Redshift Part 21

Hama said with difficulty, "I am not-happy."

"You were promised integration, not happiness."

"I failed to find the girl. La-ba."

Arles smiled in the vacuum. "I traced her. She escaped to the sensor installation."

"The sensors?"

"Another renegade lives up there. To what purpose, I can't imagine," Arles murmured.

"This place is flawed," Hama said bitterly.

"Oh, yes. Very flawed. There is a network of drones who provision the renegade. And there are more subtle problems: the multiple births occurring in the Vat, the taking of trophies fromkills, the dancing . . . These drones seek satisfaction beyond the Doctrine. There has been ideological drift. It is a shame. You would think that in a place as isolated as this a certain purity could be sustained. But the human heart, it seems, is full of spontaneous imperfection."

"They must be punished."

Arles looked at him carefully. "We do not punish, Hama. We only correct."

"How? A program of indoctrination, a rebuilding-"

Arles shook his head. "It has gone too far for that. There are many other Observation Posts.

We will allow these flawed drones to die."

There was a wash of agreement from the Commissaries all over the Supercl.u.s.ter, all of them loosely bound to Hama's thinking and Arles's, all of them concurring in Arles's decision.

Hama found he was appalled. "They have done their duty here for sixty thousand years-Lethe, a third of the evolutionary history of the human species-and now you would destroy them so casually, for the sake of a little deviance?"

Arles gripped Hama's arms and turned him so they faced each other. Hama glimpsed cold power in his eyes; Arles Thrun was already a thousand years old. "Look around, Hama. Look at the Supercl.u.s.ter, the vast stage, deep in s.p.a.ce and time, on which we fight. Our foe is unimaginably ancient, with unimaginable powers. And what are we but half-evolved apes from the plains of some dusty, lost planet? Perhaps we are not smart enough to fight this war. And yet we fight even so.

"And to keep us united in our purpose, this vast host of us scattered over more galaxies than either of us could count, we have the Doctrine, our creed of mortality. Let me tell you something. The Doctrine is not perfect. It may not even enable us to win the war, no matter how long we fight. But it has brought us this far, and it is all we have."

"And so we must destroy these drones, not for the sake of the war-"

"But for the sake of the Doctrine. Yes. Now, at last, you begin to understand."

Arles released him, and they drifted apart.

La-ba stayed with the Old Man.

She woke. She lay in silence. It was strange not to wake under a sky crowded with people.

She could feel her baby inside her, kicking as if it were eager to get to the Birthing Vat.

The floor shuddered.

The Old Man ran to her. He dragged her to her feet. "It begins," he said.

"What?"

He took her to the hatch that led to the hollow cable.

A We-ku was there, inside the cable, his fat face split by a grin, his stick-out ears wide.

She raised her foot and kicked the We-ku in the forehead. He clattered to the floor, howling.

The Old Man pulled her back. "What did you do?"

"He is a We-ku."

"Look." The Old Man pointed.

The We-ku was clambering to his feet and rubbing his head. He had been carrying a bag full of ration packs. Now the packs were littered over the floor, some of them split.

The Old Man said, "Never mind the food. Take her back." And he pushed at La-ba again, urging her into the cable. Reluctantly she began to climb down.

She felt a great sideways wash, as if the whole of this immense cable was vibrating backand forth, as if it had been plucked by a vast finger.

She looked up at the circle of light that framed the Old Man's face. She was confused, frightened. "I will bring you food."

He laughed bitterly. "Just remember me. Here." And he thrust his hand down into hers. Then he slammed shut the hatch.

When she opened her hand, she saw it contained the scrimshawed bones.

The cable whiplashed, and the lights failed, and they fell into darkness, screaming.

Hama stood in the holding cell, facing Ca-si. The walls were creaking. He heard screaming, running footsteps.

With its anchoring cable severed, the Post was beginning to sink away from its design alt.i.tude, deeper into the roiling murk of the hot Jupiter's atmosphere. Long before it reached the glimmering, enigmatic metallic-hydrogen core, it would implode.

Ca-si's mouth worked, as if he was gulping for air. "Take me to the Shuttles."

"There are no Shuttles."

Ca-si yelled, "Why are you here? What do you want'?"

Hama laid one silvered hand against the boy's face. "I love you," he said. "It's my job to love you. Don't you see that?" But his silvered flesh could not detect the boy's warmth, and Ca-si flinched from his touch, the burned scent of vacuum exposure.

".. . I know what you want."

Ca-si gasped. Hama turned.

La-ba stood in the doorway. She was dirty, bloodied. She was carrying a lump of shattered part.i.tion wall. Fragmentary animated images, of glorious scenes from humanity's past, played over it fitfully.

Hama said, "You."

She flicked a fingernail against the silver carapace of his arm. "You want to be like us.

That's why you tried to death us."

And she lifted the lump of part.i.tion rubble and slammed it into his chest. Briny water gushed down Kama's belly, spilling tiny silver fish that struggled and died.

Hama fell back, bending over himself. His systems screamed messages of alarm and pain at him-and, worse, he could feel that he had lost his link with the vaster pool of Commissaries beyond. "What have you done? Oh, what have you done?"

"Now you are like us," said La-ba simply.

The light flickered and darkened. Glancing out of the cell, Hama saw that the great Birthing Vat was drifting away from its position at the geometric center of the Post. Soon it would impact the floor in a gruesome moist collision.

