She nodded and started to put her hand around it, but the tiny barbs flexed, and she clearly had second thoughts about touching it. “Let me get it down to med, then.”
He nodded. “Go.”
He looked at Sumi, and at the girl. There were tears running down Zusu’s cheeks, channels of glistening fear that spoke volumes for her state of mind. If it occurred to Allo that such a total breakdown was uncharacteristic for the girl they had taken on board, he didn’t say that out loud.
“You’re turning into a lot of trouble for us, Jamisia.” He was trying to make his voice gentle, it seemed, but the tension underriding it was too marked for that subterfuge to work; Zusu’s self-embrace grew even tighter as he sat down by her side. “You will help us try to figure all this out, won’t you? We can’t help protect you if you don’t.”
The lie was so blatant that even Zusu understood what was behind it ... and the danger so evident that even her young mind, normally oblivious to the fine gradations of social dishonesty, caught on. “I’ll tell you all I can,” she whispered. “But really, I already told Sumi everything.” To her surprise, Allo seemed to accepted that. Perhaps it was the tears in her voice; some men, Katlyn explained, mistook that for honesty. Perhaps it was simply that he needed to be elsewhere, and saw no further use in pandering to her fears.
Well done, Verina told her. We’ll get through this yet ... together.
With a muttered word of leavetaking Allo quit the room, leaving her alone with Sumi. The Medusan had placed a gentle hand on her shoulder in comfort, but when they were alone together, he withdrew it.
“I’m sorry,” Zusu whispered. Sorry for causing him trouble, sorry for his obvious sexual embarrassment, sorry for everything. It was a generalized guilt, rather than a specific apology, and she hoped he understood it that way.
He didn’t meet her eyes. “Look, we’ve got a few more hours in Reijik Node because of this mess. Try to use it to relax, all right? Calia will find out exactly what that thing was, and who made it. Then maybe you can help us put two and two together, and we’ll figure out what to do about it.”
He didn’t go on to the part of the speech that should have come after, about how he was going to help her. Maybe that was too much of a lie for even him to stomach.
Jamisia felt sick inside. So did Verina. So did most of the Others who were watching now, their consciousness crowded about Zusu’s own like tourists at a small viewport.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered again. No answer.
He got up silently from the bed and walked to the door. For a moment it seemed he might leave without even looking at her, but he did glance back, and there was as much sympathy as frustration in his expression. “It’ll be okay,” he said shortly, and then he stepped close enough to the door for it to open. In another second he was gone, and the door slid shut once more; she—they—were alone.
Jamisia could have taken the body back then, but Zusu wanted it for one thing more. One thing she needed more than anything else, to deal with the emotions that had built up inside her. Frustration and despair and a thousand other things she didn’t know how to handle. The Others had their ways of dealing with such things. She had hers.
The Others understood. The Others sympathized. They were family, after all.
They let her cry.
Terran man being the creature that he is, it should not surprise us that the first thing he wishes to do when venturing into outspace is build walls and doors and station boundaries to shut his fellows out. Is not Terran history but a series of attempted Isolations, and most wars fought on that battered soil for the sake of racial or cultural boundaries?
MARO TALRAND, The New Isolationists
ADAMANTINE NODE ADAMANTINE STATION
GUILDMASTER ANTON VARSAV was calm.
It scared his people.
He knew that.
It pleased him.
They knew him well enough to worry when the frenzied motion of his restless body eased, for it signaled that his brain had found something to focus on so closely that it couldn’t be bothered with extraneous motion. They knew that when his language flowed smoothly and easily it was because there were no inappropriate phrases being edited out by his brainware, the usual case. And they knew that he only found such focus in danger, and conflict, and vengeance. So when they saw these signs, it scared them.
As it should.
He had spent the last E-week buried in Isolationist research. Saturating his mind with images and arguments from the two most hateful station colonies in civilized outspace. Tract after tract of the New Terran Front passed before his eyes, proclaiming the natural superiority of humankind’s hated ancestors. As always, he wanted to take them by the shoulders and shake them violently, demanding, “Why did you come out here if you hate Variant space so much? Why not stay at home and nurture your precious barbaric genes in peace?” As for the New Aryan Nation, merely looking at a picture of them was enough to make one’s bile rise in disgust. It wasn’t enough for them to declare Earth stock superior, but they must cordon off a small section of Terra’s gene pool and declare it sovereign over all that Earth had ever produced. To see a picture of them standing together, with their meticulously engineered features, perfectly matched in color, height and form, beautiful on the surface but cankerous with hatred underneath, was to understand just how corrupt ancient Earth must have been to have given birth to such a movement.
How they must hate him, all of them. How they must hate his race in general, but him most of all. This alien who ruled their node, who forced Guild law down their throats, and who flaunted his Variation before them as if it was not some kind of deformity, merely a normal state of being. How he hated them, and how he wished that Guild law would allow him to squeeze the life out of their colonies, so that the universe could be cleansed of such garbage forever.
