Jem

  But Ana Dimitrova was only one problem, and maybe the easiest to solve. "One has heard rumors that the launch may be canceled" indeed! If Dimitrova had heard them, then everybody had heard them, and maybe the rumors were close to being true.

  Margie allowed herself five minutes of luxurious soaking in the tub. When she got out she draped a towel around her body, not from modesty but from distaste; the shots had raised angry red welts all over her skin, and even with the ointment and the pills they itched. She did not want to be seen like that. Certainly not by the senator. It was bad advertising for the merchandise.

  As she was dialing Adrian Lenz's private number she looked at herself in the mirror, frowned, and switched to voice only. "Hello, honey," she said as soon as he was on the line. "I'm sorry there's no picture, but this place doesn't have all mod. cons., and anyway"—she giggled—"I don't have any clothes on."

  "Hello, Margie." Senator Lenz's voice was neutral. It was the sort of tone one uses to a brother-in-law or an airport security guard; it said, I acknowledge there is a relationship between us, but don't push it. "I assume you're calling me about your proposed new launch."

  "Just 'proposed,' Adrian? You voted for it three weeks ago."

  "I know my own voting record, Margie."

  "Of course you do, Adrian. Listen, I didn't call you up to quarrel with you."

  "No, you didn't," said the senator. "You called me up to try to keep me in line. I was pretty sure you'd call. I'm even pretty sure of what you're going to say. You're going to tell me that we've got a hell of a big investment in Klong now and if we don't nourish it the whole thing might go down the tube."

  "Something like that, senator," Marge Menninger said reluctantly.

  "I was sure of it. You know, we've heard those arguments before. Every time the DoD wants something outrageous they start by asking some piss-ant amount as a 'study grant.' Then a little more because the study showed some really promising idea. Then some more because, gosh, senator, we've gone this far, let's not waste it. And then, the next thing you know, we've got some stupid new missile or antiballistic defense system or nuclear bomber. Not because any sensible person wants it, but because there was no place to stop. Well, Margie, maybe this is the place to stop Klong. Three days from now there's a committee meeting. I don't know which way I'm going to vote, because I don't have all the information yet. But I'm not making any promises."

  Margie kept the disappointment out of her voice, but she was less successful with the anger. "This project means a hell of a lot to me, Adrian."

  "Don't you think I know it? Listen, Margie, this is an open line, but I thought you might be interested in something. I've got tomorrow's early edition of the Herald here, and there's a story from Peiping. 'Authoritative sources' say that repair crews at their tactran satellite have definite evidence that the explosion which destroyed the satellite and two transport ships was of suspicious origin."

  "I watch the news, Adrian. I saw that. And there was another story, too, that said that dissident elements within the People's Republics were thought to be responsible."

  The senator was silent. Margie would have given a lot to have seen the expression on his face just then, even at the cost of revealing the sorry condition of her own, and her hand reached out to restore the vision circuit to the call. But then the senator said, "I guess that's all we should say under the circumstances, Margie. I agree with you about one thing. You've gotten us into this pretty deep." And he broke the connection.

  Margie sat thoughtfully blow-drying her hair for the next ten minutes, while her mind raced. Then she picked up the phone and dialed the orderly room. "Colonel Menninger here," she said. "Notify the training officer that I will not be present for tomorrow's formations, and have transportation ready for me at oh eight hundred. I need to go to New York."

  "Yes, ma'am," said the OD. He was not surprised. All members of the project were restricted to the base, and the orders said there were no exceptions. But he knew who had written the orders.

  Margie sat impatiently in the audience section of the Security Council chamber, waiting to be called. The delegation from Peru was explaining its recent vote at considerable length while the other nine members of the council waited in varying degrees of fury to explain each other's. The question seemed to have something to do with the territorial limits for fishing fleets. Normally Margie would have paid close attention, but her mind was a good many light-years away, on Klong. When the young black woman came to fetch her for her appointment she forgot about Peru before she had left the auditorium.

  The woman conducted her to an inconspicuous room marked Authorized Personnel Only and held the door open for her without going, or looking, inside.

