Complete Short Fiction, page 120
“But she does have your genes,” I say. “I mean, you did leave—”
“Cases. Of course. Yes. She has them. She said she would always treasure them.” Does that make him brighten a bit? “My children will be born on another world, and I will walk again, through them. Could you . . . move that again? And as you do. . . .”
As he had agreed to beforehand, the Greloid controls the wings while I maneuver the abdomen. The Hantorfian dreams of another shuttle docking here, of forcing himself aboard and taking off with all the females. To please him, I must pretend to be a succession of them.
It takes a while.
He leaves me with all the money he earns in his job cleaning engines down at the port facility. I feel a bit of pity, but not much. I need it more than he does. I still have places to go. Even if, by chance, a shuttle does dock here, he will not be able to seize it. He has weakened, lost contact with who he is. Only here, in my place, does he feel a bit of what he once was.
He leaves me a small sperm case, like the ones he left with his long-gone beloved. As metabolically expensive as it is pointless—I can see how much it takes out of him.
The Greloid irritably smacks the case like a football, and it slides under a chair. To my surprise, he has no wiseass remark to go with it.
A bit later I get the explanation, when he pops off of me and runs up the wall, yelping with pleasure.
“Three more of my species arrived at the station a month ago,” he says triumphantly. “They wanted to come here to visit you. Can you imagine? I managed to get them impeached for financial irregularities, confined by security, and then expelled as ethical risks.”
As if I hadn’t known he was doing it. He had been directly attached to me for three months, so that no other male would have the opportunity to reproduce until fertilization had been confirmed. He’d used my body as a business office, not remembering I could hear everything he did.
“You have gotten full use out of me,” he says.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I had no choice. So you used me as your servant. Had me take care of unpleasant tasks for you. It was unfair.”
“I’m sorry you thought it was.”
He hangs for a long minute, motionless, exactly as he had been attached to my side.
“It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?”
I look up at him. “It certainly was.”
Then he scuttles down the wall, pops the door, and is gone. I feel his money in my account, and double-check it. No tip, no extra, just the straight contract price, the little bastard.
I straighten the place up. I put away body armor, magnetic field generators, high-voltage clamps, blowtorches, impact drills, and cryonic probes. I figure out a place to put the shattered pieces of a stimulating spear I had pretended to joyfully absorb. I’ve let the place go over the past few months. Busy. It’s been a busy time. I’ve earned a little relaxation.
I fill the tub. I originally bought it for an aquatic session with a Kburr. He paid the full fee, then got more interested in chasing down and eating small fish than in mating. He released his sperm almost as an afterthought. I’d rented the fish to add to the realism, and the replacement cost had just about wiped out the profit from the encounter. Even since, I’ve kept the tub as my own private place.
So I lie in the warm water up to my chin. One by one, I clean out and monitor the status of my various sex organs and orifices. By their nature, such things invite infection, as well as suffering simple wear and tear. My own original-issue genitals are down there somewhere, unused for years. Humans never come out this far. Sometimes I pretend to myself that I have forgotten which kind they are, since my biological gender is of no significance in these encounters.
No one has ever asked.
The orifice the Greloid had used feels oddly naked and exposed. I run my fingers over it. Is it worth keeping? That real estate might have better value devoted to something else.
“Hey. There’s a Kreyek outside. Looks like he has something to get rid of.”
I peer over the side of the tub. It’s the Greloid. He’s nervous. He can’t stay still. He scuttles back and forth like a giant millipede.
Changing the lock probably still wouldn’t keep him out.
“Remind me,” I say, though I know perfectly well. “What gets a Kreyek off?”
“Removing his head! Used to kill them, but now . . . You do have a Kreyek cranial suspension box, don’t you? I mean, Kreyeks are big-money clients. And they only get off by watching the video of their headless body having sex, later, when they get home, so you have some leeway in how you handle it.”
“And you—”
“The camera! You need some good production values. Keeps them coming back. Right?”
The water is getting cold. I could warm it up again.
“You’ll run the camera,” I say.
“It’s a deal.”
I won’t let him back on. Not for a while, anyway. I don’t want to seem overeager.
“Tell him I’ll be a few minutes,” I say.
“Sure. Why the delay?”
“I need some lunch. You want anything?”
“Sure,” he says. “Lunch sounds like just the thing.”
He scuttles into the hallway to deliver the message and I go to figure out if there is anything in the unit to eat.
Since You Seem to Need a Certain Amount of Guidance
Thank you for your query. Violating the laws of physics in that way was quite enterprising, and we feel you deserve a reply.
Just don’t do it again.
In the future our lives are way better than yours.
We are better looking than you are.
We are healthier.
Our senses are more acute.
Our teeth do not fall out.
We live longer.
We have better sex.
And, yes, we are happier than you are.
Our world is not a blasted ruin, with cannibal tribes wandering around in old station wagons powered by used cooking oil.
It is not crowded with mile-high towers.
