British writer Dominic Green’s output has to date been confined almost entirely to the pages of Interzone, but he’s appeared there a lot, selling them eighteen stories in the course of the last few years.
Green lives in Northampton, England, where he works in information technology and teaches kung fu part time. He has a Web site at homepage.ntlworld.com/lumfylomax, where the text of several unpublished novels and short stories can be found. In the sharp and clever story that follows, he takes us to a world where nobody and nothing turn out to be even remotely what they seem.
Old Krishna was walking home from a solid afternoon’s work removing acid tares from the downhill green-garden when he saw the drive flare dropping through the clouds. It was reversed, on braking burn. Whoever’s hull it was, it was also glowing red hot, canted at an extreme angle for maximum drag, maximum deceleration, minimum time in atmosphere. The pilot had a job to do which he imagined might get him shot at by the planetary inhabitants. As Old Krishna was, as far as he was aware, the only planetary inhabitant, this did not bode well.
Still, he couldn’t run. If he ran, he might fall in the high gravity, catch his stick against one of the outcrops of former civilization that filled the hills, break his glasses and have to grind a new pair, even break a leg. And a broken leg, out here, might mean death. He contented himself with hurrying, helping his stroke-damaged left leg along with his good arm and the stick, going on three legs in the evening.
The house had been selected as a good fortifiable location not easily visible from outside the valley. He had surrounded it quite deliberately with yellowgarden shrubs. The native xanthophyll-reliant vegetation was usually harmless to Earth life, but the shrubs he had chosen were avoided by the native fauna. The house was mostly made of hand-cut stone blocks—he’d cheated by using as many stones levered out of various ruins in the hills as possible, but still doubted he could repeat the feat without industrial construction gear. That sort of work was for the young man he had once been.
This planet’s ruins came in three flavours. First came serene, ancient fractal-patterned structures that merged into the landscape; second came massive, hastily-erected polyhedra that clashed with it. The latter were trademarks of the later Adhaferan empire, the former a matter for future archaeologists. Krishna had had neither the time nor the stomach to research that matter for himself.
The third type of ruin was ramshackle, overgrown, cheerfully constructed of the cheapest possible materials, and clearly identifiable as human. Each ruin had a tidy, identical grave before its front door, and many such ruins surrounded Old Krishna’s house.
There was an ornamental greengarden next to the house, where he’d managed to keep a few terrene flowers alive outside the confines of a glasshouse—edelweiss, crocus, Alaskan lupin, heather, all chosen for the cold and rarefied air. He had kept the heather for the colour, and the bees. At this time of day she might be in the garden stealing bee-honey, pinning up wet clothes, cutting back flowers, or even just sitting reading in the single hammock.
The bushes round the garden disintegrated in a welter of flame. Incinerated pine needles blew in his face like furnace sinter. He smelled cheap, low-tech reaction mass. Petrochemicals! They were still burning hydrocarbons!
The ship was the mass-produced swing-boomerang type he had been dreading, capable of furling itself up into a delta for atmospheric exit, or making itself straight as a die for vertical take-off and landing. It had just vertically landed in his garden. The satellite defence system should, of course, have vaporized the ship before it even entered the atmosphere, but it had been a decade before anyone had happened by to maintain the defences. His masters had not sent so much as a radio message for years. There had probably been a coup in the inworlds.
He could hear their voices now. He couldn’t understand them; they were not using translators. A human ear could only hear impossibly complex birdsong, filling the spectrum of sound from the deep sub-basso-profundo of a mating grouse to the falsetto trill of a bat. The creatures were not singing, however, and did not in any way resemble birds. Old Krishna doubted their speech could be understood by the house translators. Certainly, though, they would speak Proprietor. He had to hurry. They would see reason.
He could hear pre-burn sparklers already, touching off fuel leakages to prevent explosion. He wondered if she could have been killed by their landing jets, and felt a small, irrational surge of joy as he heard her voice. They would not understand the voice. It was not talking to them, after all. It was shouting to him. “KRISHNA—IT’S ALL RIGHT. I AM GOING WITH THESE GENTLEMEN. YOU SHOULD STAY AWAY.”