"I should have gone with Arles," he moaned. "I don't know why I delayed."

La-ba stood over Hama and grabbed his arm. With a grunting effort, the two drones hauled him to his feet.

La-ba said, "Why do you death us?"

"It is the war. Only the war."

"Why do we fight the war?"

In desperation Hama said rapidly, "We have fought the Xeelee for half our evolutionary history as a species. We fight because we must. We don't know what else to do. We can't stop,any more than you can stop breathing. Do you see? "

"Take us," said La-ba.

"Take you? Take you where? Do you even know what it is I do when I ... jump?" He tried to imagine explaining to them the truth about s.p.a.ce-telling them of filaments and membranes vibrating in multiple-dimensional harmony, of ruptures in s.p.a.ce and time as the fundamental fibers, at his command, rewove themselves . . .

In La-ba's set face there was ruthless determination, a will to survive that burned away the fog of his own weak thinking.

The Doctrine is right, he thought. Mortality brings strength. A brief life burns brightly. He felt ashamed of himself. He tried to stand straight, ignoring the clamoring pain from his smashed stomach.

The girl said, "It is un-Doctrine. But I have deathed your fish. n.o.body will know."

He forced a laugh. "Is that why you killed the Squeem? . . . You are naive."

She clutched his arm harder, as if trying to bend his metallic flesh. "Take us to Earth."

"Do you know what Earth is like?"

Ca-si said, "It is a place where you live on the outside, not the inside. It is a place where water falls from the sky, not rock."

"How will you live? "

La-ba said, "The We-ku helped the Old Man live. Others will help us live."

Perhaps it was true, Hama thought. Perhaps if these two survived on some civilized world-a world where other citizens could see what was being done in the name of the war-they might form a focus for resistance. No, not resistance: doubt.

And doubt might destroy them all.

He must abandon these creatures to their deaths. That was his clear duty, his duty to the species.

There was a crack of shattering part.i.tion. The Post spun, making the three of them stagger, locked together.

Ca-si showed his fear. "We will be deathed."

"Take us to Earth," La-ba insisted.

Hama said weakly, "You broke my link to the Commission. I may not be able to find my way. The link helps me-navigate. Do you see?"

"Try," she whispered. She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against the cold of his silvered chest.

Hama wrapped his arms around the two drones, and s.p.a.ce tore.

For a single heartbeat the three of them floated in vacuum.

The close sun glared, impossibly bright. The planet was a floor of roiling gas, semi-infinite.

Above, Hama could see the sensor installation. It was drifting off into s.p.a.ce, dangling its tether like an impossibly long umbilical. It was startlingly bright in the raw sunlight, like a sculpture.

From beneath the planet's boiling clouds, a soundless concussion of light flickered and faded. Sixty thousand years of history had ended, a subplot in mankind's tangled evolution; the long watch was over.

La-ba squirmed, stranded in vacuum. Her hands were clasped over the b.u.mp at her belly.

She opened her mouth, and the last of her air gushed out, a hail of sparkling crystals, glimmering in the fierce sunlight.Hama held the lovers close, and the three of them vanished.

Paul Di Filippo was custom-made for an anthology like this. With his wit and wild invention, evidenced in such wacky books as The Steampunk Trilogy and Lost Pages (in which a costumed Franz Kafka-yes, I said Franz Kafka-roams the night of Manhattan as the avenger Jackdaw) he's proved himself an able postpunk successor to the likes of the great Philip Jose Farmer.

His story for this book is one of those I d point to when asked what I was looking for for Reds.h.i.+ft-it's sick, hilarious, and viciously apt.

If you don't think the media is really heading this way-think again.

Weeping Walls.

Paul Di Filippo.

"I want those f.u.c.king teddy bears, and I want them yesterday1 ." Lisa Dutch bellowed into the telephone as if denouncing Trotsky in front of Stalin. Tectonic emotions threatened to fracture the perfect makeup landscaping the compact features of her astound-ingly innocent yet vaguely insane face. Eruptions of sweat beaded the cornsilk-fme blond hairs layered alongside her delicate ears.

Seeking her attention, Jake Pasha was waving a folded newspaper under Lisa's charmingly pert nose and toothpaste-blue eyes, and this impudence from her a.s.sistant infuriated her even more. She glared at Jake like a wrathful G.o.ddess, Kali in a Donna Karan suit, but-aside from swatting the paper away-she chose to vent her evil temper only on the hapless vendor holding down the other end of her conversation.

"Listen, s.h.i.+thead! You promised me those G.o.dd.a.m.n bears for early-last week, and they're not here yet. Do you have any idea how many orders I'm holding up for those bears? I run a time-sensitive business here. We're talking thousands of bereaved husbands and wives, mourning parents and red-eyed grandparents, all hanging fire. They can't process their grief thanks to your G.o.dd.a.m.n incompentence. Not to mention the f.u.c.king kids! You can't find your nose'? Are you f.u.c.king crazy"? Oh, the bears' noses! Well, I don't care if you draw the G.o.dd.a.m.n noses on by hand with a racking pen! Just get me those motherf.u.c.king bears!"

Lisa smashed the phone into its plastic cradle, where fractures revealed a history of such stresses. Now she was free to concentrate on her a.s.sistant.

"Unless you stop shoving that paper into my face this instant, Jake, I will tear you a brand-new a.s.shole. And while your boyfriends might well enjoy that feature, I guarantee that it will make wearing your thong at the beach an utter impossibility."