CHAPTER THREE
“I can’t believe I found you! It’s me—Zee. Remember?”
She looked at him suspiciously. “Have we met?”
“Don’t you remember? Back in Raba? It was about ten years ago. You were aboard the ship named Ravenal. We had two weeks together and then you had to go. You begged me to come along but I was too stubborn to leave. It was my fault. I’m sorry.”
She regarded him for a moment before answering. “I’m so sorry, Zee. A couple of years ago I had a hibernation accident. There was some memory impairment. I was able to reconstruct most of my history, but not everything. But now that I see you, I do think you look familiar.”
Meanwhile I was watching both of them, trying to figure out what in the expanding universe was going on.
The math was clear. There’s about two thirds of a quadrillion humans; just under half are physically female. As Zee’s autonomous message had found out, roughly one in three hundred million of those had the name Kusti Sendoa.
Also: at any given time there’s about a thousand spacecraft in low-Uranus orbit. Assume one percent of them are on retrograde courses like this tug we were on, and assume half are operated by a human of one type or another. So that makes ten people who could have picked us up, or one in six hundred trillion. The odds of that person being Kusti Sendoa were thus the product of the two figures, or something like one in a hundred sextillion. A reasonable approximation of zero.
Kusti motioned for Zee to take the other seat, and lowered the little gun—but didn’t actually put it away. The tug rotated end-over-end and her engine growled as she aimed herself at the big landing field on the skyward side of Puck and began braking hard.
“What happened on the shuttle?” Kusti asked Zee.
“Two guys were fighting with a young woman—was that your friend Adya? I guess I kind of got myself involved.”
Slight hesitation before she answered. “How did you wind up out here?”
“One of the guys had something that dissolved the window.”
“Goodness. What happened to the others?”
“They all got out of the compartment. I guess they’re all still on the shuttle.”
“I see. And how did you come to be in that compartment in the first place?”
“Like I said, there was a fight, and I kind of waded in, trying to stop it.” He shrugged. “So, how have you been? What have you been doing since you left Raba?”
“My memory has some gaps. Lately I’ve been working as a freelance investigator. I’m tracking that woman called Adya. Do you have any connection to her?”
“If she’s the one on the shuttle, I never saw her before.”
Kusti looked through the diamond bubble of the cockpit at the lumpy bulk of Puck, the ice-and-rock surface almost hidden by domes and factories. “Tell me: What do you remember about me?”
Zee started recounting the plot of Brief Eternity. I watched her reaction.
Zee, of course, was utterly sincere. Even bog-standard Baseline humans with nothing but eyeballs made of goo could usually read his emotions as easily as text. He was excited, happy, a little aroused, remorseful, and held nothing back as he told her all about their fictional love affair.
Kusti, by contrast, was very hard for me to read, and that’s a rare thing. I don’t know if she had conscious control over her autonomic responses, or just had very nonstandard reactions. She watched Zee laughing and weeping as he told her how overjoyed he was to find her and apologized to her for his selfishness. As far as her heart rate and blood flow went, Zee might as well have been describing what he’d eaten for breakfast.
Then, as if someone had flipped a switch, she looked wistful. “What you’re saying…it’s like a dream. It all sounds familiar, but I can’t quite recall any of it yet.” She turned her big golden-brown eyes on him, dilated her pupils, and gave him a big smile. “You do look familiar, and I know I can trust you, Zee.”
I was still trying to figure out what game she was playing. I knew the whole love story was made up. So who was this girl, and why was she pretending to remember an affair that never happened?
But of course for me to point out that all of this was completely bogus would mean telling Zee about my part in the whole imaginary-girlfriend business. I still wanted to avoid that, if I could.
So I listened and watched and played dumb. I knew she was lying, I knew I didn’t like her—and I knew Zee was convinced she was the lost love of his life. At various times in my life I’ve watched humans make catastrophically bad pairings, but all of the others had at least been their own damned fault. Poor Zee was in love with this woman because of something the penguin had stuck into his head.
