Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (58 page)

aboard— that's why I could shut down your defense drones. Don't try to target me manually, the ship will blow up if radar locks on it. Because he asked me to— don't let's go into all that again. Well, I expect that he misses you all. Yes, I can bring evidence, but it might be easier if you came up here, or I landed the ship. Well, okay, that's fine by me, too. Creepy little fucker," she added, turning to Baker.
"Can you really blow up the ship?"
"Only if it's absolutely necessary."
"That was Berry's mother you were talking with?"
"Some kind of agent, I think. It wants me to go down there with evidence that I brought Berry back."
Jackson sealed up her pressure suit but did not go out through the airlock; instead, she opened an internal access hatch and plunged into the water tank. Berry was supine. She had added a relaxant to his alcohol mix. Baker watched as she snipped off the little finger from Berry's right hand and came back out.
"It has to be fresh," she said, grinning at Baker through her helmet's visor. She was pumped up with excitement. "That way she'll know we're not kidding. You're not going to give me any trouble, are you?"
"Maybe you had better tell me what you've thought of."
"We're going down together. And if I see any sign that the ship is moving out of orbit, I'll blow it."
"I should stay here with Berry."
"And have you swing the ship around and torch me?"
"I wouldn't do that. I'm in this with you."
"You'd better be, because you're going to be my backup. They're expecting one person. You'll be a surprise. They won't know who you are or what you'll be doing when I walk in there."
They used a little jet unit to pull them across, touching down two kilometers from the tented crater, which was somewhere beyond the close, sharply curved horizon. Except for his annual safety certification exercises, Baker had hardly ever done any vacuum work. His p-suit was intelligent and responsive, but a residual stiffness blunted his reflexes; he let go a moment too soon and tumbled end-for-end when he touched down on the little moon's surface.
He tumbled a fair way— in Janus's microgravity, he could bounce a couple hundred meters off the surface with the gentlest of kicks. At last the suit fired a grapple and he slewed to a halt with a cloud of dust raining straight down all around. He was at the edge of a dense field of tall black blades that sloped away to the close horizon. Some reached up to four meters; all grew from thick rhizomes that snaked half-buried through the dusty regolith; all had turned the flat surfaces of their blades toward the sun's yellow spark.
Jackson threw a camo cloth over the jet unit and crept toward Baker on her belly, supple as a snake in her yellow p-suit. She checked him over and began to assemble a hollow tube and a scaffold cradle from components she had strapped to her backpack.
"What are you doing?"
"It's amazing what you can get in the way of surplus weaponry if you have the credit. This is a missile launcher. The Europeans made them to shoot
down drones like the ones we operated, only they didn't have time to deploy them before the hydrogen bomb broke open the crust. I paid for this through Berry's room service. It fires up to ten smart micromissiles, but I only need two. One is aimed at the scow, the other at the dome over the horizon."
"Ah. I thought you were joking about blowing up the ship."
"I don't joke about business," Jackson said flatly. She started to adjust the angle of the tube by minute increments, finally sitting back in a squat. "It's running, ready to go in three hours. Try to move it now and the charge will explode. Try to rip out the chip that controls it— same thing. The only way to stop it is to use a code. You think I'm a fuck-up, but I know what I'm doing here."
Baker couldn't see Jackson's face because the sun was reflecting off the gold-tinted visor of her helmet, but he could imagine her tigerish grin. He said, "I don't doubt it."
"You stay right there. I'll be telling them that you'll fire the mortar at any sign of trouble, so don't stray. And remember that I'm linked to the ship just like you. Try anything— especially try to close down my link— and I'll blow her. Sit tight. Enjoy the view. I'll be back soon."
Baker sat tight, watching Saturn's crescent slowly wax above the sharp, irregular edge of the horizon. Like almost all of Saturn's moons, Janus was tidally locked, and kept one face permanently turned toward its primary. Sri Hong-Owen had sited her home at the edge of sub-Saturnian hemisphere; Saturn stood permanently at the horizon, its rings arching beyond its banded crescent like the string of a drawn bow— it dominated half the sky, shedding a bilious light over the pockmarked slope. Janus was so small that wherever you looked, the ground appeared to slope away— Baker felt that he was hugging the top of a hill that was plunging toward Saturn's storms, a hill studded with half-buried boulders of all sizes, every boulder casting a multicolored shadow. In the other direction, the outer ring system scratched a thin arch across the width of the sky, with several of the moons bright against a dusting of stars. There was Dione, which had its own satellite trailing at sixty degrees of arc in the same orbital path; there was the tiny crescent of Titan, lit not only by the Sun, but by the terraforming fusion lamps hung in equatorial orbit.
Baker wondered what it would be like when Janus was overtaken by its co-orbital moon, Epimetheus. Passing only fifty kilometers away, Epimetheus would eclipse Saturn and exchange a fraction of its momentum with Janus; the two moons would swap orbits and Janus would slowly accelerate away in the lower orbit. The orbital exchange happened every four years, and was not a stable configuration; in slightly under ten million years, the two moons would collide, and it was thought that the fragments would eventually coalesce into a single body.
He thought his plan through again. With the insurance of the cargo train, he was pretty sure that he could get out of this alive. The rest was as imponderable as ever, but he was confident that he could make some friends here. That was what he was good at, after all. Of course, he'd underestimated Jackson, and it was only pure dumb luck that she hadn't upgraded her net— otherwise, he was quite certain that she would have disposed of him as soon
as she had control of the scow. But Jackson wasn't the problem now. He imagined that she would be killed as soon as she walked into the habitat. Although it certainly increased his chance of survival, part of him— the fragmented bits of his old self— wished that he'd warned her.
The p-suit's life-system made comforting hums and soft hisses; it was like being inside a tent exactly his size.
Baker broke radio silence to try to talk with Berry, but the man was gurgling inside his mask, drunk or asleep, and wouldn't answer.
He tried that counting trick:
one potato, two potato, three potato, four
. Tested it against the system clock of his net, tried different intonations, couldn't get it to come out right. Maybe it was just a story Jackson had spun to draw him in. It didn't matter. He didn't need dumb tricks like that, not anymore.
Time passed. Baker had always been calm in the squeeze of danger— to his way of thinking, there was no sense in getting caught up in useless speculation; it was best to face any situation with an uncluttered mind. In any case, there was nothing he could do until either Jackson came back or Berry's mother came for him. He set up a couple of alarms on his p-suit's system and fell asleep.
And woke an hour later to find four pressure-suited figures kneeling by him, visors blankly reflecting the gray-brown moonscape. They were as small as children. A fifth figure was examining Jackson's missile launcher.
Baker tried to sit up, and discovered that his suit was bound with a thousand tough, tightly wrapped fibers. He squashed the first tremors of alarm and said as calmly as he could, "There's a couple of things you should know."

