Peace and War - Omnibus (53 page)

It sort of worked. Most of us could see the overhead view-screen, and I'd set up a program for it to show a sequence of soothing pictures while we waited to cool down. Expressionist paintings, quiet nature photographs. I wondered whether Earth
had
any nature left. Neither Man nor Tauran was sentimental about such things; they found beauty in abstractions.

Well, we didn't have such a great track record, either. Most of human history had been industry
versus
nature, with industry winning.

So I spent the dreaming five months, which sometimes felt like five minutes, in a series of quiet pastoral environments, most of which were extrapolations of places I'd only read about or seen in pictures; even the commune where I grew up was in a suburb. I had played in neatly manicured parks and dreamed they were jungles. I came back to those dreams now.

It was curious. My dreams didn't take me back to Middle Finger, where Mother Nature and I had always been on intimate, battling terms. No rest in that, I guess.

Coming out of SA was more difficult, and uncomfortable, than when I'd had Diana to help. I was confused and numb. My fingers didn't want to work, and they couldn't tell clockwise from counterclockwise, unscrewing the bypass orthotics. When I lifted myself out I was streaked with blood from the abdomen down, though there was no injury.

I went to help Marygay, and she was only one step behind me, trying to sort out and loosen straps. She had managed not to splash blood all over herself. We both got dressed, and she went back to check on Sara, while I looked at the others.

Then I checked on Rii Highcloud, who was our volunteer medico. She was actually a librarian, way back in real life, but Diana had given her an intense week of training in how to use the standard medical kit aboard the ship.

Antres 906 was alert, and nodded at me when I peered over the edge of the box. Good thing. If something went wrong, the creature would have been at the mercy of a first-aid manual that had an appendix about Taurans.

Jacob Pierson was frozen solid, with no life signs. He had probably been dead for five months. It made me feel vaguely guilty that I didn't like him and hadn't looked forward to working with him.

Everyone else was at least moving. We wouldn't know if they were well until they were up and talking. Unwellness could take odd forms, too; Charlie had come out of SA on Middle Finger unable to smell flowers, though he could smell other things. (Marygay and I used it as an excuse, a private joke, for not remembering names or numbers: 'Must've lost it in SA.')

She said that Sara was coming along fine; she'd needed some mopping up, but didn't want her mother to help, of all people.

We got the screen working, and Earth looked all right, or at least as we expected. About a third of what we could see, between clouds, seemed to be city, a featureless grey, all over northern Africa and southern Europe.

I drank some water and it stayed down, though I could imagine it floating, a cold spherical lump, in my stomach. I was concentrating on that when I realized Marygay was crying, silently, blotting floating tears with her knuckles and forearm.

I thought it was about Pierson and started to say something comforting.

'The same,' she said tightly. 'Nothing. Just like Middle Finger.'

'Maybe they're…' I couldn't think of anything. They were dead or gone. All ten billion.

Antres 906 had climbed out of the box and was floating behind me. 'This is not unexpected,' it said, 'since there was no sign of Centrus having been visited by them.' It made a strange sound, like a hoarse dove. 'I must go to the Whole Tree.'

Marygay looked at it for a long moment. 'Where is your Tree?'

It cocked its head. 'Everywhere, of course. Like a telephone.'

'Of course.' She unbelted and floated out of the chair. 'Well, let's help people get up and around. See what's down there.'

We 'buried' Jacob Pierson in space. He was sort of a Muslim, so Mohammed Ten said a few words before Marygay pressed the button that opened the outer lock and spun him gently into the void. It was deferred cremation, actually, since we were in a low enough orbit for him to eventually fall into friction fire.

We landed at Cape Kennedy, far out on a spit, on a special pad reserved for those of us who had to come down in a shower of gamma rays. A personnel carrier, heavily armored, rolled up to wait for us.

After thirty minutes, the radiometer let us exit. The air was sultry warm and heavy with salt fragrance. Wind rushed across mangrove swamps and ruffled our clothing as we walked unsteadily down the gangway. At the bottom, the smell was of burnt metal, and the landing pad patiently ticked as it contracted.

'So quiet,' Alysa said.