Ah, yes, the penguin…exactly why did Raba just happen to pick that particular romance entertainment out of the countless billions of works of emotion-stimulating bullshit humans have produced since they learned to talk? Was there some reason the penguin wanted Zee searching for a woman named Kusti Sendoa? And did it have something to do with the statistically unlikely fact that we had just stumbled across her?
As the tug dropped toward the landing pad I linked up with the Ring network and burned some energy credits on a transmission to Raba.
“We found her, you sneaky bastard. Now what?” I wouldn’t get a reply for a couple of hours, but at least this way I’d have the satisfaction of letting the penguin know it wasn’t so smart, third-level intellect or no.
I also did a quick search for the name “Kusti Sendoa,” and was not very surprised to learn there was nobody under that name currently linked into the Ring network. Our “Kusti” was using a different handle.
The tug landed right on the center of the pad, and the whole thing retracted inside Puck. Gantries, fuel lines, and a docking tube converged on her from the walls.
Once the cockpit’s hatch snuggled up to the docking tube, the pressure membrane retracted and the two humans scrambled out. Puck’s barely perceptible gravity meant they could travel horizontally, pushing off with their hands every ten meters or so.
“We’d better get to the Ring shuttle terminal,” said Zee. “If the police have arrested those two goons they might want statements from Daslakh and me.”
Kusti nodded slowly. “Yes. You get in touch with security and find out what’s going on. I have a couple of things to take care of. Can I ask you a big favor? It would make my life a lot easier if you didn’t mention me to anyone. Tell them the tug picked you up on her own.”
“Okay,” said Zee, and he sounded a little uncomfortable.
“When you’re done with all that you can meet me…” Her eyes unfocused for a second as she looked up something on the local network. “Meet me at the Roasted Crab. It’s near the terminal. We can have something to eat, catch up on old times, and…see what happens.” She finished that with a smile that made poor Zee blush.
It’s always a little weird to watch humans in the grip of their ancient reptile instincts. Take Zee, for example: a perfectly intelligent, rational human, with a thorough understanding of how his own brain works. But let some fertile-looking female show some interest and he goes all sub-baseline. Most other humans of both sexes do the same. I found myself wishing they had some calmer way to reproduce themselves—budding, say, or pollination via bees.
Zee and I headed for the moon’s core while Kusti went off on her own vague errand. Puck’s an old colony. With a couple of interruptions humans and mechs have been living inside it since the Third Millennium. The interior’s an undifferentiated mix of ice and rock, fairly easy to dig through. Over the course of seven thousand years successive cohorts of inhabitants have turned the inside of Puck into a bewildering three-dimensional labyrinth. Without help from the local network we’d never have found our way to the core.
We eventually reached a big open shaft leading down, the walls all overgrown with colorful flowers and the inevitable uba vines. Trolleys ran along cables down the center, so Zee and I squeezed aboard one and rode downward with a slowly diminishing crowd of Puckites. The locals tended to be small and slender, pale and androgynous, and a good half of them had the opposable toes of spacer humans. The style at the time appeared to be for lots of overt tech implants; nearly everyone inside Puck had patches of glossy plastic skin, or shiny metal limbs, or data ports, or pointless blinky lights. Pathetic, really. Meat pretending to be machinery is still just meat.
The shuttle terminal was right in the center of Puck, a big spherical cavern lined with diamond blocks. The main shuttle line passed through the middle of the cavern, inside a sealed transparent tube so you could watch them shoot by. Sidings led to long airlocks where the shuttle capsules could enter the pressurized space, and additional branches after that led to the unloading platforms, maintenance shacks, and so forth.
I spotted the shuttle we’d been riding, now shunted onto the maintenance track and surrounded by hovering cop drones. Zee noticed before I could say anything, and launched himself directly across the terminal at it. I followed a little less conspicuously, and joined the small knot of onlookers on the climbway from the inner surface of the sphere to the siding.
Zee landed right where a group of Puck security—solidly built human cyborgs with six limbs—were interviewing the young woman from the shuttle compartment. I looked all around with my eyes on max zoom and could see no trace of the red- and blue-haired duo, nor of the cat.
Naturally, the security borgs swarmed Zee as soon as he dropped in, scanning him, asking questions, and checking his data tracks. He told them the straight story, and I could see his hands making swooping and tumbling motions as he gave a blow-by-blow of the fight.
