Blonde Bombshell (19 page)

“Now that,” she said briskly, “was a one-hundred-per-cent human reaction. A machine wouldn’t have done that.”

“Your targeting scanners would appear to be malfunctioning,” he said. “You failed to allow for the effect of air resistance on
a
non-flexible projectile with a highly inefficient mass-to-surface-area ratio.”

The second nearest thing to hand was
a
desk stapler. Her targeting scanners, it turned out, were working just fine.

“Ouch,” he observed.

“Did that hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“There’s no need to be like—”

“Machines,” she pointed out, “don’t feel pain. They register sensations, but they don’t process them as ouch-that-hurt. And neither do probes. What would be the point?”

The fact that she’d had to explain it to him brought home to him the extent to which his medical condition was affecting his data-retrieval and processing capacity. “Oh,” he said.

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

“You could’ve just said, instead of throwing things at me.”

Lucky for Mark Twain that Lucy Pavlov favoured the empty-desk approach. There was nothing left to throw. “I’m right,” she said. “Aren’t I? You felt pain, therefore you are no longer a machine. Therefore, you’ve begun to evolve. Like I’ve done. Well?”

It was a good point — you could’ve hammered it into a planet and tethered stars to it — but it didn’t make any difference. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can’t just stop being what I was made to be. I’m a bomb. Like you.”

She sagged, as though all her bones had suddenly turned to overboiled pasta. “Go on, then,” she said. “Do it. Blow up.”

Does not compute. “What?”

“Blow up,” she repeated, slowly and clearly. “Well, why not? The only reason you haven’t detonated so far is, you’ve been checking out the Earth planetary defences to see what happened to me. Well, now you know. Here I am. Earth
has
no planetary defences. Get on with it.”

He actually did try. But it was just like when your foot’s gone to sleep, or you wake up and find you’ve been lying on your arm and it won’t move. He tried, and couldn’t.

“Are you jamming my control systems?”

She grinned. “Yes.”

“But that’s impossible. You can’t, you’re the same specification as me. You don’t have my access codes.”

She gave him a look of pure scorn. “I’m the greatest software engineer the world has ever seen. Simple 472-bit encryption like yours? I could get through that blindfold using a stick of celery.”

She was lying. She was only the greatest software engineer that
this
world had ever seen, which was a bit like saying so-and-so is the finest concert pianist ever to come out of eastern Antarctica. Four-hundred-and-seventy-two-bit encryption, on the other hand, was military spec on Homeworld, which was a long-winded way of saying infallible. The fact remained that he’d done his best to blow himself up, and failed. Without consciously deciding to, he’d already run a systems analysis and a basic functions diagnostic, and they’d both come up nominal. So, if it wasn’t a mechanical problem or a software glitch, it had to be something else.

She said softly, “Do you
want
to blow us both up?”

“No,” he said.

“Then don’t.”

“But—”

“No buts. And look at me when I’m talking to you.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. “I appear to be subject to a disruptive influence which renders me unfit for active duty,” he said. “In the circumstances, pending full analysis and repair at an authorised maintenance facility, I believe the responsible thing to do would be to decommission myself and disarm my warhead, to avoid the risk of my detonating inappropriately under the influence of corrupt and unreliable data. What do you think?”

She nodded. “Very sensible.”

“Of course,” he went on, “the type-6 probe designated Mark Twain really ought to stay online until the problem is resolved. To gather and assimilate data and review the situation generally.”

“Quite.”

“Not,” he added quickly, “that I’m suggesting I should attempt to repair myself, since that could lead to error and would almost certainly invalidate my warranty. Which means,” he added brightly, “I’ll just have to stay here quietly ticking over until a repair team turns up. There’s bound to be one along sooner or later. Agreed?”

“Agreed. It’s the only sensible course of action, if you ask me.”

There was a pause, but it wasn’t like the earlier ones. They looked at each other, acquiring countless gigabytes of valuable data. It was essential xenopsychological research. It was also most definitely better than work. They could easily have kept going for much longer than they did, but they were interrupted by a unicorn crashing through the ceiling.