'This part has always been quiet,' Po said, 'between launches and landings. I'm afraid the rest of the spaceport is going to be quiet, too. Like ours.'

The metal ground still radiated heat. And maybe a few alpha particles. The air was wonderful, though; I was a little giddy from breathing deep.

'Who are you?' the personnel carrier boomed, in Standard. 'Where are you from?'

Marygay answered in English. 'Speak English. We're just a group of citizens from Middle Finger, a planet of Mizar.'

'Here to trade?'

'Just here. Take us to some people.'

A double door in the thing's side swung open. 'I can take you to the spaceport. I'm not allowed on roads, without wheels.'

We entered the thing and four large windows became transparent. Once we were seated, the door closed and the thing backed up, turned around, and lurched toward the other end of the long strip, moving fast. It walked on twelve articulated legs.

'Why don't you have wheels?' I asked, my voice wavering from the carrier's jerky progress.

'I do have wheels. I haven't put them on in a long time.'

'Are there any people in the spaceport?' Mohammed asked.

'I don't know. I've never been inside.'

'Are there any people in the world?' I asked.

'That is not a question that I am able to answer.' It stopped so abruptly that Matt and I, facing forward but not belted in, were almost thrown from our seats. The doors sprung open. 'Check to make sure you have all your belongings. Be careful upon exiting. Have a pleasant day.'

The spaceport main building was a huge structure with no straight lines; all sweeping parabolas and catenaries, with facets like beaten bright metal. The rising sun gleamed orange from a hundred shiny surfaces.

We walked hesitantly toward the
DIIJHA/ARRIVALS
door, which for some reason slid open upwards. Walking through it gave me a guillotine kind of anxiety. The others hurried, too.

It wasn't quiet. There was a soothing sound like modulated white noise, pulsing in a rhythm slower than a heartbeat. There were chimes at the edge of perception.

The floor was littered with clothes.

'Well,' Po said, 'I guess we can turn around and go home.'

Antres 906 made a hissing sound I'd never heard, and its left hand turned in a continual slow circle. 'I appreciate your need for humor. But there is much to do, and there may be danger.' It turned to Marygay. 'Captain, I suggest at least one of you return to the ship for a fighting suit.'

'Good idea,' she said. 'William? Go see if you can catch that thing.'

I went back to the arrivals door, which wouldn't open, of course. There was a
MOSCH/TRANSPORTATION
door a hundred meters away. When I went through it, the carrier minced up, clattering. 'I forgot something,' I said. 'Take me back to the ship.'

Putting on fighting suits used to be dramatic and communal. The ready room would have mounting harnesses for as many as forty people; you'd strip and back into the suit, hook up the plumbing and let it clamshell shut around you, and move out. You could have the whole company in suits and, theoretically, outside fighting in a couple of minutes.

When there's no harness and no hardware, and the suit isn't customized for your body, it's neither quick nor dramatic. You squirm this way and that and finally get everything in place, and then try to close it on your own. When it doesn't close, you go back a few steps and start over.

It took almost fifteen minutes. I walked down the gangway, clumsy at first. The carrier doors opened.

'Thanks anyhow,' I said. 'I think I'll walk.'

'That is not allowed,' it said. 'It is dangerous.'

'
I'm
dangerous,' I said, and resisted the impulse to tear off a couple of its legs, to see what would happen. Instead, I started running, invoking the suit's strength amplification to give me a broad-jump lope. It wasn't as smooth and automatic as I remembered, but it was fast. I was at the spaceport door in less than a minute.

The door wouldn't open for me, sensing that I was a machine. I walked through it. The shatterproof glass turned opaque, stretched, and ripped apart like cloth.

Marygay laughed. 'You could have knocked.'

'This is the
way
I knock,' I said, amplified voice echoing in the huge hall. I turned it down to conversational volume. 'Our odd men out went to find their Trees?' The sheriff and Tauran were missing.

She nodded. 'Asked us to wait here. How's the suit?'

'I don't know yet. Leg amplifiers work. Okay on doors.'

'Why don't you take it outside and try out the ordnance? It's pretty old.'