They let him go after about half an hour, and I could see the shuttle maintenance techs practically shove the cops out of the way in order to inspect the vehicle and get it back into service.
Zee and the young woman took the climbway down to the interior surface of the sphere and I met them at the bottom.
“Daslakh, this is Adya,” he said.
Even if her skin hadn’t turned a nervous yellow green it was obvious Adya was worried about something, but she paused for a moment, inhaled, and then said, “My thanks to you for helping stop those terrible three from taking me. It gladdens me to know a timely ship appeared to save you from a dismal death.”
She paused for a moment, inhaled, and then said, “Weak words cannot convey the great gratitude I give. With cool courage and great goodness you pair of protectors, mech and man, did fight the fatal fiends who conspired to capture me cunningly. Saving me selflessly, you suffered the stab of spite: One vicious villain cast you into vacuum. I feared your fall would finish in fire—two shooting stars shining unseen under Uranus’s clouds. Yet nothing could blaze as bright as your bravery. Rightfully should I repay such sacrifice by returning all I have—though such sums I can supply still are utterly unequal to the debt that is due. Yet duty demands I defer my debt. I can only offer my thankful thoughts.”
If there’d been any doubt about where she was from, that little improvised speech removed it. Miranda, and clearly from the oligarch class.
“At least our trip wasn’t boring. Who were those guys?” I asked her.
“I do not know,” she said, and by all indications was telling the truth. “They came into my cabin and tried to capture me.”
“Security are still trying to find them,” said Zee. “They must have gotten off the shuttle somehow.”
“That means you could still be in danger,” I pointed out to Adya. “Both of you, actually.”
“All three of us,” said Zee. “You stabbed one of them in the leg.”
“It saddens me to say I must depart,” said Adya, turning more orange. “I truly wish that I could stay and learn what hab or moon could spawn a pair like you. But time and orbits will not wait—I have to hit a window closing soon. Farewell!” With that she launched herself at the shaft leading to the landing field, but she did glance back once and wave.
“I hope she’s all right,” said Zee. “Should we—?”
I was almost as torn as he was. I wanted to know why those mooks had been trying to grab Adya, but I also wanted to find out more about Kusti, and why she was willing to pretend to be Zee’s imaginary girlfriend.
Zee’s hormones cast the deciding vote. He dithered another couple of seconds until Adya was out of sight, then asked the local net where we could find the Roasted Crab.
Humans love to make biological necessities into social events. I suppose I should be glad most cultures don’t make as big a fuss over excretion as they do about ingesting food. The Roasted Crab was one of those places where humans gather in groups to consume food and mild psychoactives, and typically make a lot of noise doing so. This one was decorated with images and artifacts of trade ships, cyclers, and interplanetary travel. The walls displayed lots of humanoid types exotic to the Uranian system, creating a cosmopolitan ambiance designed to appeal to people living inside Puck who probably never even visited other moons in the Ring.
Kusti wasn’t there. Zee found a table with a view of the entrance and perched on a seat. He called up a menu on the tabletop and ordered cheese cubes and a bulb of wine. If we’d been someplace rich and advanced like Juren or Deimos, the table could have printed out anything he wanted, but in a low-tech tavern inside Puck, Zee had to wait for some sub-baseline machine to get his food out of a refrigerator and carry it to his table.
An hour later Zee stared at the last cheese cube and took a swig from his third bulb of wine.
“I hope nothing’s happened to her,” he said.
“Which one?”
“Kusti, of course. Well, I mean, I hope nothing’s happened to Adya, either. I wish the network could find them.”
I did a quick search of local infospace. Adya had used some basic tricks to hide her tracks but they didn’t fool me. “You can put yourself at ease about Adya. She departed aboard a ship named Pelagia, bound for Jupiter. I guess she wasn’t kidding about a launch window.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s good, I guess. What about Kusti?”
“No trace of her,” I said, which was frustratingly true. “She must be using an alias.” I took the opportunity to sow some doubt. “Are you really sure she’s the person you remember?”
“She’s got the same name.”
“You found a million others.”