*

The ring of silver around the tented crater was a plantation of things like flowers: tough wiry stalks five meters tall and rising straight out of dusty ice, each bearing a single big, white dish-shaped bloom with a black cylinder protruding from its center. The dishes were all turned in one direction, toward the setting sun. It was pitch-black beneath the packed dishes, but Baker's captors carried him at the same fast gliding gait with which they'd crossed the open ground.
Just as he was carried out of the far side of the plantation, Baker thought he saw a flash at the horizon, and wondered if that had been the missile launcher. Then he and his captors plunged down a steep, terraced slope, following a path sketched in dabs of green fox fire. Baker didn't ask where they were taking him. He was just grateful that so far he had not been killed.
The slope became a tunnel, hung from floor to ceiling with a thousand stiff black curtains that must have formed a pressure lock, because the tunnel suddenly opened up at the lip of a huge bowl of greenery under a thousand brilliant lamps, with flocks of what looked like birds floating lazily at different layers in the air, Saturn a blank-faced giant peering in through the diamond tent that capped the vast space.
Baker's pressure-suited captors dropped him at the edge of the bowl and threw themselves over the drop, bouncing like balls from terrace to terrace and finally vanishing into a stand of tree ferns. Baker's bonds slowly dissolved, snapping apart like brittle elastic as he picked himself up.
A woman was moving toward him through the air above the green gulf, sitting on a throne borne up by what looked like cherubs.