But the law was the law, and he was sworn to uphold it.
Until they transgressed.
He hoped they had done so. He prayed nightly that they had done so. He dreamed of discovering that they were behind Lucifer—of being free to wreak vengeance upon them for that unspeakable crime. He would grind their stations to dust, and then package that dust and sell it to tourists, so that it reached every comer of the universe with its message: Your kind is not wanted here.
It was going to happen.
He had done all the things that were asked of him, and more. He had placed so many spy programs in his node’s network that one could hardly buy a pod ticket without tripping over one of them. He had all the mail from both those problem stations diverted, analyzed, and tagged for a trace, and even the regular correspondence from more worthy humans was being watched as well. It was a monumental effort. Another person would have despaired of coordinating it all. Another would have been overwhelmed by the sheer mass of data, unable to give it order and focus and purpose. But for him it was merely an exercise of intellect, more challenging than most but not at all daunting, and the diverse parts of the investigation fit together in his head like the pieces of a puzzle.
That was Hausman’s gift to him, a precious talent he expressed all too rarely. Setting his brain to this project was like stretching muscles too long unused, and he gloried in the sensation. Others noticed nothing, save that his walk was easier, his hands roved less in search of sensation, and he wrestled less with his language inhibitor programs to get speech out. Those who had served him for a long enough time knew what that meant, of course. And they knew to fear. He could see it in their eyes as they passed him in the corridors of the waystation, their glances quickly averted ... but not quickly enough.
They were afraid of him.
Good.
Day after day he went over the data, giving his people key words and phrases to search for, never giving them quite enough information to know exactly what he was looking for, or why. Unlike Ra and so many others, he never trusted his hackers. He never forgot that the same talent which made them so valuable also made them unpredicta
ble as well, and that more than one Guildmaster had been brought down by a disgruntled employee with access to confidential files. Like so many before him, he had learned that hiring conventional programmers was not enough, that one needed a mind hungry to devour secrets, in order to find secrets out. Unlike so many before him, however, he was not going to make the mistake of ever thinking they were loyal to him, or giving them a chance to work their mischief.
But they could sort through this mess in search of key patterns, and weed out the ten million letters that were of no interest whatsoever. Meanwhile his more prosaic programmers could come up with sorting programs for what was left over, searching for that all but invisible hint of insurrection in the making.
The hint would be there. He knew it.
If they did not find it for him, he could always create it.
What power she had placed in his hands, the Prima! Did she even know? Did she think in those terms? One hint of Lucifer, and he could sent an army into Destiny Station. And not his own army either; an army of the Guild itself, hot with the hunger for vengeance, ready to make an example of the Isolationists for all to see.
One station to be destroyed, for the crime of setting Lucifer loose in the galaxy. The other to quiver in fear down through the millennia, as the dust of their neighbor and cohort circled endlessly through the system, as a warning. Now that was a lesson he could never have managed on his own.
They were guilty. He was sure of it. And even if they weren’t ... it didn’t really matter, did it? The only thing the Guild would see was the data search, and what came of it. And he was in charge of that. How closely would they question his report? How little work would it take to add a small fact here or there, and seal the fate of the Isolationists forever?
He passed by a picture of the Prima and saluted it, a tight smile twitching across his face. Thank you, he thought to her. For all of this.
Power was such a sweet elixir.
The ambassador from the New Terran Front was predictably hostile. They were always hostile. They considered it an affront to be asked to share the same air as a Variant, and their speech and manner and expression all showed it.
“Our station space has been invaded.”
Varsav had started the meeting sitting, but quickly rose and began to pace. They did that to him, these Isolationists, overriding even the calm that his med programs could produce, driving him to a frenetic display of wasted energy. God, how he hated them.
“Invaded, you say.”
“Yes.”
He snorted with what he hoped was suitable disdain. “By what? Tourists? A harvester? Some poor little transport jarred off its course, that came within a million miles of your outer ring?” He’d heard all those complaints before and dealt with them as his duty demanded, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Or pretend that he liked it.
There was fury in the man’s eyes, but for now he was keeping it under control. “A pod.”
“A pod?” He stopped pacing and faced the man. Did he sound as incredulous as he felt? “And you came to my office to complain to me personally because this pod, this tiny thing, passed within ... what? A million miles of your station ? Two million?”
The answer came between gritted teeth. “Six thousand.”
Six thousand miles. Really. That was actually a legal offense, he mused, and not just some instance of Isolationist paranoia. Unusual.
“A pod, you say.”
The man held out a sheet of plastic. Varsav took it from him, resisting the impulse to make physical contact as he did so. God alone knew what the man would do if he did, probably go home and have all the skin removed from his hand, for fear of some dreaded Variant infection. Maybe they’d even kill him when he went home, just to keep the station pure. Damn it, the moment was tempting . . . but he refrained from making contact. Duty above pleasure. Maybe next time, he promised himself.