  "Hello, poppa," said Margie as soon as the door was closed, turning her cheek to be kissed.

  Her father did not kiss her. "You look like hell," he said, his voice flat and without affection. "What the fuck have you been teaching these 'colonists' of yours?"

  Margie was caught off guard; it was not any of the questions she had expected from him, and certainly not what she had come to discuss. But she responded at once. "I've been teaching them survival tactics. Exactly what I said I was going to teach them."

  "Take a look at these," he said, spreading a sheaf of holoflat pictures before her. "Art exhibits from Heir-of-Mao's private collection. Cost me quite a lot to get them."

  Margie held one up, wiggling it slightly to get the effect of three-dimensional motion. "Makes me look fat," she said critically.

  "These came out of the pouch of a courier in Ottawa. You recognize them, I guess. There's one of your boys throwing a grenade. And a nice shot of a flamethrower drill. And another one of a girl, I won't say who, stabbing what looks a hell of a lot like a Krinpit with what looks a hell of a lot like a sword."

  "Oh, hell, poppa, that's no sword. It's just a flat, sharp knife. I got the idea from watching the stew chef opening up oysters at the Grand Central Clam Bar. And that Krinpit's only a dummy."

  "Hell's shitfire, Margie! That's combat technique!"

  "It's survival, dear," she corrected. "What do you think? The biggest and ugliest dangers our boys and girls are going to face are the Krinpit and the burrowers and the balloonists and, oh, yes, not to forget the Greasies and the Peeps. I'm not advocating killing, poppa, I'm just teaching them how to handle themselves if killing is going on." Her face clouded. "All the same, I wish I knew who took those pictures."

  "You will," he said grimly. "But it doesn't matter; those are just copies. The Peeps have the originals, and Tam Gulsmit's probably got a set of his own by now, and the Peeps and the Greasies on Klong are going to hear about it by next week at the latest, and interexpedition friendship is over. Did you listen to the debate in the council?"

  "What? Oh, sure—a little."

  "You should have listened a lot. Peru has just extended its ocean borders to a thousand kilometers."

  Margie squinted, perplexed. "What does that have to do with maybe some fighting on Klong?"

  "Peru wouldn't do that without a lot of backing from somebody. They're nominally Food, sure, because of the anchovy catch. But they don't have a pot to piss in when the fish go deep, so they try to keep friendly with the other blocs."

  "Which one?"

  Her father pushed the corners of his eyes up. He did not do it because there was any risk of this supersensitive room being bugged; it was only a reflex not to speak the name of Heir-of-Mao unnecessarily.

  Margie was silent for a moment while the card sorter in her brain ordered her hierarchy of priorities. She came back to Number One. "Poppa," she said, "Peru can stick their anchovies in their ear, and I'm not going to lose sleep about which one of my people is a spy, and if we get a little scandal about combat training we'll survive it. None of it's going to matter in two or three weeks, because we'll be there, and that's what I came to see you about. Adrian Lenz is crawfishing. I need help, poppa. Don't let him cancel us out."

  Her father leaned ba
ck in his chair. Margie was not used to seeing Godfrey Menninger looking old and tired, but that was how he looked now.

  "Sweetie," he said heavily, "do you have any idea how much trouble we're in?"

  "Of course, I do, poppa, but—"

  "No, listen. I don't think you do. There's a tanker aground on Catalina Island today, with six hundred thousand tons of oil that isn't going to get to Long Beach. Wouldn't matter, normally. Southern California keeps plenty of reserves. But their reserves got diverted to your project, so they're low now. Unless they get that tanker afloat in forty-eight hours, Los Angeles is going to spend the weekend in a brownout. What do you think is going to be the public reaction to that?"

  "Well, sure, a certain amount of shit is going to—"

  He raised his hand. "And you saw the story in this morning's papers. The Peeps know their tactran satellite was deliberately destroyed."

  "No, it wasn't! That was an accident. The bomb was just supposed to knock out the supply ship!"

  "An accident in the commission of a crime becomes part of the crime, Margie."

