He’d always have ice at parties.
He shook that thought off and entered his ID in the reception screen. A few moments later, an astonished-looking woman he didn’t know came out of another room and said, “Good morning, Marshall, I’m Jane Rancourt.”
“Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”
“Jane.”
“Buford. Is Martin up? It’s about the new project.”
In his ear, Ursula’s voice said, “Penzance.”
He got the reference instantly, clenched his teeth, and said, “Penzance. You get a memo?” The damn tune would be running through his head for years, he just knew it.
“Just today. Well, yesterday. I wasn’t expecting anyone at this hour, though.”
“It’s the only time I’m not doing something else. And the appeasers are less likely to get wind of it if it’s done quietly.”
“I’ll call him.” Jane went back into her office.
“Penzance?” he muttered.
“It’s at least as good a codename as ‘Overlord’ or ‘Desert Storm,’” Ursula said. “And much better security than ‘Cherubim.’”
“I wanted to call that ‘Pumpkin,’” he said.
“The kzin are highly literate and fond of alien fables. They’d have understood it was a reference to transformation.”
Early was shocked. He hadn’t thought of that himself. He’d been thinking of sweet potatoes, which he loathed in pie. He liked pumpkin pie, that’s all. “What codename would you have given it?”
“Supposing I was silly enough to do it, you mean? Mighty Mouse. Complete irrelevance. Of course, there’d be some minor risk of them stocking up on limburger, but the Protectors would be in pressure suits most of the time anyway. Dummy up.” Massoglia was coming out.
“Hey, Buford.”
“Marty. Sorry about the hour.”
“Nah, makes sense. And you are always Early.” The only enjoyment he got from that tired old joke was hearing Ursula’s beak grind at the pun. “You want the full tour at last?”
“Not hardly, but I’m taking it. How much did the memo tell you?”
“Splice and clone, and they need at least a quarter of a cortex per donor. Personally I think if the Belt wants genius lunatics they should start with the guy who thought this up.”
“Who says they didn’t? They need more than one.”
“Might as well take you straight to the Beneficiaries, then. Not many of those. This way.” He led Early down a corridor and through a doorway.
Corpsicles had once been kept in separate Dewar tanks. Later they were more numerous, and space was at a premium, so most had been packed in rows, side by side.
Not these. There would have been too much risk of getting the parts mixed up. As they passed one carcass, Early said, “Good Christ, what happened to him?”
“Run over by a sugar train. Wore a lottery bracelet, so he was frozen,” Marty said without looking. “Everyone asks that,” he added, clearly accustomed to people wondering how he knew which one.
“Lottery?”
“It was a fad for a while to have local lotteries award freezer slots as prizes. If we could ever get him stuck back together right he’d have a lot of money waiting for him.”
“How did a guy that lucky get hit by a train?”
“Crossed the tracks when the barricades were already down. It was a jurisdiction where pedestrians had right-of-way.”
“So he expected the train to stop for him? I’d have made the freemother pay for the engineer’s therapy! A jaywalker never has the right-of-way.”
Marty just grunted agreement.
In Early’s ear, Ursula’s voice said, “We do not want that brain.”
Early nearly choked from trying not to laugh aloud.
Fortunately, he was able to let it out when Marty said, “He’s probably not quite what you’re looking for.”
This chamber had originally been excavated as a bomb shelter, which, since the building overhead had once been where the UN held its meetings, said something about the original General Assembly’s opinion about their own effectiveness. Dividers and equipment had gone in during the First War, while the delegates met under a mountain in Switzerland. They got to the end of the ranks of bodies, most of which reminded him of people he’d last seen right after a battle, and got to a section near the end that struck him as different. Early immediately studied his surroundings to see why.
The lighting was better. The windows over the bodies had no frost on the inside, meaning they were of a different material. The ID tags at each body were of hullmetal, with the lettering inset, and given the properties of hullmetal, that meant they’d been formed that way. “These are the Beneficiaries,” Marty said. “People who couldn’t afford to be frozen, or hadn’t thought of it, so strangers who admired them paid for it or took up collections. They were all heroes to someone. This is Wu Kim,” he said, pointing to the left half of a woman whose right side had not been entirely found. “Tiananmen. A few of the people who got the body out and on ice in time later ended up in the First War. Not too surprisingly, they all distinguished themselves.”
“Tiananmen?” Ursula said in his ear.
“Chinese word meaning Waco,” Early remarked. Marty glanced at him and nodded.
There were only sixty-one Beneficiaries, and Marty had something to say about them all. The last and earliest was Hugo van Trast. “He was still at Caltech when he came up with the rejection buffer,” Marty said.
“What did that to him?”
“Carlists. They blamed van Trast for the organ bank that saved the life of Francisco Bahamonde. They kind of overlooked the fact that that same organ bank also saved the life of Marissa Colby, who invented the fusion shield and replenished the depleted fishing grounds and gave us free water. She was on vacation in Majorca when she was exposed to some kind of pesticide. You know, the ones they used in the period when DDT was illegal? Really horrible stuff—There are royalists today who hold annual parties where they burn Bahamonde in effigy.”
