. Smart enough to figure out what the therapist wanted to hear. Smart enough to learn what thoughts to keep to himself.
* * *
TREMBLING, SIGMUND TRIED again to shake off the drugs. Reliving old horrors served no useful purpose—especially now. He needed to focus.
Start with them. They weren’t Kzinti: The room was too small. Kzinti would have gone crazy.
They wanted something from him; how he responded might be the only control he had in this situation. Who might they be?
Others might see in him only a middle-aged, midlevel financial analyst. A United Nations bureaucrat. A misanthrope dressed always in black, in a world where everyone else wore vibrant colors.
Sigmund saw more. All those years ago, Dr. Swenson had been far more correct than he knew. Sigmund was more than bright. He was brilliant—in the mind, where it counted, not in gaudy display.
Who were they? Probably somebody Sigmund was investigating. That narrowed it down. The bribe-taking customs officials at Quito Spaceport? The sysadmin at the UN ID data center who moonlighted in identity laundering?
Sigmund’s gut said otherwise. It was his other ongoing investigation: the Trojan Mafia. The gang, known by its reputed base in the Trojan Asteroids, engaged in every kind of smuggling, from artworks to weapons to experimental medicines. They killed for hire—and, more often, just to keep the authorities at bay. They were into extortion, money laundering . . . everything. Every other analyst in Investigations refused to touch them.
Surely that was who.
How was more speculative. A ?
??chance” encounter in the pedestrian mall near his home, he guessed, by someone with a fast-acting hypo-sedative. He stumbles; his assailant, to all appearances a Good Samaritan, helps him to the nearest transfer booth.
Where? Other than somewhere on Earth, Sigmund wasn’t prepared to guess. On a world bristling with transfer booths, he could have been teleported instantaneously almost anywhere.
And when? Blinking to de-blur his vision, Sigmund raised his hands. His left wrist hurt—not much, but it hurt. The time display had frozen. Ironic that, since the subcutaneous control pips felt melted: tiny beads beneath his thumb. Clock, weather, compass, calculator, maps, all the utility functions he normally summoned by fingernail pressure . . . all gone. He guessed his implant had been fried with a magnetic pulse. It fit the program of disorientation.
They weren’t as smart as they thought. The room had no sanitary facilities, not so much as a chamber pot, and so far he felt no need to pee. His black suit was clean, if rumpled. It wasn’t an ironclad case, but Sigmund guessed he had been snatched from that pedestrian mall no more than a few hours ago.
Footsteps! They approached along the unseen corridor beyond the out-of-reach door. The door flew open.
A tall figure, easily two meters tall, stood in the doorway. A tall fringe of hair bobbed on an otherwise bald head: a Belter crest. And did not Hector, mightiest of the Trojans, famously wear a helmet with a plume of horsehair?
It all fit with the Trojan Mafia.
Sigmund blinked in the suddenly bright light, unable to make out details.
“Good,” the Belter said. “I see you’re awake. There’s someone who wants to speak with you.”
“YOU SEEM UNSURPRISED, Mr. Ausfaller.”
An eerie calm came over Sigmund. “Someone had to put through all the requests for reassignment. Someone had to tolerate one unproductive investigation after another.”