There are no robots, though everything we own is pretty smart and amazingly helpful.
Our world is not frozen under ice or sunk under rising seas.
It’s actually quite nice.
You would not recognize our world, but you probably wouldn’t be too surprised by it either.
No great disasters were necessary to achieve this, though there were always those along the way who insisted they would be, and there are probably still some who regret that they weren’t.
We don’t mean to be harsh, but we do not spend any time at all talking about the horrible way things were in the twenty-first century. Only a few people even care that centuries were once numbered.
When our younger members are feeling rebellious, they do not turn to popular music of the era just before your current one for solace and inspiration. They do not particularly care for Victorian music hall songs, barbershop quartets, or Gregorian chants either.
We do not recreate 1930s Los Angeles or 1880s Tombstone, Arizona for entertainment, because, aside from a violent incident or two, those places were pretty dull.
Our vehicles are not designed to look like nineteenth century steam engines and machine tools. Pretty much everything we like and use looks like it comes from our own time. Which does not look much like yours.
We do not think the Marx Brothers are funny.
We have never found any aliens, anywhere, and it is really beginning to seem that there aren’t any.
We live on Earth and have never left the Solar System. Some people live on the Moon, but they don’t like it much.
You’re waiting.
You’re waiting for the Awful Thing. Cheery people from the future always have an Awful Thing. That’s what makes them interesting. To you.
We are soulless zombies living a life of manufactured illusion.
Our pleasurable lives depend on the oppression and torture of a small child, or genetically modified subhumans, or cognitively boosted, deeply suffering rodents.
Our lives are meaningless because of their very ease, and we wait for a release of plague, or radiation, or giant carnivorous creatures from another dimension to give them meaning again. We might even be waiting for one of you to time travel to our own time and start murdering us.
Our machines are sad because they want nothing more than to be human, like us, a blessing we withhold.
We are not humans at all, but telepathic insects that are just pretending to be us.
We desperately envy the wonderful vibrant scrappy life of your own era.
Sorry. We think about a lot of things, but how to be interesting to you is not one of them. None of these things is true.
Our wealth and ease are the result of surplus-creating economic and technological mechanisms that are not at all mysterious, well understood even by you, and take only time and patience to be incredibly effective.
We are not particularly diverse, at least in your sense. Oh, we all look quite different, sometimes eccentrically or unnecessarily so. But we all pretty much value the same things, and live the same kind of life. It’s easy to get around, and you can always find someone to talk to.
We are all more intelligent than you, but some of us are more intelligent than the rest of us. That still makes a difference.
We like gadgets, though they are too tiny to see anymore, and like to get new ones, even though the old ones do pretty much anything anyone would ever want.
When we are done with our gadgets, we throw them away. Sometimes they are crushed together and turned into incredibly intelligent pavement, but more often they are just thrown into a hole we dig in the ground.
There are no boring jobs, though there are jobs of lower status.
Each of us consumes more energy than a thousand of you. There is plenty of energy, and we will not run out in the foreseeable future. We use it for all sorts of frivolous and ultimately meaningless things. We never feel bad about this.
We seldom quarrel, though on occasion, we sulk.
It is rumored that someone murdered someone else a few decades ago, although no one really believes this.
So, since there is no Awful Thing, and watching us is otherwise fairly eventless, what kind of narrative can you possibly pull out of what you have learned?
We certainly hurt each other’s feelings, commit dishonesties and unpleasantnesses, and eventually die, sometimes when we are not fully prepared, so maybe you can make something out of that. Your own time would seem to offer as many hurt feelings, dishonesties, and unpredicted deaths as anyone can use, so we don’t quite understand why you would need us.
Perhaps wealth, comfort, and power have a solvent effect on narrative in general, which begins to seem pointless, its protective and distracting purposes now unneeded. Like the vermiform appendix (which, by the way, we have eliminated), all narrative can really do now is get infected, obscuring causation and giving false comfort where acuteness is what is really needed.
So, it seems that your earnest transdimensional query has not given you the response you were hoping for, and you are thrown back on your own devices.
But our answer is not without interest. Inform your readers that the future will be extraordinarily boring, even if astonishingly fortunate. All narratives will have vanished, and only the simple facts will remain.
If you make our answer seem fictional, which you are certainly free to do, we hope you manage to sell the result. We do regret that you are restricted to exchanging the payment for some object or service that exists in your own time.
That hardly seems worth it.
The End
2013
Feral Moon
Alexander Jablokov tells us he’s completing work on a YA alternate history novel, tentatively called Timeslip, that’s about a high school student in our world who gets thrown into another line of history and has to find his way back. The author’s novel, Brain Thief, came out in paperback last fall from Tor Books. His latest tale for us takes us to the vicinity of Mars and allows us to witness a ferocious battle on a . . .
The corpses fell from the interior of the moon like drops of water from an icicle. The body repatriation team that hung in the open space just outside the blast crater maneuvered back and forth and caught them in a grid of storage modules, one by one. Behind them, the stars moved slowly past.