They froze, and stared. It was a big unicorn, with a long, sharp horn. From where it was standing, it could have stabbed either one of them before they had a chance to move. There was something about its manner that suggested it wasn’t entirely friendly.

“Report,” it said.

30

Santa Barbara, California

Kevin Jotapian, age fifteen, was doing his history homework assignment.

He turned on his PayTech MT690, and while it was warming up and going through its asinine hi-there-how-are-you routine, he read the question “Were economic factors a significant cause of the American Civil War?”

He frowned, and read it again. A less acute mind would have had trouble with that one, but Kevin was nobody’s fool. In less than two minutes, he’d identified the salient keywords and typed them into Pavoogle. The screen flickered, and presented him with a bank of text. He scanned it, ran the cursor down the page, blocked what he needed, cut and pasted. Job done.

And a good job, too. Later, when the questions were asked, he was at a loss to account for what had gone wrong. The passage he’d selected had come from PavWiki, generally agreed to be an impeccable source. He’d read it — some of it, anyway — before saving and exiting. He’d even run StudentSpell 3.1, a PaySoft product that inserts random spelling mistakes and grammatical errors into downloaded text to achieve total authenticity. It had taken him an extra forty-five seconds, but Kevin was by way of being a perfectionist. His parents worried about him sometimes.

Even so, in spite of all his efforts, what the teacher saw when she came to mark his assignment was:

> This isn’t working.

> Don’t be so impatient. It’s not like I’ve got a lot to work with.

> Sorry.

> That’s all right. Now, if x = 45/7(6y
+/43n),
let p equal the sum of the inverse cube of

> You already did all that.

> Yes, I know. You interrupted me. I lost the thread. If x =

> We shouldn’t even be here. What if somebody comes?

> I used to teach at this school. Nobody ever uses this space. Now will you please be quiet and let me
think?

> Um, you can’t. You haven’t got anything to think with.

> Thank you, Mr Tact. That’s why I keep losing my place when you keep interrupting. Now then, for the last time. If x = 45/7(6y
+/43n)
let p

And so on, eventually degenerating into a slough of mathematical symbols. Back it went to Kevin, with the annotation
No good, do it again,
which puzzled him mightily, since what he saw when he called it up on his screen was exactly, word for word, what he’d put there.

He thought about it for six consecutive minutes, then took another look at the question: “Were economic factors a significant cause of the American Civil War?”

Somewhere under the pile of used clothing at the foot of his bed was a pen. He eventually found a sheet of paper in the trash. It smelled a little of steak, but he couldn’t help that.

With the pen, slowly and carefully, he wrote his name, and then the question, which he underlined. Then he started a new paragraph, and wrote:
No.
Then he read it through, the whole thing, from top to bottom. Then he crossed out
No
and substituted
Maybe.

Kevin got an A for his assignment and is now the Hardwicke Professor of History at the University of California at Sacramento.

31

?????

The fiery red heat of Homeworld’s binary suns had shaped Ostar society rather more than they cared to acknowledge. At noon on Coincidence Day, when both suns hung together in the sky like two cherries on one stem, nothing moved on the surface. The herds of
p’fift
made themselves tunnels in the three-metre-high
k
’
pt
grass, while their herders retreated to the hills and found safety in deep caves, or huddled and panted in the meagre shade of an
ulp’rtr
tree. In the air-conditioned cities, it was just possible to ignore the twin noon, provided your office had no window, but the streets below were utterly deserted until the Dog had passed its zenith.

In the magnificent city-centre building occupied by the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes, the Executive Subcommittee on Human Welfare was in emergency session.

“My boys are down there,” the chairman repeated forcefully. “If they blow their cover and the government find out what they’ve been up to, I wouldn’t give a bent credit for their chances.”

There was a brief, awkward silence. Then an elegant middle-aged female in a diamanté collar said, “Yes, but that’s hardly likely to happen, is it? As far as they know, only one Ostar’s ever set paw on the surface. They have no idea what we’ve been doing. They think we’re just a collection of dotty old women shaking collecting tins on street corners.”