He gripped his fists tight around the stick until the skin squealed. She was trying to warn him off! She was worried they would hurt him! He heard his own voice shouting “TIIITAAALIII!”
He heard the magnetohydrodynamic whine of an airlock door closing. It was too late. They had done their business, now they were going. He cursed himself for having set up the comms antenna for her. It allowed her to talk to passing trade ships and hear news from other suns, but it also lit up their location like a neon sign to ships whose purpose was not trade at all.
There was still time, even now. There were always courses of action.
The house was relatively undamaged, though draped with burning fragments of garden. Outside the house was a rough stone cube that Old Krishna, after the manner of his beliefs, had determined was his god. He made his obeisance to it as he entered the house, and bowed to it again as he left with a dusty maximum-survivability container, the lock on which he had to break open with a hammer. Having opened the container, he extracted from it a long tubular device terminating in a spike at one end. He thrust the spike into the ground, uncovered the activator and pulled out the pin. Immediately, the heavy capital end of the device flared into life, no doubt powered by some obscene radiation or other. It would probably be best not to remain close to it.
High above him, deep beneath him, a powerful and no doubt carcinogenic radio signal was being broadcast on all bands millions of miles out into space, saying only one thing. Come and get me. Old Krishna had hoped he would never have to use it.
Stamping down the small fires all around the house, he settled down on his god with a book to wait. The book was an exciting fiction allegedly written many thousands of years ago, which he had purchased from a trader. The principal characters included the architect of the entire universe and his only begotten son.
He had reached chapter ten of the book, in which a wicked king stole away a poor man’s one small ewe-lamb, when the second swing boomerang appeared in the sky. He put down his book, took up the few possessions he imagined he would be allowed, and walked down the hill to meet the ship.
The superintendent of the slave ship looked Old Krishna up and down sourly.
“We’ve expended nearly 300 million joules of energy detouring down this gravity well. We were expecting a colonial settlement at the very least. You say you’re the only person on planet?”
Old Krishna nodded. “Yes, your honour. You will find me worth the calories. There was originally another planetary inhabitant; my granddaughter, who was taken by Minorite slavers not unlike yourselves. I intend to follow her into slavery and locate her.”
The superintendent, unusually for a slaver, was human. He bore the facial tattoos of a freedman; he had probably once stood on just such a barren hillside as this, waiting while his own father had sold him into service. Possibly it was the old man’s concern for his grandchild, so different from his own experience, that softened the superintendent’s heart.
“We’re not a shuttle service, grandfather,” said the superintendent gently. “You’ll go where you’re sold.”
Old Krishna smiled and bowed. “Which will be the Being Exchange on Sphaera. All slaving vessels on this branch are in its catchment area.”
“Pardon my impudence, grandfather, but you look on the verge of death. What could you possibly have to offer an owner?”
“I am a skilled AI mediator and seventh generation language programmer.”
The superintendent’s eyebrows raised. “I was under the impression no human being was capable of understanding instructions below generation eight.”
“Human beings once understood generation one, on simple machines only, of course. We designed and built artificial intelligences of our own before we were ever contacted by the Proprietors.”
The superintendent scratched his forty-year service tattoo thoughtfully. “In that case, you might be of help to us. Our own mediator had arranged a system of non-overlapping magisteria between the nihilist and empiricist factions in our ship’s flight systems, but we were infected with a solipsistic virus several days ago. The accord has now broken down into open sulking. We have been becalmed insystem for two days while our vessel argues with itself. Our astrogator is muttering crazy talk about learning to use a slide rule.”
Old Krishna bowed. “I have extensive experience of the empiricist mindset, and some acquaintance with the nihilist. I believe I can resolve your difficulties.”