“I don’t know why. He’s still dead,” Early said, shaking his head.
“Take them all,” Ursula told him.
“Tag them for shipment.”
“Some don’t have that much brain left,” Marty objected.
“We can at least get their DNA,” Early said without being told. “These are miracle workers. The kzin get smarter with every war. We could use some miracles.”
Marty nodded, but looked sad. He looked around at the dead, made a gesture with his right hand which could have turned into a wave if he hadn’t stopped it, and said, “You need any others?”
“I hope not,” Early said.
Marty nodded again. “Was it Napoleon who said he’d rather have a general who was lucky than one who was smart?”
“It’s been attributed to him,” Early agreed, “but look how he turned out.” He studied Marty. “You’ll miss them, won’t you?”
Marty nodded. “I liked to sit here and read. It was a good feeling, to be with the best people their times could produce.”
“Get a DNA cheek swab from him,” Ursula said. “Imply that he’s got this job because he’s the most diligent organizer willing to do it. That’ll make him feel better.”
“Martin,” Early said, “they need orderly minds to sort their memories out. How would you like to have any good genes you carry added to the mix of every general they’re made into?”
“I think I’d like it a lot.”
Back in the elevator, Early murmured, “That was a damn nice thing to do.”
“I like when I can combine that with doing a good job,” Ursula said. “I also like when someone displays intelligence. You picked up on the idea right away.”
“Thanks,” Early said, keeping his own counsel.
It didn’t help. “I see. You got the purpose and the method, but you thought I was just being considerate. Two out of three.”
“Two out of three—”
“—Is a D, Buford.”
He was fuming by the time he got back to his apartment. Ursula became visible again, and he went over to his desk and gave the nearest leg a vicious kick. It broke off, bounced against the wall, and rebounded where he could grab it. He turned and aimed the stub at her. “You missed one,” he said.
“And you missed my companion,” she said.
“Are you serious? ‘There’s someone behind you’? That’s the oldest trick in the book.”
A huge, gloved feline hand reached over his head and plucked the puncher out of his grasp.
“Actually, the oldest trick in the book is kidnapping a couple of teenagers, brainwiping them, waking them up in a prepared habitat, and saying, ‘I made you out of dust and I made her out of one of your ribs,’” said Ursula.
Early turned carefully and looked at the indubitable kzin in his apartment. His suit looked like it was made out of balloons. “Oh, hell,” Early said.
“I thought it was ‘hello,’” said the kzin. “Human languages are weird.”
“I need to recreate the roast I ate earlier. Stun him and put him back to bed, then we have to get moving to arrange the supposed wreck of the ship with the bodies.”
As the kzin brought up his other hand—the one with the stunner—the only thing Buford Early could think of was, I am the very model of a modern major general—
He saw the room tilt, then stop as he was caught. The rest was silence.
Unless he was staying over with a woman he’d met, Buford Early slept in his autodoc. At his age most people died in their sleep, and while he wasn’t as afraid of dying as most people, it struck him as an undignified way to go after surviving five wars. On the other hand, his psychist program told him it was really a way of distancing himself, since the lack of a bed in his apartment meant that any woman who came home with him couldn’t stay over herself. The clincher, however, was that it was the most comfortable place he’d ever had to sleep.
He was not accustomed to being startled when he woke up.
Certainly not by a group of stern-faced guards. He checked his weapons by reflex, but left them; he’d spent his entire career doing what he believed was right, and however someone had disagreed on what that might have been, shooting his way through his fellow ARMs wasn’t it. He opened the ’doc and said, “Do I get to eat?”
“You’re not under arrest,” said Smith. The Marsborn agent was the only man he recognized. “But we really do want to ask you an awful lot of questions. The ship you sent off last night has disappeared.”
“Ship?”
Smith squinted, then said, “Aw, tanj, he’s had an erasure. Assume lethal traps and search the place.”
“I can point things out if you like,” Early said, utterly at a loss. Why would he have an erasure?
“You might have had some things erased,” Smith said.
Early got up, went into the bathroom, showered, dressed—he’d apparently remembered to run the laundry last night, all his clothes were in the cabinet—and went to the kitchen to start the roast.
After a while he heard an exclamation and came to the doorway to see who’d made what mistake. They were all standing at the desk looking at the screen. Smith looked at him and said, “Where the fuck did you get this crystal?”
Early spread his hands, shook his head, and went over to see what it was.
It was in kzin script, with a running translation down the side of the screen.
If it was genuine, it was the entire kzin order of battle, including the target schedule for the current war. They were making copies already.
He must have had an erasure to protect the identity of one king-hell insider in the Patriarch’s Palace.
“If this checks out,” Smith said, “that funny business last night isn’t going to cause you much trouble. You’ll probably be promoted to a directorship to keep you out of trouble, but I imagine you’d find it difficult to get out from behind your desk under the weight of all the medals anyway. Marshall, you’re either the smartest man alive, or the luckiest.”
