Titans Page 5

  "Are you saying I'm fat?" She said it deadpan enough that even my time-honed people-judgment was fooled for two seconds. Then I narrowed my eyes and she laughed. "If you think disinterest is sexy, my response to your little strategy is going to make you come in your pants."

  "It's no strategy." I reached for water to quench the spice. "My first impression is you've got a body that could crash cars. My second impression is you might be fun to spend a lot of time with. But if you smash me under your heel and walk away, it turns out I'll live."

  Naya stole a red-slathered lump of lamb. I'd pegged her as a vegetarian. "A body that could crash cars? That's not as flattering as it sounded in your head."

  "Thoughts are like marine creatures. Safe and warm in the ocean of your mind, but when you expose them to the cold air of conversation, they have a tendency to croak."

  "And stink."

  "So let's expose yours instead," I said. "What do I do next?"

  She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. "You act like a rich person. Why not travel? Or create something? Do you like the arts?"

  "I like cave paintings." My omni thrummed in my pocket. The vibe function was nearly outmoded now that everyone was moving on to the tingler, a pinhead-sized subdermal accessory that did exactly what its name implied, but I was skiffy about any form of unnecessary surgery, no matter how uninvasive. I ignored the vibration and asked her what she did: art student, as it turned out. Making the age-old decision between the uncertainty of going all-out as an artist, or playing it safe with ad design and painting for herself as time allowed.

  She scooped curry from the margin of her plate. "What do you think?"

  "Your life will be short. Much shorter than you want. Does painting feel like a calling? Or just something you'd rather do than a real job? Because if it's a calling—" My omni went off again. I scowled and gave it a covert look. "I'm sorry, my employer's as needy as a toddler. This will just take a minute."

  I excused myself and answered, voice-only. Baxter's voice was terse. "Where are you?"

  "Enjoying my time off. Which I've had none of for nine weeks."

  "Ah. Capitol Hill. Pike and 10th."

  "What? How did you know that?"

  "I bugged your omni," he said, matter-of-fact. "I'll send someone to pick you up."

  "Like hell you will. I'm on a date." I smiled at Naya, who watched my conversation with naked interest. "It can wait, Baxter."

  "We've waited too long already." Muffled yells filtered from his end. "Have to go. See you soon."

  He clicked off. I rolled my eyes and pocketed the omni.

  "Who was that?" Naya said.

  "A man whose problems run so deep he doesn't realize he has them."

  She wrinkled her forehead. "Doesn't that describe everyone?"

  "Look, something strange might happen in a minute."

  "Now you're going for mysterious."

  I rubbed my temples. "I just have the strong suspicion we're about to be interrupted."

  "So tell him you can't leave."

  "If only it were that easy."

  I had just asked her what she thought of artificial intelligence when the storm blew in. The restaurant windows were pelted with grit, crumpled flyers, and hamburger wrappers. Pedestrians and bikers ran from a boiling gray cloud surging through the intersection. Inside the restaurant, a man screamed and was drowned out by the shriek of engines.

  My omni went off.

  "I'm afraid that's my ride." I dug an untapped cashcard from my wallet. The smoke in the street thinned, revealing a dark spheroid in its center. I dropped the card on the table. "Come outside with me."

  Naya took my hand, face blank in that look people get when they're not sure if they're about to laugh or get shot. I opened the door, shielding my eyes against the swirling dust. Heat radiated from the vehicle perched in the middle of the street. Bulgy but sleek, the size of a truck or an old helicopter, the VW Veetle was named both for its resemblance to the discontinued car and for its vertical takeoff and landing capabilities—and was outlawed inside the urban zones of 47 states, including Washington.

  Its passenger door swung up and Pete Gutierrez dropped out. "Don't make me come over there."

  I squeezed Naya's hand. "Get me your contacts. If I don't call, assume I've been kidnapped."

  She tapped her omni's info over to mine, eyes frozen on the steaming Veetle. "Who do you work for?"

  " You know, I'm not really sure." I leaned in for a kiss. She didn't respond; I like to think she was overwhelmed. I ducked into the smoke, bounced up the two steps, and threw myself onto the Veetle's plush passenger bench. Pete clapped the pilot on the shoulder and plunked beside me. I rubbed grit from my eyes as the engines whined up. "What are you doing here?"