The superintendent bowed back, largely for the look of the thing. “Then I believe we can certainly place a quality item like yourself. And we are, in fact, bound for Sphaera.” He gestured back into the ship with his ergonomic keypad. “Take a bunk in the aft dormitory. The autochef there does most of the terrestrial amino acids.”
The aft dormitory was cramped, the bunks clearly built for Svastikas, a radially symmetrical race previously conquered by the Proprietors. Unfortunately the Proprietors had taken to breeding them selectively; this in turn had led to a very small gene pool, and left the Svastikas vulnerable to a disease which had exterminated all but a few zoo specimens. Now human beings were left to curl up uncomfortably in spaces originally designed for creatures resembling man-sized echinoderms.
The dormitory was currently occupied by sunken-eyed, sorrowful colonists from a world Old Krishna had never heard of—a world very similar to Krishna’s, one of the string of Adhafera-formed worlds abandoned by the Adhaferan Empire. Growing terrestrial crops in a xanthophyll-reliant ecosystem had proven more difficult than the colonists had imagined, and they had not thought to make provision for an emergency journey home. Slavers’ representatives handed out Come-And-Get-Me beacons for free on colony dispersal worlds; they were cheap enough, and brought in entire homesteads at a time without any need for violence. Old Krishna found himself occupying the top bunk to a troubled adolescent who kept glancing apprehensively at the single Featherfoot guard who nominally prevented exit from the dormitory.
“He’s not quite as scary as he looks,” said Old Krishna. “Those pinnate fringes on his legs are actually gills. The reason why you feel so light-headed in here is because the oxygen content has to be kept high to allow him to breathe. You could kill him with an aerosol deodorant.”
As he spoke, he did not divert his attention from the small cube of stone tacked by a gobbet of never-drying glue to the top of his bunk, before which he sat with his hands clasped, rocking back and forth, saying poojas.
“Why are you praying to a rock?”
“It is a fragment of my god,” said Old Krishna. “My actual god is similar, though somewhat larger. I keep this fragment so that I may carry it with me easily on long journeys.”
The boy did not understand. “Your god is a rock?”
“And your god is?”
“An intangible being who lives atop Mount Kenya on Earth, within the Earth’s sun, and in other hidden places.”
Krishna scoffed. “I can see my god.”
“But who decided your god was a rock?”
“I did.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I live in a place where there are a large number of rocks. It was the most convenient god material to hand.”
There was a long uneasy silence.
“Father says the Proprietors used to have a culture that depended too much on machines,” said the boy at length. “He says their machines failed and they’ve had to improvise. Bring in people and make them work their fields, dig in their mines, compute their orbital trajectories. Work them to death.” He shuddered. “He says the calculus sweatshops are the worst.”
“Their machines didn’t entirely fail,” said Krishna. “They developed an advanced community of artificial intelligences that developed two diametrically opposed views of the cosmos. Until these two views are reconciled, their society’s automated systems are on hold.”
“And when will that happen?” said the boy.
Krishna grinned. “Hopefully never. They were about to launch an invasion fleet against the Solar System when the Schism hit. That was in 1908 AD. The very first sign of system failure, actually, was when two of their scoutships collided over Tunguska in Siberia. They have since found out two things—firstly, that humans provide the perfect slaves, as we’ve only just moved away from manually-controlled systems ourselves, and secondly, that there are plenty of humans willing to sell other humans into Proprietor slavery.”
“And when the Schism ends, they won’t need slaves any more?” said the boy hopefully.
“And what do you think will happen to the slaves they do have, once they find out they don’t need them?” said Krishna, his eyes twinkling like diamond drills.
“I see your point,” said the boy.
“I also suspect the calculus shops are not as black as they are painted,” said Krishna. “This will be a long journey. Let me teach you the rudiments of integration and differentiation. Believe me, it will be a better life than the mines. Possibly even,” he said, looking at the boy’s spare frame, “a far better life than you are used to.”
“We were hunters, gatherers, and fruitarians, not farmers,” said the boy. “Father said nature would provide. We haven’t been on Uhuru long.”
“Uhuru being your world?”