'Good idea.' I went back through the hole I'd made and looked around for targets. What would we not need? I set my sights on a fast-food stand and gave it an order of fries, with the laser finger. It burst into flame in a satisfying way. I flipped a grenade at it and the explosion sort of put out the fire by scattering the pieces.

The personnel carrier came mincing up, accompanied by a small robot with flashing blue lights. It had
PARKING POLICE
stenciled on front and back.

'You are under arrest,' it said, in a huge stentorian voice. 'Surrender control to me.' That was followed by some almost ultrasonic warbling. 'Surrender control to me.'

'Sure.' I chambered a rocket, which the heads-up thing called MHE. That's not an acronym we used to have. I assumed 'medium high explosive' and squeezed it off. It did vaporize the parking robot and leave a crater two meters in diameter, in the process knocking the personnel carrier on its back.

It righted itself by rocking back and forth until it tipped onto its spidery feet. 'You didn't have to do that,' it said. 'You could have explained your situation. You must have a reason for this arbitrary destruction of property.'

'Target practice,' I said. 'This fighting suit is very old, and I had to know how well it works.'

'Very well. Are you finished?'

Not really.' I hadn't tried the nukes. 'But I'll hold off with the other systems until I have more real estate to work with.'

'Real estate outside of Spaceport?'

'Absolutely. There's nothing in here small enough to destroy.'

It actually seemed to pause, integrating that statement into its world view. 'Very well, I will not call the police again. Unless you destroy something here.'

'Scout's honor.'

'Please rephrase that.'

'I won't hurt anything here without telling you ahead of time.'

It sort of threw a mechanical tantrum, stamping its many feet. I supposed it was generating conflicting orders. I left it there to sort things out.

The sheriff came back to the group the same time I did.

'The Whole Tree gives no warning,' he said. 'There's no sense that anything was going wrong.'

'Just like home?' Marygay said.

He nodded. 'More complex things are going on,' he said, 'and the Tree is still trying to make sense of what has happened.'

'But it hasn't,' Po said.

'Well, now it has new information. What happened to us, out in space, and to Middle Finger. And Tsoget. It may be able to piece something together.'

'It thinks by itself?' I said. 'Without people connected to it?'

'It's not like thinking, exactly. It just sifts things; makes things more simple for itself. Sometimes the result is like thought.'

Antres 906 had returned. 'I have nothing to add,' it said.

Maybe we
should
have turned around and gone home. Begin to rebuild from what we had. Both the sheriff and the Tauran would have been in favor of that, I think, but we didn't ask them.

'Guess we ought to try a city,' Marygay said.

'We're right next door to what used to be the biggest one in the country,' Cat said, 'at least in terms of acreage.'

Marygay cocked her head. 'Spaceport?'

'No, I mean
big
. Disney!'

Twenty-nine

Marygay and I had been to Disney
world
, as it was still called, in the early twenty-first, and it had been large then. The one we'd gone to was now just one element in a patchwork of 'lands' – Waltland, where you visited in groups, and a simulacrum of the place's founder took you around and explained the wonders.

The carrier had amiably agreed to produce wheels, and it got us to the outskirts of Disney in about twenty minutes.

The perimeter of Disney was a huge ring, where parking lots for the patrons alternated with clustered living areas for the people who worked there.

You were supposed to park, evidently, and wait for a Disney bus to take you inside. When we tried to drive through an entrance, a big jolly cartoon robot blocked it off, explaining in a loud kiddy voice that we had to be nice and park like everyone else. It alternated Standard and English. I told it to fuck off, and after that all the machines spoke to us in English.

Goofy was the robot on the third one we tried. I got out in my fighting suit. It said, 'Ah-hyuh – what have we here?' and I kicked it over and pulled off its arms and legs and tossed them in four directions. It started repeating 'Hyuh … that's a good 'un … Hyuh … that's a good 'un,' and I pulled off the meter-wide head and threw it as high and far as I could.

The living areas for the staff were blocked off by holograms that were only partly successful now. On one side we had a jungle where cute baby monkeys played; on the other, a sea of Dalmatian puppies running through a giant's house. But you could see dimly through them, and sometimes they would disappear for a fraction of a second, revealing identical rows of warren housing.