“She looks like Kusti.”
“Could be off-the-shelf looks.”
“Now you’re being silly. How likely is it that I’d run into a duplicate of the woman I’m looking for?”
How likely, indeed. The penguin still hadn’t replied to my message, which I decided to take as a tacit admission that this had been planned. I could either swallow my pride and ask Raba what was going on, or demonstrate my own superior intellect by figuring it out for myself. Put that way, the choice was obvious.
“We were just talking about you!” Zee called out as Kusti herself approached the table. As soon as he spoke her expression of mild annoyance turned into a big sexy smile.
“I hope you were saying nice things. What are we having?”
“There’s some cheese left. Want some wine?”
She added a salty miso cocktail and a kudzu-and-kelp salad to Zee’s tab, and after they arrived she took a long drink before looking right into Zee’s eyes. “I need your help,” she said.
“Anything,” he said without hesitation.
She smiled again. “I knew I could depend on you. I need to leave the Ring. Adya’s gone off to Jupiter and I have to follow her as soon as possible.”
“Okay, but I want to know what’s going on. Why are you tracking Adya? And who were those guys who attacked her?”
Kusti took a sip of miso and vodka. “What do you know about the Great War of the Ring?” she asked him. If my spider body had ears I would have pricked them up at that.
Zee just shrugged. “Ancient history. Was it the Fourth Millennium? A big fight between the Inner Ring and the rest of the solar system. Lots of habitats wrecked, Earth and Venus depopulated, trillions dead. We won.”
“That’s about right. There were some pretty desperate moments during that war, when it looked like biological life would go extinct. When it was all over a group of human scientists and loyal AIs came up with a weapon to use against the minds of the Ring if conflict ever broke out again. A conceptual weapon that only destroys digital intelligences. Their minds simply can’t process it, and it shuts them down. Biological brains are immune. They called it the Godel Trigger, but it was never used.”
I kept absolutely silent.
“What does this have to do with Adya?”
“She’s gotten mixed up with an extremist group. They call themselves the Corporeal Compact, and they want to suppress AI and turn mechs into slaves again. They want to find the Godel Trigger.”
“She didn’t seem like the fanatical type.”
“Oh, the people behind it are good at fooling people. They claim the Compact is just an advocacy group for biological intelligence. They draw people in and trap them, using brain-tampering, lies, memetics, plain old blackmail. Adya probably thinks she’s part of an innocent political group, but they’re very dangerous. Can you imagine how many lives could be destroyed if there was a way to shut down any digital mind?”
I knew this “Godel Trigger” was important, but I didn’t know why or how I knew. Those memories were locked away in passive storage—presumably so that nosy higher-level intelligences couldn’t pull them out of my mind. I’d have to sift through my old memories and figure out what to unlock.
But I was pretty sure Kusti wasn’t telling the whole truth. Either she was lying to Zee, or she didn’t know the truth herself. Given that she was already deceiving him, inductive reasoning suggested she was lying about this as well.
“Who were those three trying to kidnap her?”
“The two humans are Chi and Ketto. They work for the cat, who’s called Muro. They’re freelancers. I think some rival faction must have hired them to find Adya. She knows something about where the Trigger is hidden, and they want to find out what she knows. So do I. Can I count on you, Zee?” She looked into his eyes as if she were trying to gaze a hole through his skull.
“Of course,” he said. “I was selfish before and it took me years to realize what I’d lost. I’m not going to make that mistake again. I’ll do whatever you ask,” he said, with an adoring look.
“Good,” she said. “Because we’ve got a big problem. I need to follow Adya, but I don’t have enough energy credits to get to Jovian space. I’m almost out of cash and my employer won’t give me any more unless I can produce some results. How much money do you have?”
“I could barely afford to get here from Raba,” Zee admitted.
“Then we have to find a way to raise cash quickly. We’ll need enough for a fast sail to Jupiter—four hundred thousand gigajoules for propulsion and space.”
“I can look for a job,” said Zee. “I’m a qualified repair and maintenance tech for mining machines. Oh, and I’m a Veteran-level nuledor, if that helps.” After another moment’s thought he added, “I can sing.”