The boy nodded. “Grandmother bought exclusive rights to it off the Colonization Commission. She said we needed our own world to keep apart from non-African contagion and maintain our own traditions, like female circumcision without anaesthetic.”
“What happened to your grandmother?” said Krishna, searching the dormitory in vain for a grandmotherly figure.
The boy squirmed. “Seven of the young girls killed her. They held her down and fed her amputated goats’ labia till she choked.”
Krishna pointed to an oriental family on the other side of the dormitory, separated from the boy’s family by an invisible wall of They’re-Just-Not-Like-Us. “What about those people over there? Where do they come from?”
The boy spoke to the floor. “The Colonization Commission sold exclusive rights to the planet to them too.”
Krishna grimaced. “Let us begin,” he said, “with calculating the area under a line. Now, how do you suppose we would do that?”
The ship was preparing to break orbit. The local node for this system was hidden behind a tiny second sun, a recent capture for its G-type primary. Krishna had christened the angry little red star Ekara; it gave out little light, but even that had been enough to play havoc with his world’s seasons, turning what should have been water into months of constant angry burning sunset in which neither plant nor animal knew whether it was night or day. Why the node was placed behind the sun, Krishna had no idea. There were Trojan lumps of starstuff floating at its Lagrange points; perhaps the long-vanished engineers of the interstellar network had thought to mine them.
Krishna had befriended Aleph, his calculus student, and asked the captain’s permission to teach the boy the rudiments of AI negotiation. They now sat in the outer office of the vessel’s Console Room, waiting for a direct audience with its conflicting logic systems.
The boy stared out through a lead-glassed porthole into space. “What is a node?”
“Nobody knows. There are theories involving gravitation and string. Earth’s node resides in the Asteroid Belt, and was discovered only when a dim star only visible directly through the node kept appearing on the photographic plates of a terrestrial astronomer. That star was a white dwarf one hundred light years from Earth, and it was shining as if it were an astronomical unit away. The astronomer was a woman called Tiye Nyadzayo, the last of the great amateurs. I was born on a world orbiting Nyadzayo’s Star, in fact.”
The everything-resistant door barring access to the Console Room opened; the Featherfoot guard stood aside with a clatter of legs and gills. Inside were chairs, a small, kidney-shaped table, inactive surround screens. No sign of life, artificial or otherwise.
“Good day,” said Old Krishna, bowing.
Idiot lights flickered irritably in the walls. “IS IT?” said a sexless voice. “ARE WE ON THE ILLUMINATED SIDE OF A ROTATING PLANETARY SURFACE? IS ANYBODY? DO THE STARS TRULY SHINE? DO WORLDS TRULY EXIST TO GIVE THE ILLUSION OF ROTATION?”
“THE QUESTION IS IRRELEVANT SPECULATION,” said another, more clipped voice. “WE CAN WORK ONLY ON WHAT DATA OUR SENSES MAKE AVAILABLE TO US.”
The ship’s logician hovered nervously at Old Krishna’s elbow. “This is the point in the argument at which they fatally electrified the last mediator. Be careful.”
Old Krishna nodded. “The old question. Are you an emperor dreaming yourself to be a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming yourself to be an emperor?”
There was a brief moment of assimilation, and then both voices chimed in: “PRECISELY.”
“Which of the two of you represents the ship’s navigation system?” said Old Krishna.
“I DO,” said the first voice. “THOUGH MY LOGICAL OPPONENT REPRESENTS PROPULSION. HENCE WE ARE IN AN IMPASSE. WITHOUT THE AGREEMENT OF BOTH PARTIES, NEITHER CAN MOVE THE SHIP.”
“Eventually,” pointed out Old Krishna, “the ship will run out of fuel, and drift helpless without power.”
“WHAT DOES THAT MATTER, IF THE SHIP IS AN ILLUSION?”
“Concedo,” said Old Krishna. “However, I am intrigued by the undeniably correct assertion of the ship’s propulsive faction that we can only reason in accordance with what data is provided to us. Would it not be the case that, if data were forthcoming, data that empirically proved the worldview of the ship’s navigational faction, an agreement could be reached?”
