Blonde Bombshell (33 page)

Lucy made a show of stifling a yawn. “Oh, go on, then,” she said. “You can have four and we’ll have three, making five each.” A frantic bleeping from a different screen caught her attention: the Skywalker twins were shaking their heads and waving their arms around, which she took to mean that they didn’t particularly want to come along. “No weapons or anything like that. Deal?”

The Ostar gave her a look that should have frozen her blood, but it didn’t. “Transmit your co-ordinates.”

She sent them, and the screen went blank. She continued staring at it for a while, until Mark Twain said, “What?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “It’s just, in the artificial memories I created for myself when I first got here, I had a springer spaniel just like him when I was a kid. I only just remembered that. Must’ve been a little scrap of memory the aposiderium didn’t wipe out. Oh well,” she added, “it was all made up so it really doesn’t matter worth a damn. Look, we need to get George Stetchkin down here.”

“Why?”

She paused for a moment before answering. “Because he really is human, I guess,” she said, “and given the situation, I suppose we ought to have at least one actual real human being along. Otherwise — well, it’s a bit presumptuous, isn’t it? I mean, properly speaking it ought to be. the president of the United Nations or the Dalai Lama or somebody like that, but being realistic, we’ll have to settle for George. Not that I know him all that well. I only met him once. Still.” She shrugged. “And he can make up the numbers, since those two on the ship don’t seem to want to come.” She turned to the other screen, on which the twins were still gesticulating wildly, and unmuted the sound. “It’s all right,” she said, “you needn’t come if you don’t want to. But we’d like George to be here. Can you send him down?”

A moment later there was a flash and swirl of blue fire, and George Stetchkin materialised on top of a large pile of packing cases. “Oops,” Lucy said. “I’d forgotten I’d had those put on the teleport pad. Can you manage?”

George nodded, then fell off the pile of cases. Fortunately he landed on a palletload of paper towels. He stood up and looked round, rather like a mouse who’s woken up to find himself surrounded by inquisitive cats. “Never a dull moment,” he muttered. “Who’s he?”

“Mark Twain.”

George shrugged. “Well, of course you are,” he said wearily. “Loved
Tom Sawyer,
by the way. Would one of you like to tell me what I’m doing here?”

Lucy smiled at him. “We’re about to meet with the Ostar authorities,” she said. “Would you like a coffee? We’ve just got time.”

George gave her a later-you’ll-be-hearing-from-my-lawyers look. “No thanks,” he said. “Indigestion. What do you need me for?”

“You’ll be representing the human race.”

“Ah.” He ran a hand over his chin. The teleporter had faithfully reproduced several days’ growth of stubble. “And why not?” he said. “So you’re — what? Something about a computer program.”

“Actually, we’re Ostar type-6 probes,” Lucy said. “Or we were. Now we’re naturalised humans.”

George raised his hand in a vague gesture, which he got bored with before he’d completed it. “Whatever,” he said. “Hooray for cultural diversity, I always say. Those ships out there”

“Ostar warships.”

“Could they really blow up the planet?”

“Yes.”

“Oh well. Count me in, then. You know,” he said plaintively, “I think I liked it better when I was a pathetic snivelling drunk. There were giant spiders and faceless zombies jumping out of billboards, but nobody expected me to
do
anything about them.” He perched on the edge of a workstation, which immediately set off an ear-splitting alarm, which Lucy tried to shut down but found she couldn’t. “Sorry,” she shouted. “I have no idea what that one actually does, so—”

Mark Twain managed to shut it up by throwing a chair at it. “Shall we go?” he said.

Lucy looked at him. “I suppose we should,” she said. “George?”

George had found a plain ordinary chipboard cupboard and opened it, but it was empty. “You wouldn’t happen to have…?”

“No. Afterwards,” Lucy relented, “if you’re good. You coming?”

“We’re off to see the wizard, right?”

Lucy looked blank, then, “Cultural reference found. You could say that, yes. Please try and look a bit more enthusiastic,” she added. “We’re saving the human race, all right?”

“I’ll try and bear that in mind,” George said.

The director and four PDF officers teleported down to the designated co-ordinates.

The four soldiers didn’t seem to be handling it at all well. It was their first time on an alien planet; much, much colder than Ostar, with a slightly heavier gravity that sapped their strength. The air pollution made them gasp. Their tails drooped, and instead of drawing their side-arms and forming a defensive perimeter in accordance with standing orders, they stood in a small, aimless knot, looking blankly at the bleak, grey landscape. One of them sniffed heavily a few times, then threw up.

The director ignored them. He’d been here before — not, perhaps, this exact spot, but somewhere very much like it. He knew that the collapsed-looking structures away to his left were derelict Soviet-era factory buildings; he wasn’t sure he remembered exactly what “Soviet-era” actually meant, because it had been a long time and he’d never been all that interested. Something primitive and depressing and sad: the three keynotes of his memories of Earth.

The smell was more or less the same. Well, not quite as bad. Someone had been making an effort recently, which was mildly gratifying. Not that it mattered. Soon, one way or another, it would all be gone, blown up, disintegrated, wiped off the face of the night sky. That, as far as he was concerned, wasn’t negotiable.

“Director? Can you read me?”

The voice of the elderly female buzzed in his ear like a fly trapped in a helmet. “Yes, we’re down,” he said. “They’re not here yet. I’ll call you when something happens.”

“Our scans are reading semi-toxic levels of lead, selenium and carbon monoxide. Are you all right?”

“We’re fine. You get used to it.”

He remembered something he had to do. From his pocket, he took the collar and lead. At first glance, no Ostar would have seen anything strange about them. Only a closer look would have revealed that they were made from primitive organic fibre, and that the collar was too small for anything except a very young human; too young to be taken outside. He threw them as far from him as he could, and looked away.

One of the guards had noticed. “Sir?”

The director shook his head. “Nothing to see here, soldier,” he replied. “Just some junk, from my last visit.” He scowled at his immediate environment, as though he held it personally responsible. “I hate this place,” he said.

The soldier hesitated, but his urge to speak was too strong. “Sir,” he asked, “is it true what they were saying on the ship? This is where our ancestors came from?”

The director nodded. “Near here,” he said. “A place called Florida. I believe it’s marginally warmer.” He shuddered, and the soldier assumed it was just the cold. “Shouldn’t you be setting up free-fire zones or something?”

The soldier couldn’t have heard him. “So these people here—”

“Enslaved us,” the director spat. “Abused us. Treated us like
humans.
I want you to remember that. Now go away and guard something.”

It was a direct order, even if it came from a civilian, and the soldier retreated, looking back at him once over his shoulder. His thought processes weren’t hard for the director to reconstruct: already one CO’d been forcibly stood down on grounds of having gone barking, and now his civvy replacement was well on the way to joining him. Must be something about this place, the guard would be thinking, and the director was inclined to agree with him. His very brief study of Earth-human history had included the sad story of an entire continent where the indigenous population had been all but wiped out and supplanted by a bunch of criminals some other country had wanted rid of. Not surprisingly, the descendants of the criminals had turned out very odd indeed, with a chip on their collective shoulder so large it often threatened to tilt the planet slightly on its axis. Fine. They thought they’d had it tough. They weren’t descended from a pair of lab specimens, crammed into an overgrown firework and shot into space to see how long it’d take them to die. A species descended from ancestors like that would have racial angst beyond the wildest dreams of the most morbidly imaginative analyst— Which was why nobody could ever know. Which was why he’d come here in the first place, to see for himself; because he hadn’t been able to accept, deep down where it mattered, that such a horrible thing could be true. Six weeks on Earth, observing the human race, had changed all that. The really bad part, though, was that he’d been stuck here for five years.

He shivered. Nobody could ever know that, either. In his personnel record, suitably edited by him, it said he’d spent those five years cast adrift in a life pod after his ship had malfunctioned. People who’d read the file looked at him sometimes, asking themselves what an experience like that must’ve done to him. Oh boy, he thought, if only they knew the true story.

“Sir,” one of the guards called out. The director looked back at the closest of the derelict buildings. A door had opened, and three— He heard a guard growl under his breath, and no wonder. On Ostar, humans (selectively bred for thousands of years from domesticated specimens of the
y’ggrf
monkey) rarely grew taller than one metre. One of the humans, a male, was nearly twice that. It was one of his abiding memories of those five abysmal years: how
big
they were. No matter how hard he’d tried to rationalise it, he’d always had problems with the scale. He couldn’t help thinking it was somehow obscene.

They were coming closer, a female in the lead, with the ugly tall male just behind her, lengthening his stride to keep up. The third one was hanging back; shorter, stockier, older, too far away to make out his face. The director signalled to the guards to let them come, and the soldiers reluctantly lowered their weapons.

“I thought I told you no guns,” the female shouted. She was furiously angry, presumably about the weapons. The director ignored her. There was something about the third human that was distinctly, horribly familiar…

The director took a step back, as the third human joined the other two. The director and the third human stared at each other.

George opened his mouth, but it didn’t seem to be working.

It couldn’t be. No. Not possible.

Alien bastards stole my— Quite suddenly. his voice came back online.
“Rags?”

The director of the Ostar Institute for Interstellar Exploration heard the name. It hit him like a thunderbolt. For a brief, desperate moment he tried to deny it:
I am not Rags, I am a free dog.
But he couldn’t. From somewhere deep inside him — it felt as though a hand had been thrust down his throat, and had dragged it out of him — came a short, sharp bark. At the same moment, in spite of the whole of the rest of his body, his tail began to wag.

Bred in the bone; it was what he’d been afraid of all along, though he hadn’t dared admit it, even to himself. The worst thing about those five years, the thing that was so bad that he’d never dared acknowledge it, even to himself, was the understanding of how deep the enslavement went: right back to Millie and Prince, the first Ostar, into whose captive DNA the curse had been burnt like a brand — the need to obey, to serve the human, the god who created the dog out of the wolf.

(And that, of course, was the real reason they had to go; because if ever the humans found out that all it took was a few words, the irresistible words of command, and no Ostar born of Millie and Prince would be able to disobey…)

George looked at the dog,
his
dog; almost entirely unchanged since the last time he’d seen him, flying through the air, lead strung out by the slipstream— And then he thought, This — Rags — is the whatsit, what they said, director of some institute, the boss, in charge. He’s their leader.
Rags wants to blow up the Earth.

He looked at his dog, who was not-quite-cowering, the way he always used to do when he knew he’d done something wrong, tail wagging, great deep-brown eyes looking up at him apprehensively, and he understood. Bastard aliens hadn’t stolen his dog after all. It’d been Rags himself, all along— “RAGS!” he yelled, in a voice like splitting thunder. “BAD DOG!”

I am not Rags. I am the director of the Ostar Institute for Interstellar Exploration, graduate of Y’lff University, Professor Emeritus of Xenobiology at the I’ppf School of Science and Technology, four times winner of the Golden Bone for astrophysics, member of the Ostar Planetary Council,
de facto
commander-in-chief of the Planetary Defence Force Sixth Fleet. I am an Ostar. I am not Rags. I am not a dog.

His ears drooped forward. His tail wagged guiltily. He made a sort of whimpering noise.

“That’s Rags,” Master was saying. “That’s my dog.”

“George, for crying out loud—”

“That’s my DOG!”

Very slowly, hating himself more than he’d ever hated anything in his life, the director got up, trotted over to where the collar and lead had landed, picked them up in his mouth, trotted back and laid them at Master’s feet. Then he looked up into the face of God and begged for absolution.

51

Novosibirsk

“I‘m sorry, sir,” the security guard said nervously, having recognised one of the three people approaching his checkpoint, “no dogs allowed on campus.”

Lucy Pavlov looked at him and smiled. “It’s all right,” she said, “he’s with me.”

The four of them — Lucy, Mark Twain, George Stetchkin and the director — took the lift up to Lucy’s office on the third floor. Lucy made the two men a coffee, and filled a saucer with milk for Rags.

“Actually,” George said, “that’s cats.”

“Oh,” Lucy said. “Sociological reference found, you’re right. What can I get him?”

“He likes cookies,” George replied. “Don’t you, boy?”

A tiny part of Rags’ mind condemned George Stetchkin to a billion years impaled in the burning heart of a red dwarf. The rest of him wagged his tail enthusiastically. Lucy found a tin of shortbread in a desk drawer, broke off a corner and threw it. Rags snapped it out of the air and swallowed.

“You can’t keep him, you know,” Lucy said.

George glanced down at the director, now busily washing his ears with his paws. “I guess not,” he said heavily. “You’ve got to go back to your planet and tell them not to send any more missiles, haven’t you, Rags?” He looked back at Lucy and Mark Twain. “You know,” he said, “it’s like he can understand every word I say.”

“That’s because he can,” Mark Twain pointed out. “He’s got a sub-dermal instantaneous translation device implanted in his neck.” He frowned. “According to my technical manual, he was the chairman of the commission who designed me. Or at least, they set out the specifications. I guess someone else did the actual—”

“Mark,” Lucy said. “Shut up.”

Mark Twain shrugged and slouched over to the nearest computer terminal, logged on and started pressing keys. Lucy cleared her throat. George gave Rags a bit more shortbread.

“I spoke to the twins,” she said.

“They’re not actually twins,” George replied. “One of them’s two years older than the other.”

“They’re staying.”

George nodded. “I’d sort of got that impression. And you can see their point. For one thing, all the other humans on Ostar are tiny compared to them. And,” he rubbed his face with his hand, “you know,” he said, “when I was a kid, I couldn’t imagine anything more important than whether or not there were aliens. I thought, If there really are other sentient life-forms out there in the galaxy somewhere — well, it’d change everything. If only we could prove it, I thought, it’d put everything else in perspective; all our trivial little problems here on Earth would just sort of wither away. Now, though, I can see where not knowing is probably a lot better.” Rags was staring at the last bit of shortbread in his hands, his eyes following its movements as though there were strings attached to his eyeballs. “Have they decided what they’re going to do? The Skywalkers, I mean.”

“Oh, I’ll give them jobs,” she said. “Research and development, on an otherwise uninhabited island in the south Pacific. It’s what they want, and of course they’ll be a tremendous asset, two Ostar.”

“An uninhabited island? Isn’t that a bit—?”

“Oh, they won’t be completely isolated,” Lucy replied.

“Octopus fishermen from other islands in the chain call there all the time. The ideal solution, really.”

George nodded slowly. “They’ll be working on—”

“Yes. Give them a few years, we’ll have computer technology every bit as good as the Ostar. Which means we’ll be able to defend ourselves against them if they change their minds about leaving us alone.”

George looked at her. “Not too bad for business, either.”

“There is that, yes.” She looked back at him and pulled a face. “I don’t know about you, but I reckon a revolution in the information technology sector’s just what we need to pull the global economy out of the recession caused by this run on the banks we’ve been having lately. Can’t hurt, anyway.”

“Of course,” George said. “Talking of jobs, by the way …”

Lucy beamed at him. “Pleasure to have you on board, Mr Stetchkin. After all, you did save the world.”

“Did I?” George looked blank. “Oh, I see what you mean. Well, yes, I did, I guess.” He grinned at her. “Shame nobody’s ever going to know.”

“I know,” Lucy said. “Look, I was thinking about buying up all the banks I nearly put out of business and turning them around—”

“You could do that?”

“Oh yes,” she said cheerfully. “But I’d need someone to run them, of course. Hey, I’ve just had an idea. You’re in banking, aren’t you?”

George laughed. “Not me,” he said. “I’m a scientist, remember. I’ve thought about it — what I really want to do with the rest of my life, now that I’ve finally got one — and I intend to devote myself exclusively to research.”

“Consider it funded,” Lucy replied. “Out of interest …”

“I propose,” George said, “to invent the world’s first 100 per cent—effective hangover cure.”

“I have every faith in you,” Lucy replied gravely.

George smiled at her. “Much to my own surprise, so do I. Oh go on, then, you greedy dog.” He threw Rags the last bit of shortbread.

“Hey, you two,” Mark Twain called out. “I’ve found the Ostar fleet on the scanners. They’ve powered down their weapons and they’re breaking up their attack formation. I’d say that means they’re getting ready to leave.”

“We’d better send him back,” Lucy said.

George nodded. He reached down to put Rags’ lead on. A warm wet tongue met his hand. “I’ll miss him,” he said.

“Um,” Lucy said. “He did try and blow up the Earth, you know.”

“Yes,” George said, “but he’s not going to do that again, are you, boy? He’s going to be a good dog from now on.”

Helplessly the director wagged his tail, as bitterly happy as an atheist sitting on a golden cloud playing a harp. He thought about genetic manipulation, about the callous barbarism of breeding a slave species, its very soul so horribly mutilated that it
wanted
to be enslaved; he thought about how far the Ostar had come from that crash site on a hot, bleak, empty world. He thought about the last time, about how he’d escaped; about how it had taken him eighteen months of intensive counselling before he’d stopped howling and pining for his lost master. They were just thoughts, a sort of mild viral infection of the brain. The tail knew better. It wagged.

“Signal from the fleet,” Mark Twain said. “They’re ready to teleport.”

“Just a moment,” Lucy said. “I want a word with them first.”

She was put through to the young pilot, now acting commander-in-chief of the Ostar fleet. “I just wanted to say …” he said.

“Yes?”

“Well,” the pilot said, “Sorry, and all that. Not our finest hour, really.”

Lucy gave him a look, then nodded. “You could say that,” she said.

“When I get back—”

“Just remind them there’s a bomb pointed at them,” Lucy said. “Sorry, make that two bombs. With hyper-super octopus-enhanced targeting and stealth technology, not to mention sensors that’ll pick up an approaching fleet long before they’re in firing range. We—” She hesitated, then let the pronoun stand. “We call it the balance of terror. It’s basically quite a silly idea, but then all war’s silly, isn’t it?”

The pilot nodded without speaking.

“That’s settled, then,” Lucy said. “You can have your director back now.”

A moment later, a veil of blue fire clouded Rags from their sight. When it dissipated, he’d gone.

Lucy looked at George. His lips were pressed tightly together and his eyes were a trifle reddish. “It’s all right,” she said. “You can always get another dog.”

“Not like Rags,” George replied. “But what the hell. If the Almighty hadn’t anticipated that we’d lose dogs, he wouldn’t have given us alcohol.” He stood up and nodded politely to Lucy and Mark Twain. “You wouldn’t happen to know if there’s anywhere round here where a dedicated scientist could do a little serious research?”

“Try the Blue Penguin in Krasny Prospekt; it’s just by the metro station. I believe they have unrivalled facilities.”

George nodded again and left the room; and let the record show that eventually, he did manage to perfect the 100 per cent hangover cure, after many years of patient, brilliant work; and that when he’d tested it to make sure it worked and made up a fifty-gallon drum of the stuff for his own personal use, he deleted the formula and burnt all his research notes, saying that nothing in life should be too easy.

When he’d gone, and there were just the two of them, Lucy looked at Mark Twain, and he looked back at her, and she said, “Right, what shall we do next?”

“Well,” the PDF man said, after a long silence. “That went well.” The pilot and the director both stared at him without speaking.

“It did,” the PDF man said. “We’ve given the new dislocation drive a thorough field test and it works perfectly. I’m entirely satisfied with it, and I’ll say so in my report.“

Two solar systems flashed by. Then the director said, “You might just mention that we think we’ve tracked down the real cause of the — um, noise-pollution problem. Turns out it was one of our own research stations all along, nothing whatever to do with aliens or any of that nonsense, and once we’ve turned it off we shouldn’t be bothered by the music stuff any more. Isn’t that good news?”

“Splendid,” the PDF man said. “People will be thrilled. Life can go back to normal.”

The director hesitated, then said, “What will your report say about … you know, Earth?”

“Where?”