“Can you pull two hundred thousand a week?”
Zee shook his head. “I’m a hard worker, but I do need to sleep sometimes. Give me half a year and I can save up that much.”
“We don’t have that much time. The longer we wait, the longer it takes to get to Jupiter.” She looked thoughtful, glanced at me as if estimating how much my chassis would fetch, then smiled at Zee. “All right, leave it to me. I think I know a way to make the best use of our talents.”
Zee rented living space for the two of them in a cheap section of Puck’s interior—a big chunk of space dug out of rock and lined with a simple pressure balloon. The walls and floor were literally ice-cold, so the two of them had to take refuge inside an old cargo container rigged up with a mattress and heater. Zee apologized more than once for the lack of luxury, but Kusti was surprisingly tolerant. “It’s just temporary,” she said. “I’m happy as long as I’m with you,” she added with another petawatt gaze into his eyes.
I tagged along and did my best impression of a barely Baseline mech. Kusti took to bossing me around almost as much as she did Zee, but he was too starry-eyed to notice. I mostly did what she asked; when I didn’t feel like being obedient I played stupid until she gave up. The two of them “revived” their relationship in the usual way, but on the following day they began putting Kusti’s plan into action.
She located a dive near the landing field named Plainer Ground—a cheap and drab place where humans could nourish and intoxicate themselves without being distracted by anything like aesthetics. This one, though, featured games of chance. The house ran a game in which players bet on the outcome of a random-number generator, all tarted up with flashy graphics and sound. It wasn’t even rigged; the players had to buy in, and the house made money pushing overpriced refreshments while the players won each other’s energy credits.
Kusti wasn’t interested in that, which showed she had a basic understanding of probability. Instead, she taught Zee how to play a simple game based on randomly picking numbered tokens, then betting on whether your tokens added up to a higher or lower number than your opponent’s. There were some irrelevant complications and jargon designed to make it confusing to biological minds, but that was the core mechanic.
I didn’t really understand how this was supposed to make money since they were just trading credits back and forth in a closed system. But then Kusti spotted a male human watching them, and favored him with one of her intense smiles before inviting him to join the game. The three of them played a few rounds, and the new guy won about as much as he lost.
“Zee, will you get me a napkin?” she asked, and as soon as Zee left the table she leaned close to the new guy. “I think we can clean him out if we work together,” she murmured. “You go high every time, I’ll go low.”
“And when he’s out of cash?” asked New Guy, looking at the skin exposed by her half-unsealed travel suit.
“Then we can go someplace and split the profits,” she said. “And see what comes up after that.”
Zee came back with the napkins, and the game resumed. With Kusti and New Guy collaborating, Zee lost pretty consistently. After about half an hour he was down a couple of thousand gigajoule credits. How losing money to some stranger was supposed to turn a profit still didn’t make sense to me.
Then Zee threw down his tokens in disgust. “That’s it,” he said, and glared at New Guy. “You two are cheating.”
“Just a run of good luck,” the guy protested, but he cast a nervous look at Kusti, who looked back with an alarmed expression.
Zee stood up, and leaned menacingly over New Guy. “I say you’re cheating!” His righteous anger wasn’t entirely fake; Zee always hated being the target of any unfairness. Even if he knew what was going on he still felt outraged.
“I’ve heard of this guy,” Kusti murmured to New Guy. “He’s a nulesgrima champion.”
“Tell you what,” said New Guy. “Let’s just cancel the game. Take back everything you bet and we’re even.”
“No,” said Zee. “You two are cheaters. I’m going to tell everyone!”
“How much will you take to keep quiet?” Kusti asked him.
Zee shrugged.
“Ten thousand?” she asked, and looked over at New Guy. “Kick in half?”
He glared at her, then looked nervously at Zee, who did look pretty impressive in a tight coverall with his shoulders and arms all tensed. “Fine.”
So everyone got back what they’d lost, and Zee got five thousand from New Guy and the same from Kusti. Once that was done, Kusti and New Guy left in a hurry—but she gave him the slip and doubled back, and sat down with Zee to begin a new game.