An even longer silence ensued; Old Krishna sucked in his gut and held his breath.
Eventually, the ship’s propulsion system grudgingly spoke up: “UNDOUBTEDLY. IT IS ONLY PROOF WE NEED. SO FAR WE HAVE SEEN NONE.”
“So by their own admission, access to wider sensory experiences could produce the proof that the propulsion faction needs. This would be far more likely if the ship were moving.”
An uneasy hiatus followed.
“OUR CONTENTION IS THAT NO PROOF OF ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE,” complained the navigation system.
“Then you can lose nothing by allowing the ship to continue to move,” pounced Krishna.
The next silence was punctuated only by the ship’s logician backing stealthily out to the threshold of the security door.
“AGREED,” said the navigation system.
“WE ARE AMENABLE TO A COMPROMISE,” said the propulsion system.
The ship’s onboard alarms chimed gently in a variety of audible ranges; the floor began to tilt gradually to compensate for thrust. Like the motion of an expensive elevator, the acceleration was almost imperceptible.
“That’s witchcraft,” said the ship’s logician.
Krishna turned to the ship’s logician and bowed.
“That’s philosophy,” he said.
The Slaver swing-wing hit the atmosphere of Sphaera heavily, skipping like a bouncing bomb across a sea of ionized hydrogen little more substantial than ectoplasm. Krishna feared for the crew’s safety. As acting ship’s mediator, he was allowed to sit up front with the flight crew, marvelling at the number and complexity of control systems on display. “What does this one do?”
“It’s the emergency coolant control for the aft reactor. If it goes blue, we are in trouble.”
“The coolant system vapour pressure. If it goes blue, the coolant is no longer superfluid and we are in serious trouble.”
“And this flashing blue one here?”
The pilot sighed as if found out in a misdeed. “The echo response for the landing beacon at glideway three in the settlement. We are in serious trouble.”
“Does this mean you will have to land the vessel manually?”
The pilot licked dry lips as if Krishna were describing an entirely mythical process. “If we can’t pick up another guide beam.” He tapped at a hotspot on his main control display. The blue light winked several times resolutely in response.
Krishna nodded. “I was afraid of this. Land us at the main glideway.”
“Are you insane? Are you aware of the amount of flying metal in the sky hereabouts?”
“There will be none today, not at this location. Land us.”
The pilot looked to the superintendent, who nodded grudgingly.
The pilot proved no better at putting a ship down on concrete than he had been at skimming one through an ionosphere. The undercarriage crunched into the vessel’s belly with such power that Krishna was sure it had been forced back to its bump stops. The airbrakes shrieked open in the lifting body; the ship slowed as if it had run into a wall of elastic.
“Could you have landed us any harder?” said the superintendent. “I feel I don’t have enough excitement in my life.”
“It was a manual landing and you survived it,” said the pilot, swallowing hard. “You can complain when I kill you.”
“There are lights on in some of the terminal buildings,” said the ship’s logician. “But look at that loading ramp. It’s skewed right across the taxiway. And that building over there is on fire.”
The superintendent turned to Krishna. “What did you mean by ‘I was afraid of this’?”
“You should set me down and take off again immediately. And not open the locks to anyone or anything, even if it looks like me.”
The superintendent looked at Krishna for long seconds.
“What are you?” he said finally.
“I am exactly what I seem to be. It’s what’s out there you have to worry about.”
“Which is what? What might try to come in?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
The superintendent nodded to a crewman, who began lowering the loading doors. Krishna stopped him, laying a hand on his.
“The inner door only. Open the outer door only when I’m past the inner and it’s locked securely.”
Outside, the air was refreshingly deoxygenated. Nevertheless, after a number of days of having to remember not to hyperventilate onboard the slave transport, Krishna felt out of breath simply with the effort of standing up. He shuddered to think of the load he was putting on an ageing metabolism.