*

She was not Sri Hong-Owen, but one of her daughters. She was young, golden-skinned and unselfconsciously naked. She had a tweak's etiolated build, her long arms and legs skinny but supple, her breasts no more than enlarged nipples on her prominent rib cage. A cloud of black hair floated around her narrow face.
When Baker asked her name, she smiled and said that no names were needed here, where all were one mind, one flesh. He asked then where her mother was, and the golden-skinned woman told him that she had moved on, which at first Baker took to mean
died
.
"Alder descended to the Earth to continue our mother's work there," the woman said, "and Berry went his own way. He is only our half-brother, and is weak-minded, but we love him anyway. Our mother would have killed him, we think, but she no longer needs to make small decisions like that, and we decided to show mercy."
"How many are you?"
Baker had unlatched the helmet of his p-suit and stood with it tucked under his arm, like an old-fashioned knight in front of his enthroned queen. The cherubs had flown away— they had little patience, the woman had said when they left, being full of the joy of life lived moment to moment.
"There are more than enough of us to deal with you or anyone else who tries to invade our kingdom," she told Baker now. "We have killed many in the last twenty years— spies, pirates, adventurers, the merely curious. But you are the first to think of kidnapping Berry, and you are the first to threaten our mother. How did you know?"
"Luck, I guess," Baker said, wondering what he was supposed to have guessed.
The woman leaned forward, gazing intently at him through her floating tangle of black hair. "Berry is not dead."
Her gaze compelled. Baker said, "No. No, not when I left him."
"Then you are luckier than you know," the woman said.
"What about Jackson?"
"Was that her name?"
"You killed her, didn't you? You should know she aimed a missile at this place."
"We dealt with it."
"Ah. I thought I saw an explosion."
"The one who tried to disarm it was killed."
"So you killed Jackson in return."
"No, we killed the woman because she threatened us. Any of us would sacrifice our lives for the good of the clade, but all of us would die to save our mother. We love her more than life itself. You should know that we are tracking the cargo train and have calculated its trajectory."
When Baker had briefly wrested control of the scow from Jackson, he had sent the cargo train on a trajectory that would end in a collision with Epi
metheus after three orbits of Saturn, less than twenty hours now. He said, "I was going to tell you about that. I don't mean any harm by it. I want to be friends. The cargo train— it's just insurance, that's all."
The woman made no gesture, but children appeared at various levels of the burgeoning greenery. No, not children; they were naked creatures the same size as his pressure-suited captors, so pale and skinny that they seemed partly transparent, like certain deep-sea creatures. They were quite sexless. Their heads were small and wedge-shaped, sloping straight back from skin-covered dimples where their eyes should have been; their ears flared out like bats' wings; their hands had only three fingers, spaced like a crane's grab. Four of them gripped the arms of Baker's p-suit with implacable strength.
"We will kill you slowly for your presumption," the woman said, "and our defense drones will destroy the cargo train."
Baker said, "I don't think you want to do that. If it's destroyed, the debris will still hit and do just as much harm, but if you leave it be, I can change its orbit once we've made a deal."
The woman shrugged. "It is unlikely that the impact will hurt our mother, for most of her is far underground. But it will damage her energy-gathering systems, and we cannot allow even that. You will change its orbit now."
Baker said stubbornly, "We can make a deal. That's why I'm here."
"No," the golden-skinned woman said serenely. "No bargains. Change the orbit of the cargo train and we may let you leave. Otherwise we will keep you here, alive and in great pain."
"You didn't kill me," Baker said. "Of course you want to bargain. I want to set up a trading agreement between your clade and my collective. You must have plenty of biological novelties, for instance. In exchange, we can supply you with trace elements, or anything else you might need. I did a little research and I know you deal exclusively with the private citizens who bankrolled this experiment. I bet my collective can offer you better supply contracts. And we can guarantee confidentiality."
"There will be no trade," the woman said. "We need nothing. Our mother made this garden. It is all we need. You will do as we ask."
"I have to be on the scow to do it," Baker said, "so you'll have to let me go anyway. There's plenty of time. I can show you the figures on the trade my collective does with the Titan terraforming project. Think it over. I mean no harm to your mother. I didn't know she was on Epimetheus. I thought she was here."
"She is not
on
Epimetheus," the woman said, "she is
becoming
Epimetheus. Think what you will do. I will return soon."
Cherubs whirled down and lifted the chair and the woman into the air. As she dwindled away, the workers released Baker and vanished into the greenery with unnerving swift silence.