Over the course of eight hours the two of them visited three bars and went through four New Guys. They cleared about twelve thousand in net profit. Twice they played against opponents who weren’t interested in cheating, and one wise old corvid cackled at Kusti’s proposal and said, “I know the ending of that comedy, and decline to play the part of the dupe.”
Kusti was clever enough to skip around, not going to the same joints two nights in a row, and changing her look every time. She went from utilitarian coveralls to a frivolous swarm of glowing gnatbots to a formal ruff to a grungy old suit liner to shifting body paint. Zee mostly stuck to his own travel suit, although he did let her talk him into going shirtless a couple of times, once even going so far as to paint himself up with red and black stripes like an old-time gene raider.
The two of them made just under eighty thousand in a week, but after that the takings began to drop off. At one establishment the mech serving drinks told them, “No more gambling. New rule.”
At another place, the following evening, the warning was more personal: a chimp and a human almost as big as Zee stopped them at the door. “There’s a new item on the menu,” said the chimp. “It’s called You Two Go Someplace Else. We’ll be serving it all week.”
When the three of us got back to the cargo container that night we had a little conclave. “It looks as though we’ll have to move on,” said Kusti. “Work our way around the Ring.”
“That means extra time and expense,” I pointed out. “We will lose our fast-transit launch window for Jupiter.”
“I do have another idea,” said Kusti. “It’s a little risky, but the payoff could be huge. What if I start dropping hints to some of our marks that I’m putting together a big score—maybe black-market antimatter or illegal genomes. Get them to buy in, then you show up, tell them it’s a sting and take a bribe to let them go.”
Zee looked like he was trying to figure out a way to say no without actually saying it, so I jumped in.
“The risk is unacceptably high,” I said in my best literal-minded mech voice. “Individuals willing to participate in a major crime have a high probability of using lethal violence.” I had a suspicion that Kusti was planning to arrange things so that she got the cash and Zee had to deal with the consequences.
“Besides,” said Zee, “I bet local security gets very proactive about antimatter theft. We could get into big trouble just for talking about it with the wrong people.”
She nodded, a little sadly. “You’re probably right. But how are we going to get the money we need in just a week? We’re still two hundred thousand short.”
“I still want to try working for it honestly,” said Zee. “Maybe something will turn up.”
She sighed audibly at that, but didn’t argue.
So Zee plunged back into the job market. Over the course of six standard days he worked as a server at a fancy party, ripped metal scrap out of the walls of an abandoned tunnel section for salvage, gave a paid exhibition of Raba stick fighting techniques at a local nulesgrima dojo, pruned uba vines, and spent a shift scraping frozen air off the doors of a landing bay. All that labor got him a little more than twenty thousand gigajoules.
On the seventh day he got up early to go look after an elderly recluse’s songbirds. The bird fancier’s name was Hymeddion, an old brain in a diamond ball with two clumps of variable-metal tentacles and a cloud of sensor drones filling the air around it. It lived alone in a bubble-cave near Puck’s core, a lovely place full of musical birds, beautiful plants, and a fabulous collection of microgravity sculpture.
Hymeddion hired Zee to feed a cohort of baby songbirds, as the sexless adults had no parental instincts left. Zee had to float around the overheated little aviary, catch each baby bird and squirt mealworm paste into its mouth, which immediately stimulated the chick to release a glob of shit at the other end for Zee to chase down. Hymeddion had two dozen chicks; feeding and cleaning each one took about two minutes, and the downy, starved-looking little monsters demanded food every hour. Do the math: Zee finished a cycle, grabbed a swig of water for himself, made up a fresh batch of mealworm paste, and by then it was time to start over. By the end of the second cycle he was covered with sweat, feathers, mealworm paste, and bird shit.
“And how do my beautiful filthy babes dine today?” Hymeddion asked after six hours, the halfway point of Zee’s shift. “My eyes see you decked in pearls, which is a favorable sign, for obstruction is always fatal to such frail creatures, as it is to all artists. Let the birds shit free and wild, and grow strong and musical thereby.”
“One thing I can’t understand,” Zee panted as he launched himself after one of the fluttering chicks. “They know I’ve got food, so why are they so hard to catch?”