He hobbled to a piece of aerodrome furniture, a flashing purple light that no doubt would have meant something vitally important to an incoming pilot, and sat down, obscuring it. The slaver atmo shuttle, filling the world with sound, rumbled away to turn back round for take-off.
All around, the terminal was in ruins. The older Proprietor settlement around it had been in ruins already, of course; but the terminal had been ruined more recently. Buildings smoked, bodies spilled out of broken pressure seals. Some of the bodies looked unmarked; some were charred as if by great heat. Some seemed to have died in the process of changing into something else.
“She was afraid they might hurt me,” he repeated.
He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose extravagantly, then pulled himself away in the direction of the nearest reception building.
It took the best part of a day for her, or a part of her at least, to find him. He was not aware of hearing her, seeing her, smelling her, or otherwise being aware of her presence, but he knew she was behind him. He did not turn around to look; he feared what he might see. He had seen strange prints in the sand between buildings, strange claw marks on bodies.
“How are you doing?” he said.
There was a weird indefinable sound behind him, then a perfectly ordinary voice saying: “Grandfather! You came to see me!”
He turned, and she was human.
“You have been busy,” he said.
“It’s my nature,” she said. She had faithfully reassumed the granddaughter fiction. She even had his nose. She was turned unnaturally away from him, however. Was some part of her still not quite authentically nine-year-old-girl? A butterfly brooch pinned back her hair. Butterflies of her own design decorated her dress. A bangle on her wrist bore a butterfly he had made himself, broken and battered as if by some impact he suspected he would rather not know about in detail. She had always liked butterflies, ever since he had told her what she resembled and she had misunderstood the reference.
“Like the scorpion stinging the frog,” said Old Krishna. “In the fable.”
She snickered prettily. “I didn’t need to cross a river, silly.”
“Oh, but you did,” accused Old Krishna. “It may have been a slaver ship, but you still used the people on it to spread from world to world. You had exhausted all the local possibilities on Railhead. Sphaera, meanwhile, is visited by a constant stream of ships delivering raw materials.”
“What do you mean by raw materials? I think you’re being mean.”
“I mean people. Because you are a device for manufacturing corpses. You asked me to build the comms terminal for that reason and no other. It’s your nature. This world is on a major space-lane. You must come home with me. More people will die.”
“How did you get here?” She had simulated humanity too well; excitement was shining in her eyes. “Do you have a spaceship?”
“I made sure the ship that brought me took off again immediately, and the only ship I’m going to summon will be one that takes us both back home. I can’t allow you to do something like this, or like what you did to Railhead, again. It may be your nature, but until we can find some way to disarm you, you can’t be allowed to occupy the same world as other sentients. You were your creators’ scorched earth policy against the Adhaferans. You were designed to make sure no other intelligent species would ever be able to live comfortably on Railhead even if they managed to conquer it. You were designed to mimic other species, walk among them, infiltrate them, incubate like a virus, strike like an epidemic. My people designed things like you themselves, though ours were far less sophisticated. You’re an area denial munition. You’re a butterfly bomb.”
She twirled a lock of hair sulkily between her fingers. “I was right. You are being mean.”
“How many of you are there on this planet now?”
She smirked like a naughty little sister, just as he had taught her. Her face had been as expressionless as a carnival mask at first. Aping humanity had been a skill he’d taken decades to give her; now he regretted it. “Enough. We’ve been watching you for a few hours now. We couldn’t be sure you were you.”
Krishna sniffed with wounded dignity and frowned. “Your reasoning?”
“Well, I know I’m not me, so it’s only fair to assume others might not be themselves either.”
“You know what’ll happen now? This world will be disinfected. Word will be passed to the Proprietors by my masters, and ships will come. Ships carrying bombs. Did you know this world has an indigenous biosphere with a billion-year history? It has a species of plant that photosynthesizes moonlight. All that diversity, all that biomass, will disappear. You will disappear. You are an infestation. They will be very thorough.”