  Pete shrugged. "Baxter liked my commitment to the Cooper and Silva affair."

  "Really? You didn't account for much in that bathroom."

  "Unfair. You're so short they probably couldn't see you."

  "They made 'em smaller back in my country," I said.

  "This is where? Lilliput?"

  The Veetle lurched, wobbled, and climbed straight up. I pressed myself against the window, but if Naya was watching, she was hidden in the swirling smoke.

  Engines roared, but the vehicle was insulated well enough that it wasn't necessary to shout. I did so anyway. "What the fuck is going on?"

  "I think we're running from the police." He leaned forward. "Bill, is that the police back there?"

  "Temporarily," the driver said.

  "Not that, you steroid-sweating—" The Veetle swooped down, mashing my face into the foamy ceiling. I plopped back onto the bench and scrabbled for a seatbelt. "I mean what's going on with Baxter?"

  "An emergency."

  "Informative. Okay, I'm going to explode all over this cabin."

  "Please don't."

  Towers dwindled below. Since our talk with Jefferson, Baxter had left HemiCo alone, but I knew he considered it a ceasefire rather than a binding treaty. "Did he get in another fight?"

  Pete held up his palms. "The details, I don't know them. Anyway, he wants to tell you himself."

  Ferries slid across the dark bay, shuttling passengers through the next leg of their lives. Through a gap in the waterfront spires, the red point of the Space Needle winked in the night, echoed by the red-blue-red-blue of a police chopper dead behind us. The Veetle veered toward the Sound. We leapt forward, the invisible hand of acceleration shoving me into my seat. The police lights shrank behind us.

  I'd had it. I'd had it with the ceaseless travel, the all-hours calls, the semi-legal schemes that had led to assault in a dirty bathroom. I'd had it with the secrecy and with being dragged after Baxter like a recalcitrant mutt. It had been fun for a while—the globetrotting, the face-to-faces with Earth's mortal gods—but I was sick of being used. And the violence! I wasn't invincible. If Silva had split my skull on a sink, it would have been game over. If our Veetle were reeled in by the cops, my DNA would enter the American penal database, and if a sharp-eyed fed noted the irregularities lurking in its helices, I'd be chained in a bunker with tubes spliced into every organ of my body. A large part of my lengthy existence was due to luck, but a large part of luck is keeping yourself out of situations where a little bit of the wrong luck will screw you bowlegged.

  NVR was up and running. Our first ship would be finished in orbit by the end of June. I'd completed my contract, and now I wanted what was mine. I'd put off seeking answers for over two hundred years of modern medicine—mostly because I didn't want anyone else knowing what I was, but partly because I didn't want to know what I was—but Baxter had no interest in turning me into a lab rat. It was time.

  The Veetle cruised over a black landscape. I rehearsed a few speeches for Baxter, some with swearing, some without. I still liked him too much to resort to namecalling. Unless he was being a dick.

  The land swelled into pine-covered peaks, then crags of moonlit snow. The Veetle lifted with it.

&n
bsp; "Can you at least tell me where we're going?"

  "Wilkeson," Pete said, as if that answered everything.

  He couldn't tell me more than that, so I flipped open my omni and spidered it out. Wilkeson was one of the numerous Escapist agrarian communes that had mushroomed during the recessions and agri-scares of the 21st century. This group, like many, rented land on certain First American reservations whose expanding independence had so loosened federal law that Uncle Sam couldn't touch the tribes' income or business—or that of their guests.

  I wasted a few minutes slushing through the subforums attached to the Escapist files. The comments were typically useless. Opinion was split as to whether the Escapists were heroes of self-sufficiency, pathetic traitors who couldn't hack it in the real world, a boon to First Am economies, or one more crime in the ongoing exploitation of North America's original settlers. The Veetle dipped into its descent, sparing me from reading more.

  Below, blue and white lights lined a landing strip in the shadowy desert. A lone control tower stood at one end; a score of personal fliers and small jets filled a swath of concrete to the strip's side. Incongruously, a sleek, silver suborbital dominated the runway's foot, wingtips stretching beyond the strip's edges. A quarter mile from this one-horse airport, a blob of small, dark buildings sketched a sloppy approximation of a village.