“A profound mystery, but the habit is scarcely confined to hungry downy infants. Many are the times I have seen grown men, angels, rats, even second-level minds centuries old, all flee from that which would benefit them. Surely it is the desire for autonomy, the wish to make a foolish choice simply because it is our own. I hire you as my deputy tyrant, earning the hate and love and showers of shit from these my subjects, so that when grown they will sing to me and think themselves delivered from your oppression.”
“Can’t you just rent a bot for the job?” I asked the old borg.
It tapped its diamond ball with one silver tentacle. “There was a time long ago, before I shed my skin and bones and guts, when I was a puling babe like these, though plump and brown instead of downy yellow. I have a sentimental fondness still for mothers of flesh and hairy skin, rather than impostors, no matter how cloaked in foam and synthetic fur they may be. How can silicon quickness and steel strength compare with half a billion years of evolution breeding care for the small and helpless by ruthless culling of any parent lacking love?”
I was pretty sure that if Hymeddion hadn’t been paying six hundred energy credits an hour, Zee would have cheerfully wrung every small and helpless neck in that aviary. But I didn’t say it aloud. Let the meat have its illusions.
At the end of twelve hours Zee was tired and filthy, ready for a hot shower and a fat credit transfer. But Hymeddion came into the aviary with its tentacles in a humble configuration. “I come before you a supplicant, beseeching you to aid me in my disappointment. The other person I hired to tend these feathery hatchlings has refused the call. She complains of bird shit fouling her fur, and even the prospect of a full-body shampoo at my expense could not lure her back. I cannot take on the task—the night-flowers are blooming and I must hand-pollinate them. Can you, would you tend the birds another six hours? No more than that, I swear upon the honor of all my ancestors.”
Zee wiped his face with the inside of a sleeve and glanced around the aviary with obvious loathing. “Can your flowers wait an hour? I need some food and a rest.”
“An hour you may have, and anything my kitchen can provide to nourish you as you nourish the chicks.”
“Thanks,” said Zee. He ate a cloud omelet, drank a liter of water, and napped. Hymeddion let Zee’s hour off stretch to seventy-five minutes before waking him. With another heavy sigh Zee resumed feeding and cleaning the birds while the cyborg went off to help its flowers achieve sexual satisfaction by means of a long foam-tipped swab.
Four hours later Hymeddion returned, its floral pandering accomplished, and relieved Zee at the task of feeding. Ten thousand gigajoule credits popped into Zee’s account balance, and he got ready to leave.
“Mere energy seems a poor reward for such service,” said Hymeddion, taking up the mealworm syringe. “You have done more for me than paid work; you have granted me a favor and I consider myself bound to repay you for your kindness. Speak your fondest wish and it will be accomplished.”
“I need fast sail passage to Jupiter for two humans and Daslakh,” said Zee. “We’ve got about half saved up and the launch window will only last a little longer.”
“Thy will be done, and I wish you joy of your journey” said Hymeddion briskly. “By the time you get to Jovian space these birds will be in full glorious song, and I will be cultivating the next generation. Safe travels and happy homecoming!”
I practically dragged Zee back to the cargo container he shared with Kusti, and before we got there Zee got a message informing him that two hibernation coffins were reserved in his name aboard a laser sail bound for Jovian space.
“See?” he told Kusti. “I told you something would turn up. You don’t have to cheat to get what you want.”
She smiled at him, more than a little patronizingly. “When you took the job I looked up that Hymeddion character. It doesn’t like to advertise the fact, but a couple of hundred years ago it was called Penglog, and ran a gang of hijackers in the Uranus outer belt. It always had legal cover, as a licensed military contractor or salvage recovery operation, but most of its career was just plain piracy. Your nice old bird fancier made its fortune as a thief, and probably a killer as well.”
His face got a look of enormous sadness and disappointment, but all Zee said was, “Well, it gave us passage to Jupiter. Are you coming?”
“Of course. But you really need to stop being so naive, Zee. Nobody’s hands are entirely clean. Which reminds me: ditch your coverall outside and tell Daslakh to shove it into the recycler. In the morning we’ll print you something that doesn’t smell like bird shit.”