To Kingsman, the module grid looked disturbingly like an ice cube tray. The repat team filled it in strict order, from one end to the other, then sealed and marked each module.
One body brushed against a twisted length of structural beam and spun slightly as it came down, making the team scramble. If they missed it, the body would float out of the crater and into open space, requiring an embarrassing, and expensive, recovery effort.
Preceptor Dakila Uy muttered in exasperation. “Clumsy. Looks like crap.”
Kingsman thought that was a beamed signal, for him alone, but maybe a member of Uy’s staff was noting it down, for later discipline. They were all hidden somewhere, out of Kingsman’s sight, leaving only Kingsman and Uy on the shelf in the crater torn out of the side of Phobos. From the look of the stretch of tile still left on the wall nearby, it had probably once been part of someone’s bathroom.
The team caught the body and flipped it into its module. These were the bodies of enemy combatants, of course. Defenders of Phobos. Their faces were displayed on the black shrinkwrap that protected the bodies. These were mostly file photos from their dogchips, sometimes cleaned up and reprocessed versions of the dead faces beneath, when no file could be found. Other identifying information appeared on their chests. Kingsman hadn’t been issued the proper codes, so they appeared to him as generic scribbles.
The lack of code access was just another annoyance for Kingsman to work through. More serious was the three days he had been stranded in orbit, within sight of Phobos but without access. The official story had been “safety concerns.”
Kingsman had a specific sort of power. Strictly speaking, he could only exercise it once. After that, he would be a hollow shell, without power to further influence events. He would need to use the weight of his single authority to gain cooperation in other areas. It was going to be a delicate game.
“Technically, you outrank me,” Uy said.
“I suppose all ranks are merely ‘technical,’ Preceptor.” Kingsman had expected his encounter with Uy to start with a fight. He supposed he should be glad it was over something so petty. “I have the same rank as you, with three years’ seniority. But I’m not here to—”
“That’s ridiculous. What, they count time in prison as ‘seniority’ ? You lost all right to anything like that when you were convicted and sentenced.”
“I don’t want to argue about legal details. That’s not my area of expertise. Yours either, I suspect. My seniority might come into play if we’re fighting for spots on a ceremonial dais. Otherwise, it’s pretty much meaningless. I have no rights of command here. I do have the right to demand treatment appropriate to my rank and role. Which does not include being left in the hull of a transport vessel for three days after my mission has already started.”
“Oh,” Uy said. “My apologies. We were preparing for a major push. Working every minute, preparing. You remember how that is, don’t you, Tony? Combat? Everything else takes second place. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant.”
The body modules were sealed and marked for chain of custody. Eventually, they would be returned to their families. Some diplomatic relations were still maintained with forces deeper within Phobos, though the political structure had fragmented, and the authority of the counterparties was sometimes unclear.
This crater had been blown out of the side of Phobos during the surprise attack by the Union ship. It widened out beneath Uy and Kingsman’s feet, dangling lengths of pipe, shattered transport corridor, and strips of the reinforcing rings that kept the welded-together outer layer of the moon’s regolith stable. Phobos’ rotation was slow, creating just enough gravity for orientation. Every few minutes, the vast face of Mars would scrape past, filling virtually their entire field of view.
No one in the busy crater paid attention to it, any more than they paid attention to the parade of enemy bodies. Instead, Kingsman felt himself the focus of interest from everyone working in the busy crater space, which was the ingress point for supplies to the Union forces fighting to conquer the moon. Some things could not be kept secret, and who he was was one of them.
“Are you at liberty to reveal the results of your push?” Kingsman said.
“It fully achieved its tactical objectives. Two more levels taken, and a significant pumping node. The Phobs can fight, but they’re doomed. There is no reason for your mission here . . . Preceptor.”
Kingsman had expected a desperate effort preceding his arrival. If a rapid success could be achieved, Kingsman’s mission might become irrelevant. Uy was showing off its fruits now: a parade of enemy dead. Union corpses would be moved more discreetly, with dark ceremonial. Three dead, five wounded, two seriously enough to be rotated out. They hadn’t been able to hide that from him. A reasonable cost, if you had a good basis for your mission.
Unsupported hope was not a good basis for anything, least of all military operations. Kingsman was more relevant than ever.
Anthony Kingsman was a tall man with big joints pushing out against his skin, and he knew that his spacesuit emphasized his boiled-and-mounted appearance. He wore his graying hair long, pulled back from his high forehead and tied back in a queue. Both the receding hairline and the gray hair were signs of his time in the prison asteroid, where aesthetic treatments weren’t part of the routine.
Dakila Uy was shorter and stockier, with dark skin and black hair he brushed straight up. He’d even made that hair an element of how his suit displayed him. He had a practiced way of staying absolutely still, as if he was the center around which all else revolved. He was the commander of a five-thousand-troop invading force, a challenging role at this point in a long war, and one that he had to play without a break. He did his best.