  We shot over the landing strip and braked to a halt over Wilkeson. I grabbed the crazy-bar on the Veetle's ceiling as Bill plummeted straight toward a plaza. Dust bloomed around the windows, blotting out the town. I closed my eyes, certain we were about to be dispersed across a smoking crater in the desert floor. The Veetle's springy legs bounced against the dirt.

  Pete popped his door up before Bill clicked off the engines and waved both hands at the dust. "Come along."

  He grabbed my hand and led me through the curling smoke into a high-ceilinged log lodge. It was filled with pews, a dais rising from the far end. It could have been a church, a town hall, a theater, or all three. Our footsteps echoed through the open chamber. Baxter sat on the dais with three men and a woman, all of whom had rifles slung over their shoulders.

  "Oh, you're here." Smoke squiggled from a lumpy joint dangling from Baxter's fingers. He tucked his chin and made a small O with his mouth, a cumulonimbus of smoke gushing from his lips. He saw the judgment on my face and rolled his eyes. "This is just business. A favor, really. Providing an impartial arbiter for the owners of the private airport we're about to make use of."

  "You're getting high," I said. "Wait, are you?"

  "I have a highly sensitive, uh...palate." He passed the joint to the man to his right, a bearded man in a dusty denim jacket. "Extremely high concentration of the appropriate chemicals. A bargain by any measure."

  The man thanked him and resumed negotiations with the pair across from him. Baxter stood, brushed his pants, and nodded toward the front door. I was beginning to feel like a yo-yo.

  "Is there a finer way to pay the rent than smuggling?" Baxter said as we removed ourselves from earshot. "Though it's not really smuggling, since it's not illegal here. Which is exactly why we're here. The smuggling, that is, not the drugs. Specifically, ourselves."

  "Is that right? Where do you imagine we're going this time?"

  "Mars."

  I waited until the door shut behind us, then wheeled on him. "I'm done here. NightVision's up and running. You'll be drilling rocks out of other rocks any day now. That was my contract. Which I completed in a record amount of time, I should mention." I glanced at Pete, uncertain how far Baxter had drawn him into the loop. "And now I want my payment."

  "You can get it on the way," Baxter frowned. "The trip will only take four days. Once we've gotten our lawyer out of prison, you can—"

  "Our lawyer's in prison? On Mars?" A chunk of windblown grit lodged itself in my eye. I blinked hard. "Who cares about some lawyer? What does any of this have to do with me?"

  Baxter glanced across the grounds. Planked storefronts lined the plaza, like something out of a tourist-revived gold rush ghost town. Alcohol-emboldened voices blattered through the night. A few pedestrians strolled across the boardwalk, out of easy earshot.

  "A few months from now, humanity's first extrasolar colonists will be sent from Titan to establish a presence on a moon in the Alpha Centauri system. This is significant for several reasons. Do you know who owns everything on Titan?"

  "HemiCo?" I guessed.

  "A private financial entity much like them. These are the only groups that can afford to settle humans beyond Mars, let alone light years outside the System. Not governments, not Mayflower pioneers, not splinter groups like this village. Incorporated bodies. With specific interests in their colonies' goals—and equally specific ideas about how to make sure their colonists achieve them."

  "You think they're going to be made into corporate slaves? Living labor-assets?"

  Baxter rolled his lip between his teeth. "Our projections see the colonists existing in a semi-feudal society, paying tribute to local company-barons and the CEO-kings back in our Solar System. If that colony is successful, and others follow, this semi-feudal society will—with the exception of Earth, Luna, and Mars—become the future of mankind, everywhere."

  "It sounds like you've got it all figured out." I no longer cared what Pete heard; I just wanted out. "You don't need me. Go fling all those awful CEOs down a well. But before you go, tell me what I want to know."