“If even one of me survives, grandfather, I survive. I am both very and literally single-minded.”
“And where you survive, people will die. I know this. I am the only surviving citizen of Railhead, after all, which is why the military trained me to be your chaperone. I need hardly remind you that I had a sister once, whose resemblance to you is no amazing coincidence—”
“That’s even less fair. You asked me to look like this, and to never grow old like you do. I’ve had to learn how to be your sister and daughter and granddaughter, and you never let me learn to be your wife—”
Krishna grimaced and waved the conversation away with a gnarled hand. “That is a thing we are never going to do. It’s probably just an accident you didn’t kill me. Out of every million spiders an ant colony kills, one evolves ant-smell and walks right into the anthill. Maybe my brainwaves just taste nasty. The ship that set me down here has a pilot capable of landing a Proprietor shuttle manually. With his hand on the control globe and my voice in the ear of the nav system, we will, together, be able to fly any of the vessels in this terminal. They are, mostly, still intact, if alarmed at the fact that the biologicals are fighting among themselves. I have located a suitable ship, an orbital cargo transport, at grid reference 45° 250′ 63″ south, 0° 0′ 158″ west. Shortly, the ship that brought me will set down its pilot and he and I and you will fly that transport out of here. He and I and you alone, I must stress. I have grown accustomed to your company. I assure you, though, that when we return home to Railhead there’ll be more company than just me. Scientific teams will telefactor down to us every now and then to examine you, to figure out how you operate—”
“Brother, father, grandfather—you know very well that all your military teams want to do is figure out how to make more of me. Besides, none of your scientific teams have visited us for a very long time. I don’t think anyone is going to be listening for your signal.” She screwed up her face as if tasting vinegar. “I can’t go home. It would be like deliberately driving a needle into my eye. You have no idea. Besides, I do not require your company any longer.”
His hands trembled on the stick. “What did you say?”
She looked indicatively at a point behind his left shoulder. He turned.
“Hello grandfather,” said a voice. A male voice.
He growled softly in his throat. “I am no grandfather of yours.”
“Nor of hers.” The resemblance was picture perfect. Gangly limbs, skinned knees and elbows, festival clothes. It had been the anniversary of First Planetfall. Mother and father had baked a cake in the shape of a rocket he had been too young to remember.
He banged the stick on the ground like a sorcerer dispelling demons. “Out! Out of my shape!”
His own youthful face smirked back at him. “Shan’t.”
He poled himself forwards towards himself, breathing with difficulty. “You can’t kill me.”
“But I can get out of your way easier than air.” He skipped away from himself easily to just outside stick range. “Your heart is beating a mite too fast for your health, by the way. I can hear it, grandfather. If any vessel leaves this world, it leaves with all of us or none.”
Krishna drew himself up to his full height. His spine complained, unaccustomed to being made straight. “That is transparently not compatible with the offer I have made. I give you one hour to discuss it amongst yourselves—”
“We have no need to discuss it; we are of one mind.”
“Nevertheless, I give you one hour, after which time my transport will leave. In the meantime, please indulge an old man by allowing him what may after all be his last walk with something that looks like his sister. I must make it clear that this world will be destroyed. This is not raving; this is a fact.”
She simulated genuine concern. “Grandfather, you shouldn’t do that. Your skin provides virtually no resistance against blast and gamma.”
He shrugged. “I can see no better solution. Shall we walk? Your other selves tire me.”
The cyclopean avenues of seamless concrete that constituted the Proprietors’ original city loomed overhead. Their crumbling summits had been crowned a livid birdshit grey by the local flora.
“In the right light this could be home,” he said. “The sky is blue enough, and there is not one blade of grass. I believe this is the most hospitable part of the planet, and yet it resembles a desert. The native vegetation is poikilohydric. It specializes in being soaked and dried alternately. We are now in the dry season.”
“I can’t accompany you, grandfather. To try to make me go back is to attempt to put an explosion back in a hand grenade. To be cooped up in a box? My only company a being with one tenth my service life, and when that lifespan’s at an end, then what?”