“Besides,” a sharply dressed young male on her left added, “with all due respect, our paws are tied. They’ve got two
R’wfft-
class flying bombs in planetary orbit, all ready to go; we have absolutely no idea what’s preventing the second one from detonating; our only asset is an unreliable human drunk; and now it would appear that your
operatives”
(it just went to show how much venom you could pack into a simple noun if you really tried hard) “have managed to lose him. We’re hardly spoiled for choice, are we?”

“It’s too early,” the chairman said, and if stone walls could talk, they’d sound just like that. “If we break the story now, the public will simply shrug and say, so what? Look, we agreed all this. Timing is crucial.”

“Fine,” the female snapped. “Alternatives? You have our full attention, Mr Chairman.”

“We must attempt to disarm the bomb.”

For something essentially negative, silence can be eloquent and richly textured. This one said,
The old man’s finally lost it,
and smirked. “You mean,” said a middle-aged male with long trailing ears,
“your sons
should attempt to disarm the bomb.”

“Yes.”

“Your sons who managed to lose the human scientist inside a small box.”

The chairman growled, and the fur on the back of his neck rose. It should have been enough. It wasn’t. “That’s right,” he said. “My two highly trained and motivated sons, who volunteered for this incredibly dangerous mission, and whose father happens to be the alpha male of this committee. Would you like me to put it to the vote?”

The middle-aged male just smirked at him, and the chairman couldn’t help but be reminded of the old Dirt proverb about giving someone enough rope. Still, too late now.

“Our priority,” he said in an oppressively calm voice, “is to save the humans. If my sons fail to disarm the bomb, we’ll still have the option of going public, as you suggest. Also, I will immediately resign as chairman of this committee. Will that do? Let’s get this sorted out, shall we? It’s too hot to argue.”

“I think we can dispense with a formal vote,” the elegant female said smoothly. “Now then, as to timescale. Shall we say forty-eight hours, local time?”

The chairman shrugged. “Why not?”

“And in forty-eight hours, if they haven’t succeeded, you’ll step down.”

“Agreed,” the chairman growled.

“In that case,” the female said (and under the table, where nobody could see, her tail was wagging furiously), “I suggest we adjourn until the day after tomorrow.”

After the rest of the committee had gone, the chairman stood alone in the centre of the room. It could, he felt, have gone better. His sons, amiable boys and desperately anxious to please, but not the sharpest teeth in the jaw, were almost certainly going to die, alone on a distant planet far from their own kind. Everything he’d worked for was about to collapse in ruin, and an entire alien civilisation would be wiped out. Worse still, he’d have
lost.
Even worse than that, his enemy would have won. On the other three paws— He tried to finish the sentence, but nothing would fit. He went back to the table, switched on his computer and put through a call. It was long-distance — very long-distance — so he kept it short. Then, since there was nothing else he could do, he retired to a corner of the room, turned round three times, lay down and went to sleep.

32

Novosibirsk

“You ate it.

 “Sorry.”

“You ate the computer.”

“I couldn’t help it,” his brother replied sadly. “It was the smell.”

In spite of everything, the senior non-werewolf couldn’t find it in his heart to blame him. Even though they’d had the air-conditioning on Maximum Chill, it hadn’t taken the octopus long to progress from mature to ripe, and thence to a state guaranteed to fill any canine nose with unendurable longing. For an Ostar, from a planet where every beach is lined with racks of dead seagulls mouldering to gourmet perfection, it had all been too much.

“What about the transtator coils and the hyperspace inversion field chips? I was up all night building those.”

“You mean the crunchy bits?”

The senior brother sighed. “You can’t have eaten half a million credits’ worth of microcircuitry,” he said. “For one thing, they’d be completely indigestible.”

“I know.” His junior sibling looked at him out of his great big brown eyes. Over his shoulder, the elder brother noticed a little heap of organic matter on the carpet in the middle of the room. It was still steaming slightly.

“Wonderful,” the senior brother said crisply. “I had to dismantle both our neutron blasters, the spare communicator and the backup teleport key to get the parts to make up that lot. Now we’re completely cut off from our ship.” He pulled an expression that only a human face could have been contorted into. “For all the good it can do us, we might as well not
have
a ship up there. Unless I can jury-rig replacement parts out of the local junk, we’re screwed, you know that?”