  He shook his head hard. "My employer has an idea. We're not going to kill anyone. We need to free the lawyer—who HemiCo had arrested, incidentally, which suggests they know much more about us than they ought to—to draft an airtight constitution agreeable to both the Titanian dissidents and their employers/owners. We need Pete for personal security. We need you for the adaptive negotiating skills you've demonstrated establishing NVR, which should come in handy when we sit down on Titan, but also for your expertise in matters of—"

  "Everything? Will you stop being so goddamn vague?" I jabbed my finger into his chest. He felt exactly like a human. "There are other people who know how to talk people into doing what they want! Leave me alone!"

  My words rang across the square. Pete shifted his feet. Baxter tipped his face to the sky.

  "A long time ago," he said, "the Persian empire, composed of so many peoples God Himself couldn't count them all, marched to war against the scattered Greek cities. The fully realistic plan, considering the Persian army was so huge it could fight itself and still have enough men left over to deal with the backbiting Greeks, was to conquer the entire region.

  "All but Sparta and Athens, who defied them and thus required annihilation. Now, if all had gone to plan, history might not have missed Sparta's babykilling eugenicism. With the loss of Athens, however, we would have lost the democratic ideals that eventually permeated the entire world. We—me, my employer, our associates—have decided that permeation was a good thing."

  "That would have happened anyway."

  "Perhaps. But initial conditions have a drastic influence on everything that follows."

  I snorted. "Also, that was 2700 years ago. It doesn't mean a thing today."

  "Against terrible odds, Greece fought Persia off. Athens survived to change everything." Baxter looked up at the sky again; I wanted to punch him. He spread his palms to the stars. "What if Titan is Athens? What if its colonists are about to be conquered? What if liberty is never allowed to spread through the Empire of Man?"

  "Fuck you," I said. "I was just a hoplite. A grunt."

  Baxter's green irises glinted under the moon. I saw a terrible difference in them, some alien spark no human had ever carried. "You were there. You saw the build-up, the war, the victory, and what came after. If that can help us in any way with its analog on Titan, you have to help us."

  "I'm happy here. I like who I am and what I've built for myself. I have no interest in being dragged into the middle of your little feud. And you know why else I don't have to tag along for your crazy plan? Because I don
't goddamn want to."

  He nodded. "Not good enough."

  Pete's shoes ground against the dirt. My hand was halfway to a guard when his fist slammed into my chin. My last view from Earth's surface was of a dusty, unpaved square owned by drug-running farmers; thin moon-whitened clouds streaking across constellations I couldn't name; a robot dressed in man's skin watching me fall to the hard-packed ground.

  "Here's what happens next," the company man said. "Baxter, you carry the box into the hall. Walk ahead of me. I'm going to have this gun pointed straight at your guts and I know where to shoot. You got me?"

  Arthur's eyebrows raised in his best simulation of concern. "I should probably warn you we're about to kill you."

  "I'm sorry." Baxter dropped his free hand to his pocket and shot the company man through the chest three times. The man thudded onto his shoulder, gun clattering away, and grunted once, chest jerking with quick breaths. He blinked up at Baxter, face pale with pain, eyes bright with something like betrayal.

  "Why did you apologize?" Arthur said, more confused than angry. "Point me so I can see him."

  Baxter complied. "What do you suppose that's like?"

  "How should I know? They don't even know."

  "Well, they don't seem to like it."

  5

  Not all lives are created equal. I'd lived 96 of them, but my memories of most could be reduced to bullet points. I could only recall a handful with any clarity. A cobbler in the clay streets of Nineveh. A sailor of Lydia. Soldier-citizen of Athens. An engineer in Sicily, nailing wooden engines drawn by Archimedes' own hand. A baker of Damascus and the count of Milan, a mercenary of Amsterdam and a Virginian farmer, the hermit of Idaho and a Martian pioneer. If I thought hard, I might dredge up ten more, but the others were lost to me, whole lives compressed into a suite of images as brief and static as your first memories of childhood. They bled together and washed away like dyes dumped in a stream. Was this proof they'd been useless lives? If I lived another 3000 years, would I remember this one?

  I tongued my dry mouth and furry teeth, jaw aching. Windowless black walls hemmed me in, thick with the staticky scent of plastic. A seamless black table rose beside the black bed. Past it, the outline of a knobless door inscribed the far wall.