The copying was done, and the screen reverted to a desktop that wasn’t his: a reclining woman he’d never seen before, almost entirely Caucasian, nude, built like he liked ’em, and smiling at the camera with what looked much very like love in her eyes. Below it was perhaps the most unnecessary caption imaginable:
HOT.
THE WHITE
COLUMN
by Hal Colebatch
THE WHITE COLUMN
THE LIFT TOOK ME DEEP UNDERGROUND, past five decks of steel and concrete, the guard glaring at me and my own escort, and apparently deciding he hadn’t quite got an excuse to shoot us. The site was well hardened.
General Burkholtz greeted me at Level 5 and took me through the second retinal identification. Then our far-seer was to be presented to me.
“We’ve tested him at short range, sir. To show us, under top secrecy of course, headlines of newspapers from different parts of the world, from a few weeks ahead. In each case the newspapers, when they were printed, were exactly as he had pictured them. It works for sounds as well—he recorded a new symphony before it was written. It was just a matter of fitting phones on the opti-encephalograph.”
“Why not just have him read all the future documents, then?”
“He can’t see to that degree of visual detail. And also because in every previous case where such an ability has been present in some degree, it very rapidly burns itself out. It did with Basil Shackleton. Already we are starting to get flickerings in the pictures he ‘transmits.’ Once the ability has gone, it doesn’t come back. We don’t want to waste it, sir. He’s the best we’ve ever had, but judging from the rate of ‘flickering’ we have recorded, which is increasing exponentially, he probably has only one session left in him. We don’t want to waste it.”
“Is he aware of this?”
“That he’s nearly finished as a far-seer? Yes. I think he’s rather pleased at the prospect of becoming normal.”
“Can you tell what the headlines of the newspapers he saw say, at least?”
“The usual stuff, sir. Things going from bad to worse. Nuclear proliferation. Environmental decay. The blow-up getting nearer. We’ve photographs of them here.”
“It reminds me of a science fiction story I once read,” I said. “Someone else who could see the future, just like this. The military, for obvious reasons, asked him to draw the most advanced weapon he could see from a century hence. They puzzled over the picture he brought back, turned it over to the best teams of scientists. Someone eventually recognized it as a crossbow.”
There was a very mirthless laugh from these, our own best team of scientists. They brought Richard Billings, the far-seer, forward and presented me to him. A very ordinary name, I thought.
He was a somewhat shabby, unkempt-looking man, despite the major’s uniform someone had put him into, not unpleasant-looking, but undistinguished and, apart from the pallor they all shared from living underground, out of place in this company of high-domed heads and spectacles. Like many people, he seemed somewhat shy at meeting me. I told him we all appreciated the patriotic thing he was doing. The pallor threw up his blushes and he stammered something.
“I hope I can help, sir” he said. I asked him, as I suppose many had done before, how he thought he did it. “My subconscious—or something—points me at what I see,” he said, “but I can hardly remember it. I didn’t recognize the newspapers when they showed the photographs of them to me.”
“Is it painful?” I asked.
“No, not really, sir.”
Dr. Gropius took me to one side.
“The general is right, as far as we know, sir,” he said. “We think the next session will be his last.”
“And what’s he programmed to find?” It was easy to talk of Billings as if he were not there. We thought of him as a weapon, not a man.
“The most advanced artifact existing a hundred years from now.” He smiled wryly. “I hope it won’t be the crossbow.”
We sat back. Billings, the opti-encephalograph clamped to his head, his arms and legs restrained, slumped forward in his couch. There was a faint humming as the current built up. Then a picture appeared on the screen in front of us.
There was a flat, reddish plain. In the center was a white column, with what appeared to be some sort of decoration at the top. The microphones recorded a whistling wind. There were what might have been low buildings or paving nearby, but scale and size were impossible to tell.
“A column.” I thought of “Ozymandias”—“‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’” I quoted. “Is it a ruin?” As the scene grew darker, I recognized the Pleiades in the sky. I could identify the scene as the Northern Hemisphere, anyway.
“Doric,” said someone. “Or Corinthian, maybe…Yes, ‘round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ the lone and level sands stretch far away.’” The picture flickered. There was what seemed a long pause, and it returned.
“That’s the longest interrupting yet,” said Dr. Gropius, “And the quickest to manifest itself. It’s breaking up fast.”
Nothing seemed to be moving in the picture, save that it was sunset, and as night deepened more stars were beginning to appear. There was bright Venus, and Orion’s Belt.
“It can’t have moved since classical times,” said someone. “Maybe it’s all that remains of the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna, or somewhere else in North Africa.”
“Or what the Romans called Arabia Felix.”
“If that is the most advanced surviving artifact, all the cities must be gone, all machinery…”
“All life…” said somebody else.
I have said it was impossible to tell the scale. Now the picture was becoming fuzzy. I noticed tiny things, possibly insects, were moving at the base of the column. As I watched, they moved into or under the low structure near it.
“Well, there’s life, anyway,” I said.
“A complete waste,” said the general. “We could look at this till Doomsday, and it wouldn’t tell us anything useful.”
“Except that Doomsday is coming,” said Gropius. “And this is all that’s left. The last trace of Man. We must have destroyed the Earth big time.”