  "But they can't prove— I mean, there's no way in the world that they can pin it on me unless—"

  She looked at her father. He shook his head. "The Italian isn't going to tell them anything. He's already been taken out."

  So poor Guido was not going to live to spend his hundred thousand petrodollars. "He gave good value," she said. "Look what you got out of his microfiches. You have proof that the Greasies set up their base where they did because they had seismic scans to show oil under it. That's against treaty right there."

  "Don't be a child, Margie. What does 'proof' have to do with it? Sir Tam and the Slopies can't prove you handed Ghelizzi the bomb, but they don't have to prove, they only have to know. And they do. Peru proves it. Not to mention a few other little news items you may not have heard about yet, like the American embassy in Buenos Aires being fire-bombed this morning. That's a little message from Sir Tam or Heir-of-Mao, I would judge. What do you suppose the next message is going to be?"

  Margie realized she had been scratching her blisters and made herself take her hand away. "Oh, shit," she said glumly, and thought hard while her father waited.

  But really, she reflected, the basic rules were unchanged. The equation of power was utterly clear. No nation could afford to fight any other nation in the whole world anymore. Food, Fuel, and People each owned enough muscle to smash both the others flat, and all of them knew it. Worse than that. Even the tiniest nation had a minute sliver of muscle of its own, gift of the breeder reactors and the waste reclaimers. Not enough to matter in a global sense, no. But Peru could enforce its decisions if driven to. Ecuador could kill Washington or Miami, Denmark could destroy Glasgow, Indonesia could obliterate Melbourne. Fire-bombings and riots—well, what did they matter? There was a permanent simmer of border incidents and small-scale violence. Each year, a few thousand injured, a few scores or hundreds dead. But the lid never blew off, because everybody knew what would happen.

  "Poppa," she said, "you know nobody can do anything really serious. The balance of power prohibits it."

  "Wrong! The balance of power breaks down as soon as somebody makes a mistake. The Peeps made one when they fired rockets at our gasbags on Klong. I made one when I let you carry that bomb to Belgrade. It's time to pull the fuses, honey."

  For the first time in her adult life, Margie Menninger felt real fear. "Poppa! Are you saying you're not going to help me with Lenz?"

  "I'm saying more than that, Margie. I agree with him. I'm seeing the President tomorrow, and I'm going to tell him to scrap the launch."

  "Poppa!"

  He hesitated. "Honey, maybe later. After things quiet down—"

  "Later's no good! You think the Peeps aren't going to reinforce as soon as they can get another satellite up there? And the Greasies? And—"

  "It's settled, Margie. "

  She looked at him, appalled. This was the God Menninger that his whole agency knew and she had rarely seen. It wasn't her father she was looking at. It was a human being as implacable and determined as she herself had ever been, and with the accustomed support of a great deal of power to back his decisions up.

  She said, "I can't change your mind." It wasn't a question, and he didn't give it an answer. "Well," she said, "there's no reason for me to hang around here then, is there? Good-bye, poppa. Take care of yourself. I'll see you another time."

  She did not look at him again as she got up, collected her brown leather officer's bag and her uniform cap, and let herself out.

  If her father was as determined as she, the other side of the coin was that she was no less determined than he. She stopped in the visitors' lounge and entered a public phone booth to dial a local number.

  The woman on the other end was a strikingly handsome human being, not a sex symbol but a work of art. "Why, Marjorie," she said. "I thought you were off doing spy stuff for your father or something—Marjorie! What's the matter with your face?"

  Marge felt her blotched chin. "Oh, that. That's just a reaction to some shots. Can I come over to see you?"

  "Of course, lover. Right now?"

  "Right this second, mom." Margie hung up the phone and hurried toward the elevators. But before she entered them she stopped in a ladies' room to check her makeup.