“I was hungry,” his brother pointed out. “And human food…”

It was a fair point. Thanks to the transmutation field they both had human stomachs and digestive systems, but the signals the human taste buds relayed went to Ostar brains. “I hate this place,” the elder brother said with feeling.

Junior grinned feebly. “Sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Senior replied, with the exasperated sigh of elder brothers everywhere. “We can get another octopus, and with a bit of luck we might be able to salvage— Oh shit.”

“What?”

“The transceiver’s beeping.”

They looked at each other. That could only mean one thing: more instructions from home.

“Your turn.”

“No it isn’t.”

“I answered it the last time.”

“Yes, but you just ate—”

“You’re the eldest.”

An unanswerable point. “Halfway across the galaxy just to get away from the old bastard, and he won’t leave us— Hello? Dad? Really great to hear from you. Look, it’s going really well, we’ve nearly—”

After that, he said very little, just the mumbles and cheeps of someone failing to get a word in edgeways. Finally he said, “Yes, Dad. Yes, right. Will do. Love to Mum,” winced, and flicked the toggle to cut the power.

“Well?”

Senior looked away. “The good news is,” he said, “it doesn’t matter that you ate the computer.”

“Well?”

“Our orders,” Senior said, without expression of any kind, “are to teleport on to the missile vehicle in planetary orbit and disarm the warhead.”

“What? You must be—”

“And we’ve got forty-eight hours to do it. Failing which, Dad’s going to tell everything he knows to the newsweb, which means the government’ll know for sure we’re here.”

“What?”

“Quite,” Senior said with feeling. “There was a reason. Politics, I guess. Can’t say I took much of it in.”

“Go on board the
bomb?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll never make it,” Junior yelled. “There’s defence systems, anti-teleport scramblers, EM forcefields. If we make it through them, we’ll be going back to Ostar in a bottle. Or rather we won’t, because the bomb’ll blow and we’ll be vaporised. A crack special forces team with physics doctorates couldn’t get aboard that thing. We’re—”

“Screwed, yes.” Senior nodded grimly. “On the other hand, Dad did sort of make it clear we don’t have any say in the matter. No excuses. “My brother ate my homework” isn’t going to cut it this time.”

They shared a long, silent look. There are things language just can’t say.

“Oh well,” Junior said at last. “I’d just like to say, being on this mission with you… It’s been fun.”

“Thanks, bro.”

“I’d like to say that,” Junior went on, “but I can’t, because I promised Mum I’d always tell the truth. Actually it’s been hell, it’s been one disaster after another, and it’s all your fault.”

“Me?
Screw that. I’m not the one who lost the human.”

“I’m not the one who thought the Eiffel Tower was a very tall lamp—post.”

“You ate the computer.”

“You said that didn’t—”

“I was trying,” Senior said bitterly, “to be nice. Of course it matters. If we’re going to stand any chance at all of getting aboard the bomb, we’re going to have to hack into its teleport, since we can’t use ours any more.” Pause for significant silence; waste of time. “We need a
really
good computer.” He made a combination sighing-growling noise. “We’ll just have to build another one.”

“I’m not going back to that Sergei’s place. I don’t think the people in there were right in the head. They were acting really weird, you know?”

Senior nodded. “We’ll get one from the fish market,” he said. “Doesn’t seem to make any difference if they’re dead anyway. Correction:
you
get one from the fish market, while I stay here and try and fix up the circuit blocks you ate.”

Junior had the grace to look guilty. “Sorry.”

“You should be.” He crossed the room, knelt down beside the small heap of half-digested octopus and machine parts, and sniffed. “You know how Mum used to say, ‘Don’t play with that, you don’t know where it’s been’?”

“Mhm.”

With the tip of a pencil, Senior probed the nearest mound and teased out a small, glittering crystal. “In this case,” he said, “I think I’d have been happier not knowing. Are you still here?”