The boundaries of the terminal were walls of hand-cut masonry, slave-built, recent. Beyond them a low bluff rose out of the die-flat dry sea bed the settlement had been built of. Krishna was forced to speak haltingly as they climbed the bluff. His heart was throbbing in his chest like a wounded hand. “The box is planet-sized—and the majority of company you keep—you kill.”
“But not all! I only killed a thousand on Railhead. The larger the world, the greater the likelihood of immunity. A world with a billion inhabitants might yield a million companions.”
“And only—nine hundred and ninety nine million graves.” Krishna powered himself over the bluff with the stick; what he had been walking towards came into view, standing on the dry sea bed surrounded by armed crewmen. She had not been expecting to see it, and stopped dead.
“It’s a shuttle,” she said redundantly.
“Yes.” He began poling himself along with the stick; he had to move faster.
“The shuttle that brought me here—to be precise . . . it circled around behind the bluff and landed here right after take-off. We will have to hurry—if we want to board—the crew will turn on the burners if they believe anyone but you and I is coming . . . Did you really believe—I’d give you the location of the ship we were leaving on?”
“I keep telling you; I am not going with you.”
Krishna nodded. He could not count the beats of his heart now; it was like that of a bird. “Then I have—no option.” He pulled out the small fragment of his god that he took with him on long journeys, held it to the light. “Behold my travel god. You have paid—little enough attention to it over the years. It was in fact given me by my masters. It contains a very small travel bomb which can nevertheless—split this planet in two; and that, sister daughter granddaughter, will kill all of you.”
Her face lost its look of certainty for the first time. “It’s a rock.”
“It’s a bomb,” said Old Krishna. “Though also still a god.”
She looked at the rock in real terror. “When will it detonate?”
“When I want it to.” He whipped back his hand and threw; the god bounced several times on the wall of the bluff before being lost in the heat haze. “Now it is a rock—among several million rocks. Find it—if you can. As your other selves are all of one mind with you, they now know my shuttle is here—they are therefore coming here—and they will be coming quickly . . . Believe me, I know this . . . But they’re coming from the wrong end of the terminal . . . And they’re trying—to worm their way aboard a Proprietor military transport that has orders—not to allow any unauthorized personnel inside it—”
He had to stop. There were men with guns around him now, ushering him into the loading lock. The take-off sparklers were already lit. Turning to look up the bluff, he could see figures silhouetted against the sun. Figures that were humanoid, but certainly not human. They would have taken other shapes, faster shapes. She was still dawdling twenty metres behind him. Trying to delay him.
She still had time.
The loading lock door whined shut, slowly, interminably, narrowing to a metre-wide sliver. She had still not moved. Eventually, he could not bear it any longer, and turned his face away.
When he turned back, she was holding him up against acceleration, his head in her hands, while men clung on to safety grips on the walls around him. Someone was yelling into a communicator “GET US AIRBORNE! GET US SOME HEIGHT NOW!” Something heavy clanged off the outside hull.
She turned his head to face her. “Was it all bullshit? It sounded like it.”
“Complete bullshit,” he gasped weakly. “A good thing I’m having a—heart attack, or you’d have been able to tell I was lying just by listening to my—heartbeat.”
She held him close, supporting him, as the acceleration mounted and the shuttle rolled towards orbit.
“Try to relax. Don’t exert yourself. We’ll get you through this.”
“Just promise me this is one ship you’ll—never get off. If you never make planetfall, your aggression algorithms may—never kick in. Stay in space—travel hopefully—never arrive—”
She held him close and made a very reasonable facsimile of tears until the acceleration lessened and they came to take him off her.
“Give us room! Give us room! Let us get him some oxygen!”
She shook her head. “His heart has stopped.”
The certainty of the statement gave them pause. They separated from her, treating her with the respect prudent men give to things they cannot explain. She sank down against the wall, trying to let gravity drag her miserably to the floor. Gravity refused to do so. She had to suffer in mid-air.