  Marge Menninger's mother lived, among other places, in the residential tower section of one of New York City's tallest and most expensive skyscrapers. It was an old-fashioned place, built when energy was cheap, so that it made economic sense at that time to economize on insulation and rely on huge inputs of BTUs all winter long and continuous air conditioning all summer. It was one of the few that had not been at least partly rebuilt when oil reached P$300 a barrel, and it would have been ruinously expensive for most tenants—even most well-to-do tenants. The condominium apartments were no more expensive to buy than any others in a good neighborhood. But if you had to ask what the maintenance costs would be, you couldn't afford them. Alicia Howe and her present husband didn't have to ask.

  The butler welcomed Margie. "How nice to see you, Miss Menninger! Will you be using your room this time?"

  "Afraid not, Harvey. I just want to talk to mom."

  "Yes, Miss Margie. She's expecting you."

  As Alicia Howe rose to be kissed, she made a quick, all-seeing inventory of her daughter. Those awful splotches on her complexion! The clothes were passable enough, as army uniforms went, and thank heaven the child had been born with her father's smiling good looks. "You could lose a couple of kilos, lover," she said.

  "I will, I promise. Mom, I want you to do me a favor."

  "Of course, hon."

  "Poppa's being a little difficult about something, and I need to go public. I want to hold a news conference."

  Alicia Howe's husband owned a lot of television: three major-city outlets and large interests in a dozen satellite networks. "I'm sure one of Harold's people can help you out," she said slowly. "Should I ask what the problem is?"

  "Mom, you shouldn't even know there's a problem."

  Her mother sighed. She had learned to live with God Menninger's off-the-record life while they were married, but since the divorce she had hoped to be free of it. She never talked to her ex-husband. It wasn't that she disliked him—in her heart, she still thought him the most interesting, and by a long way the sexiest, of her men. But she could not cope with the knowledge that any little slip of the tongue from him to her, and from her to anyone, might bring catastrophic consequences to the world.

  "Honey, I do have to tell Harold something."

  "Oh, sure, mom. But not as a problem. What I want to talk about is Kl—Jem. The planet Jem. I'm going there, mom."

  "Yes, of course, you told me that. In a year or two, maybe, when things settle down—"

  "I want to settle them down, mom. I want the United States to send enough muscle up there to make it fit to live in. Fit for you to visit someday, if you want to. And I want to do it now. I'm su
pposed to leave in eighteen days."

  "Margie! Really, Margie!"

  "Don't take on, will you? It's what I want."

  Alicia Howe had not been able to prevail against that argument in more than a dozen years. She had no hope of prevailing against it now. The thought of her daughter flinging herself through space to some terrible place where people died disgustingly was frightening. But Margie had demonstrated a capacity for taking care of herself.

  "Well," she said, "I guess I can't send you to your room. All right. You haven't told me what you want me to do."

  "Ask Harold to get me onto one of his newsmaker programs. He'll know how to do it better than I can tell him. They're backing away from my planet, mom, cutting the funding, complaining about the problems. I want the public to know how important it is, and I want to be the one to tell them." She added strategically, "Poppa was right behind me on this at first, but now he's changed his mind. He wants to call the whole thing off."

  "You mean you want to put the squeeze on your own father?"

  "Exactly right."

  Alicia Howe smiled. That part was sure to appeal to her current husband. She spread her hands resignedly and moved toward the phone. "I'll tell Harold what you want," she said.

  Ana Dimitrova sat with her eyes closed in a broad, low room, elbows on a ring-shaped table, head in her hands, earphones on her head. Her lips were moving. Her head twitched from side to side as she tried to match the rhythms of the taped balloonist song that was coming over the headset. It was very difficult, in large part because it was not a balloonist's voice making the sounds. It was a Krinpit's. The tape had been made several weeks before, when Detrick's last surviving Krinpit had had no one left to talk to but Shirley, the one surviving balloonist.

  But her name had not been Shirley. Her name, rather beautiful, had been Mo'ahi'i Ba'alu'i, which meant something like Sweetly Golden Cloud-Bearer. Krinpit rasps and tympani did not easily form the balloonist sounds. But Shirley had understood him—no, Ana corrected herself, Mo'ahi'i Ba'alu'i had understood him. Ana was determined to do the same, and so she played and replayed sections of the tape: