Overkill (18 page)

He returned to his station behind the humans. Their trail was only too easy to follow. They moved with the male behind the female, in a proximity one to another that grezzen tolerated only in order to mate. The male seemed to have assumed the trailing position to fulfill the responsibility of marking their territory, and its tiny droppings were as disproportionately pungent as they were repulsive. Whether the assignment of this task was a function of gender the grezzen did not know.

In fact, he knew almost nothing of humans. Once grezzen had decided to sequester and coexist with humans, his race had been deliberately incurious about a species they found dangerous and prone to disgusting habits.

By midmorning, the grezzen gazed up at the lazy circling gorts, poked at the too-familiar ground. Already, this exercise bored him, and it was destined to continue for days, particularly given the male’s frequent marking stops. Driven more by ennui than curiosity, the grezzen brought the two humans forward out of the vast background hum of intellects available to him.

“Again, Parker?”

The female continued to walk while the male paused and marked territory. She displayed only a hunter’s concentration on her surroundings, and anxiety at their lack of progress.

The male crouched in the brush and audibilized after her, “Can you slow down? I’m dyin’ back here.”

The grezzen cocked its head. He felt in the male embarrassment, coupled, certainly, with anxiety about increasing dehydration. But no life-threatening symptoms.

The female responded audibly to his cry. “Parker, it’s only the runs! You’re a soldier. Just suck it up!”

The grezzen stopped and drew back on his haunches. He was aware that certain small species could re-ingest their excreta to survive extreme drought. But the suggested behavior in an intelligent species disgusted and shocked him.

The grezzen gritted its great teeth at what it was about to be forced to witness.

The male, however, simply increased its pace. As it hurried to rejoin the female, the male audibilized criticisms of her, but in muted tones so that the female was not instructed at all. That seemed pointless. Males were apparently less intelligent, because this one seemed misinformed about sexual dimorphism in his own species. It was physiologically obvious that the female was
not
heartless.

The grezzen resumed his meandering trot, but soon felt the tweak of a minuscule consciousness. He paused and flipped over a stone slab with his uninjured forepaw. The flat, green animal that he found beneath he swallowed whole. The individual had displayed barely enough awareness of its surroundings for him to detect it. It was that very insensate quality that made the species a rarely-found treat.

Grezzen rarely tasted humans anymore, either, but they reportedly went down bland. These two wouldn’t taste like much. But in the meantime they were proving to be full of surprises.

Thirty-nine

Three days after we left the Sleeper, shortly after the daily rain ended, we encountered again the formidable obstacle of Broad Falls. The river rumbled feet deep over the rock bench, though Kit said the flow was at much lower levels than in some years. At the present decline of flow, the bench would be dry enough to cross on foot by the following morning.

Kit said that the river valley’s rock, water-smoothed, pocked and criss-crossed with six-inch wide joint cracks, was avoided by the worst of the land predators, because it was hard on their claws. Safe havens for humans were few and far between on Dead End, but the riverbank figured to be our safe haven for awhile. We gathered wood for an evening fire. Then we stripped off and washed our armor and ourselves in clear pools that the receding river left behind in bowls it had hollowed out from the rock.

About the three days march to the falls, the less said the better. For the first two days, I crapped my brains out. I had struggled to hold Kit’s pace, but by the time we got to the river I had recovered to the level of mere soreness and exhaustion.

On our journey out from the Line by tank, we had crossed paths with stampeding woogs, grumpy stripers, and a half dozen smaller species you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley without your 120-mm cannon. But, walking back in, we were assaulted by nothing bigger than lemon bugs, and one altitudinally challenged gort who drifted close enough to earn a bullet. Kit attributed that pleasant surprise to us being less noticeable on foot. I chalked it up to dumb luck.

Kit and I lay side by side on our backs on the rocks, heads pillowed on our packs, bootless feet up on boulders.

She tugged two Coke plastis from her pack, tossed me one, then tucked Cutler’s Reader, which had been inside her armor, into her pack.

I pointed my Coke at the Reader. “Straighten me out here. Bauer was an obscure naturalist. He took a dangerous job in an obscure place because he heard that Rover ’bots were able to sneak up on these fierce animals, even though other animals couldn’t even get close to a grezzen. He thought the reason was that grezzen could read a living thing’s mind, but they couldn’t read non-living chips that performed like minds. A couple months before Zhondro and I got blown up on Bren, you, or somebody you work for, got wind of Bauer’s work.”

She nodded.

I said, “If there really were intelligent telepaths out here at the ass end of the universe, it was a huge event. But it was very unlikely. So your employer just sent you out to investigate on the cheap. By the time you got here, Bauer had gotten terminally close to his work. You took over his job to see whether he was right. How am I doing so far?”

Kit sipped from her plasti. “On the money. When we heard Cutler was cashing favors to come out here and hunt grezzen, we suspected that he knew at least as much as we knew. But he could have been just one more Trueborn with too much money and a taste for overkill.”

“You weren’t sure. So when we got here, you climbed into the Cutler party’s back pocket.” Like Zhondro had said, keep friends close and enemies closer.

She nodded again.

“That’s why you had us close our eyes. If the grezzen was reading our minds, it could find us by knowing what we saw. When we saw nothing, it saw nothing that gave away our position. So now we’re the living proof that Bauer was right.”

She shook her head. “That was a hunch I played out of necessity. To a scientific skeptic, our survival proves squat. The grezz could have been confused, or not hungry, rather than telepathically blinded. People usually live or die of dumb luck. Not because something mystical cares.”

I smiled. “Zhondro always thought God cared. I wonder whether Cutler thinks God is on his side, or just on his payroll.”

She sighed. “If I had truly understood what a menace Cutler was, I wouldn’t have let it get this far.”

I turned my palms up. “What’s Cutler after? Train grezzen to steal somebody else’s trade secrets? Hire them out to armies to spy on the enemy?”

She nodded. “That’s what we thought. But based on what I saw in Cutler’s Reader, it’s bigger. And it’s worse. Parker, what’s the fastest you could send a message back home to Yavet from here?”

“Why?”

“Just answer.”

I cocked my head. “I dunno. If I pay extra so the information gets burst between jumps at lightspeed, it’s still ten jumps inbound back to Mousetrap, then another six jumps out to Yavet. Couple months?”

“Try four. Six if you just send a hard-chip Cutlergram that gets mailbagged between jumps on a near-light-speed cruiser. What do you think it would mean if you could whisper a question into a grezzen’s ear here on Dead End and have a grezzen on Yavet repeat it over there in the time it just took for me to ask and you to hear what I said?”

I laughed. “It’d mean I’d never buy another Cutlergram.”

“No, but you’d buy the new, improved version. And be delighted to pay more for it.”

“But it’s irrelevant. Even if Grezzen can phone each other jungle-to-jungle here as fast as I could phone city-to-city back home, nothing can travel faster than light in this universe.”

She nodded. “In
this
universe. The War taught us a lot of things, Parker. Not least, it confirmed what the theoretical physicists have been saying since the twentieth century. This universe coexists with others. Some of the other ones may be nearly infinite, some are probably infinitesimal. Our guys weren’t sure but Cutler’s people are very sure, that if grezzen telecommunicate, they telecommunicate transuniversally.”

I stared at her. “You do know I was only homeschooled.”

“I’m not patronizing you. I don’t understand it either. The geeks dumbed it down for me this way. You and I are on opposite sides of a room full of jello, which represents our universe. I can’t throw a ball across the room to you faster than it can move through jello, right?”

I nodded.

“But suppose the room has a dropped ceiling. If you and I climb up into the open space above the ceiling tiles, we can exchange fastballs all day. Cutler’s people think grezzen telecommunicate above the ceiling tiles. Their information moves out of this universe, through an adjacent universe, then back. The conduit universe may be so small that the thoughts travel no farther than the distance from one side of an atom to the other. Real-time communication among five hundred planets, Parker. It’s the jackpot of this century.”

I raised my eyebrows and pointed in the direction of the clearing where we had seen the grezzen. “Cutler thinks he can hire five hundred of those monsters to work as telegraph operators?”

She smiled. “The employee of the month would be the one that didn’t try to eat you?”

I laughed. “So what
does
he plan to do?”

Kit held up her Coke plasti. “Bottle it. Figure out what makes the grezz tick, then replicate telepathic communication mechanically or organically.”

I shrugged. “That’s less evil than I expected.”

She raised one finger. “Don’t underestimate the man. Tycoons don’t like competition any better than top predators do. Cutler doesn’t plan to share.”

I shrugged. “Neither would I.”

“But the way he’s going to keep competitors from duplicating his work is to exterminate the grezzen once he’s got a monopoly on the process.”

I snorted. “Tycoons don’t exterminate races. Countries do.”

“Parker, have you seen Cutler do anything that wasn’t overkill? And who do you think’s gonna stop him? Earth is the Union’s sole superpower and it barely has the stroke to slow down
human
genocide on Bren. Grezzen are long-lived, slow reproducers at the tip-top of a food pyramid that can’t support very many of them. This whole planet has fewer grezzen than downtown Eden has parking meters. Grezzen may be hard to kill with antique tanks, but there’s plenty of up-to-date technology for sale that can wipe them out. If we just let the Rover ’bots range free, we’d overkill

the species down to endangered status in two years.”

“Look, he doesn’t own the place. The locals—”

“When I told you that the locals here would rename the planet after him if he carpet bombed the grezzen to extinction? I meant it. A bad neighborhood always welcomes a tough sheriff. According to his Reader, Cutler Communications’ front entities have already optioned seventy-two percent of the fee simple patented real estate on Dead End. So he will own the place, unless something changes.”

I laid back and folded my arms. “So that’s what this is about? Your employer wants to exploit the grezzen before Cutler can?”

She shook her head. “There are two kinds of Trueborns, Parker. I—yes, guilty—represent the pole opposite Cutler. The war left us as the only intelligent species in this universe. We want a do-over for mankind, if there is another intelligent race out there.”

“If I stick with you, I get to be the good guy for a change?”

She sat up, touched my cheek, and whispered, “That’s not a change for you, Parker.”

She smiled down at me as the day ebbed behind her. Her cheeks were scrubbed pink, her fine blonde hair was pulled back, and she smelled of soap and water.

I’m not one to impress a date by making her dinner, but I can squeeze a Meal Utility Dessicated until its internal heat triggers, as well as the next GI. I could mix a tube of buttery alfredo sauce with a couple tubes of marini fila, which would showcase my creative, romantic side.

I said, “You busy tonight?”

Forty

Hidden in brush, on a bluff above the river that obstructed the two humans’ passage, the grezzen sprawled. The rocky river bank made for poor hunting, which the female had realized in selecting the place to rest. So the grezzen nibbled a yearling amphibian that had strayed farther from the water than normal. The season had been dry, the water low, and the river’s residents had altered their habits accordingly. As the grezzen reclined, he physically eyed the humans below while he felt them.

In the dusk, a yellow spark flickered between the two humans. It blossomed into a flickering orange and yellow pyramid from which smoke spiraled cloudward.

The grezzen widened all three eyes and surprise caused him to grunt amphibian blood into his chin hair.

Fire didn’t surprise him. He knew fire was a product of lightning, of which Dead End had plenty. He knew that lightning fires thinned and rejuvenated forests, and turned rain to steam that replenished the clouds. Fire was part of the natural balance of the world.

The world needed fire, but grezzenkind otherwise did not. Grezzen moved easily during darkness, were never cold, and preferred their food at just-killed temperature.

Fire frightened him. Unlike most adversaries, fire could not be defeated head on. It could sear his flesh, and easily kill him.

So what
had
surprised him was, first, that the humans had harnessed something that his race avoided.

Second, until now, night in his world had been dark. He didn’t know that perpetual cloud had blocked starlight and moonlight for thirty million years. He didn’t know stars and moons existed. He simply knew that tonight was not dark, and that was as different for every other living thing in this world as it was for him.