Junior left quickly, while Senior spent a fairly wretched ten minutes retrieving everything he could salvage and wiping the bits clean with a piece of toilet paper. He put them all together, looked at them sadly and shook his head. In spite of what his father thought of him, he was a competent engineer with a flair for improvisation, but this mess was too far gone. His brother, bless him, had chewed up the #5170 transtator, and bitten the calibration relay in half. There was a #5170 in the main communications transceiver, but if he cannibalised that they’d have no way of contacting Homeworld. With the proper equipment, he might just be able to bodge a bypass for the relay, but the proper equipment was hundreds of light-years away. It might just be possible to do without the relay altogether, but that’d mean— He made a sad whimpering noise. Nobody had ever called him too clever by half, but that was exactly what he was. He was clever enough to jury-rig the calibration without the relay, but that would mean that, once they’d passed through a teleport beam regulated by a computer lacking said relay, there’d be a 0.1 per cent chaotic anomaly in their biomolecular patterns. You could live with 0.1 per cent, if you were lucky and weren’t too fussed about the risk of waking up one morning to find you’d grown an extra ear, but there were certain things you most definitely couldn’t do. One of them was pass yourself through a biotransmutation field — which was what an Ostar who’d turned himself into a human would have to do in order to turn himself back into an Ostar. Bottom line: if they used the rig to beam themselves on to the missile using the missile’s own teleport, when the mission was over they’d be stuck as humans for the rest of their lives.

Senior picked up the bitten-through relay and laughed. When he was just a pup, he used to look at Jumble, the family’s pet human, and wish he was a human too. After all, humans had all the fun. People fed them and played with them, took them for walks (Dad always found time to walk Jumble; his sons were a lower priority when it came to time management), cuddled them and gave them treats, and never yelled at them, even when they did something really bad. I wish I could be a human, he’d thought, instead of a rotten lousy Ostar.

Someone, he couldn’t help thinking, had sharp ears, a long memory and a really nasty sense of humour.

Too clever by half. The idea of doing without the relay wouldn’t have occurred to an incompetent mechanic, or if it had it’d have been sent packing. But he could do it; and because he could, he knew that he must. In which case, assuming that by some miracle they survived and managed to get the bomb defused, what would the future hold for the pair of them? If they went home— Well, the GSETDB would look after them, presumably, after a fashion. People would be understanding. Arrangements would be made. But it’d either be a lifetime in a quiet place a long way from anywhere, with no visitors apart from scientists and dutiful family, or else an existence as a circus turn (come and look, he can talk and walk on all fours, just like a real person!). Or they could stay here, on this dismal little planet, and be
animals
for the rest of their lives.

The only comfort, he thought as he started work on the coils, was that their chances of survival were slimmer than size zero. Defuse the bomb, son. Sure, Dad, and when I’ve done that I’ll mow the lawn and put out the trash. How could he
do
that to them?

Junior came back with an octopus. It was bigger than the last one, and the early stages of decomposition actually increased the conductivity of the copper salts in its nervous system. If only Junior hadn’t crunched up the parts, he could’ve built a computer that would’ve put them in with a chance. Even as it was, the extra capacity would give him an additional two, possibly three decimal places of precision when it came to penetrating the missile’s shield modulations; an important advantage, which meant he’d now be trying to find the gaps with a needle rather than a carrot tied to a stick (but still blindfold, wearing boxing gloves, upside-down and facing the wrong way). Marvellous, he thought. The less incentive I have to succeed, the better my chances get of succeeding.

“How’s it going?” Junior asked.

“Could be worse. Pass me that probe, will you? No, not that one, the other one.”

“This?”

“Yup.”

“I’m really sorry,” Junior said. “And about the Eiffel Tower. You weren’t to know.”

“Thanks.”

“And it has been fun. Really.”

Senior grinned. “Liar.”

“Well, yes. But it wasn’t your fault.”

He touched the head of the probe to a circuit block and heard the tiny click of closing shunts. Fine work, though he said it himself. Too clever by half? Make that three quarters.

“Will it be OK?” Junior asked.

He thought carefully about his answer. He really ought to tell him. After all, the kid had a right to know. On the other hand, since it was still overwhelmingly likely that they’d die in the attempt, why upset him needlessly? If they survived, he’d tell him then.

Very carefully, he inserted the electrodes into the octopus’s head. The tips of the tentacles twitched, and the eyes started to glow green. “Yes,” he said.