Varsav looked over the figures recorded on the sheet, and frowned as he did so. This was not good. Not good at all. Something really had come into the Front’s station space, and that meant he had to do something about it. The law was the law. “How long ago was this?”
The ambassador hesitated. “Nearly two Earth days now.”
Varsav snorted derisively. “And you expect me to do what now? Track the thing?” Oh, he could see them wasting two days, all right, while the intruder made his merry way home. A grand council meeting or two to discuss how to deal with such a threat, followed by a host of committee meetings to decide if it was worth sending one of their own into Variant-controlled space, followed by a long discussion of who ... if there ever was a war between Earth and her Variant offspring, and if this station was any example of Terran competence, Hausman’s children had nothing to fear.
Which was not true, and he knew it. The Terrans had invented terrorism as a strategy of war, and if hostility between Earth and its descendants ever flared into open conflict, he did not doubt they would use it to their advantage. Whereas Variants were raised to consider terrorism an unacceptable strategy under any circumstances . . . the result of lifetimes spent on space stations, where a million lives might be lost in the wake of one well-placed explosion. That would be an ugly war indeed, he thought.
“We expect you to defend the sanctity of our station space. As our station treaty says you will.”
For a moment he said nothing. His fingers, already exploring the surface of a statue near his desk, gripped it tightly. “Very well,” he said at last. “You’re quite correct. Your space was invaded. Did this ... this pod do anything to damage the station?”
“No.”
“Did it hinder your communications in any way?”
“No.”
“Did it do anything else you are aware of, which might have harmed your station or any of its people?”
The fury on the man’s face was unmistakable. “It could easily have spied on us. Intercepted transmitted data. Half a dozen things that we would never find out about. That’s your job to determine, isn’t it?”
Varsav scraped his nails along the statue. Scratch marks joined a hundred others already there. “Did you attempt to trace it? Backtrack its trajectory.”
“We did what we could,” the man said stiffly. “The figures are there.” His very tone said they hadn’t accomplished much. That wasn’t a big surprise. They might have the equipment to track things through Guild space, but he doubted they used it often enough to be very adept with it.
“Very well. As you say. I will investigate.” He paused. “Is that all?”
The man drew in a deep breath, and was obviously struggling not to let loose what he was really thinking. Which might even prove refreshing, Varsav thought, if he did let go. He could shut down his own speech inhibitor programs and let loose on the man with the kind of language he would really like to use. That could be ... interesting.
But the man backed down. With a look in his eye like a wary dog, he muttered, “Yes. That’s all.” And added, “There’s an eddress there for your report on the matter.”
“Of course.” He glanced down to note where it was, and nodded his official attention to the matter. The man glared at him but could find no concrete cause for further confrontation, so at last, like a snarling dog being forced to give ground, he backed, scowling, out of the door.
Varsav wanted to chute the damn report and the Terran Isolationists along with it, but he knew that he couldn’t. The Front would have been within their legal rights to shoot down any intruder who came in that close to their station space, and if they hadn’t done that, Varsav was sure it wasn’t due to any sense of mercy for whomever was inside the pod, merely the fact that they didn’t have guns pointed in the right direction at the right time. Well, he was sure that was being corrected right now. In the meantime the Guildmaster had better just be grateful that he was dealing with a two-day-old complaint about an off-course pod, rather than the press closing in because some innocent tourist strayed off course on his holiday and was shot down by
extremists. That had happened once off Destiny Station, and it was a scene he hoped never to repeat.
If only you could demand that people were civilized before you let them settle in outspace....
With a grunt he called in his aide and gave him the sheet of data specifications. Let him see what he could find out now, two days after the fact. He suspected the thing was far gone, probably on a station somewhere, or maybe out of the node entirely. Two days was a long time in outspace. Oh, well, they’d try. And he’d file a report for the Front and they would bitch and moan . . . in short, business as usual. These Isolationist stations from Earth might be nasty and hellishly dangerous, but they were certainly predictable.
As for the pod, it was probably some teenager out for a joy ride. Buzzing a station, they called it. Each generation had its own particular stupidity, and the current one seemed to encourage reckless behavior when it came to transit law. He’d check the records from the educational circuit and see what the young ones were being arrested for these days. Maybe add a class or two on Why I Should Not Annoy Isolationists. Or even better, he thought darkly, How Not to be so Stupid In My Youth That I Will Never Reach Adulthood.
Maybe he could force all the would-be hackers to take that class, too. Some of them could use it.
It was his downshift when the message came. That was all right. He didn’t mind his sleep being interrupted, if it was for a reason.
He tapped the com and muttered, “What?”
“You wanted to know as soon as we got something off the Front’s station,” a voice said hoarsely. It was his Director of Programming, and his long hours of labor sounded clearly in his voice. “I think we just did.”
He was awake at that, and putting on the headset. Magnetic contacts snapped into place and the start-up icons filled his field of vision. He brought his interface online and said, “Let me see what you’ve got.”