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  TB found a half pot of coffee already brewed in the kitchen coffeemaker. He returned with two steaming cups and sat back down. Bob quickly brought out the whiskey again and laced his coffee with it. He took a snort straight from the bottle for good measure, then put the flask back into his pocket.

  “So what have you got to tell me?” TB asked the musician.

  “Huh?” Bob looked around. “Oh, right.” He slurped at his coffee. “Never liked coffee when I was younger. ’Course, I couldn’t exactly taste the real thing. Just virtual coffee. I don’t think they ever quite got the algorithm right back then.”

  “Tastes the same to me,” said TB. He knew better than to try to hurry Bob into saying whatever it was he had to say.

  Bob set down his cup. “What happened to me was this,” he said. “And this has bearing on you, son, ’cause I seen some of that old shadow starting to creep back over you—”

  TB took a sip from his coffee and said nothing.

  Bob closed his mouth and pursed his lips, as if he were having trouble getting himself to speak. TB continued waiting. This was obviously something important to Bob.

  “You try to help other people, and it doesn’t work. You can’t save one damned soul. It’s all up to them.”

  “I know that, Bob,” TB said gently.

  “You think you do, but you don’t. You’re stuck in the crazy logic of the world, TB. You ever think that’s why I sound sort of off-kilter, son? That your ears are put on wrong.”

  “I’ve considered that possibility.”

  “Back when I was the most famous musician in the solar system, I had a student. You might’ve heard of him. He got famous later. Anyway, he was like a son to me.” Bob took a long sip of his coffee, settled back in his chair. “He was a son to me.”

  Bob looked down into his cup. The skin around the old man’s eyes crinkled to a sadness TB had never before seen on his face. Bob’s irises had taken on the color of the black coffee.

  TB realized for the first time that Bob was spaceadapted. Space-adapted eyes always took on the color they beheld.

  “My son did not turn out well,” said Bob, “and I blamed myself. I knew it was a damn fool thing to do—the boy had been raised by what amounted to a psychopath before he came into my care, after all. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help feeling like I failed the boy. This was a great trouble to me. Even though I could write a symphony with no hands and compose a concerto that could make a stone cry oceans, that boy…the only thing I had to offer him was music.”

  “Not a bad gift.”

  “Not good enough!” shouted Bob. He sat bolt upright, then continued in a lowered voice. “Not good enough by a long shot. The boy needed love.”

  “Sounds like you had that, too.”

  “Now,” Bob said. “Now. Not then. I was a goddamn computer program at the time. Twenty-seven copies of famous composer converts strained through an evolutionary algorithm. The Artificial Musical Expression System, they called me. With the accent on ‘expression.’” Bob chuckled. “I gave him that name. I picked my own new name and didn’t have any use for the old one. He wanted another name, so I gave that one to him.”

  “A…M…E…accented…&rd quo; TB said. “You’ve got to be kidding, Bob.”

  “His name was Claude Schlencker back then. He hated that name on account of his father. The psychopath.”

  “ Amés was a student of yours?”

  “I taught him everything he knows. About music, that is.” Bob shook his head sadly. “I saw something bad would come of it all. Not the exact badness, mind you. But I saw. And I wanted to do something about it. But there I was, one of the first free converts, and I couldn’t know what it was like to get the shit beat out of you night after night. To have a mother who pretended like it didn’t happen, and then ran off and left you to the tender mercies of your tormentor. So I decided to give it a try, being a regular person and all. I grew me a body. This one I’m wearing now. I was one of the first pure-program free converts to try it—to make myself into a regular physical human.”

  Bob stood up abruptly and walked from the room. He banged around in his bedroom for a while, then returned, his fiddle and bow in hand. He pulled the bow across the strings and began to play quietly. It was a reel of the same sort as he normally played, but slowed down to half time.

  “I wanted to touch the world. Have the world touch me in a way it never did before.” Bob said. “Oh, I did it for myself, too. To hear music beating on my eardrums. To feel it in the soles of my shoes. But I wanted to find a way to help Claude.”

  “And have you?” TB asked.

  “No,” said Bob, “I have not. But I am no longer a creature void of form. I can rosin up a bow with my own spit. I can drink whiskey with the best of ’em.” Bob began sawing more vigorously on his instrument. “You got to give up any idea of what you thought you was gonna be before you can be who you are,” he said.

  TB sipped at his second cup of coffee. He sat back and listened to Bob finish playing his tune. The fiddler took a bow.

  “Anyway,” Bob said. “That’s whatever happened to old Despacio in case you were wondering. He ain’t dead; he just sort of underwent a sea change.”

  They said nothing else for a long while. Bob, true to his word, sat down and rosined up his bow with a block of resinous wax and a wad of saliva.

  “Maybe you’ll find a way to help the man,” TB finally said. “Somehow.”

  “A fellow would have to be crazy to mess with Director Amés, now wouldn’t he?” Bob said between dribbles of spit. He looked up and smiled a drooling smile at TB. “On the other hand, I got a feeling both me and you qualify in that way.”

  Eleven

  NEPTUNE SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 13:17, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017

  FEDERAL ARMY THEATER COMMAND

  “We’re engaged at the Mill,” Major Monitor reported to Theory. “Austen is taking fire. Twain is maneuvering for position.”

  “Give me enemy locations,” said Theory.

  “Four ships. IDs on three. Two Dabna-class destroyers, the Aguilla and the Mediumrare. Third is a cruiser. She’s the Martian Dawn. She’s a specialty ship, we think.

  “Carrying demolitions for the Mill,” Theory said.

  “That’s intelligence’s best guess,” Monitor replied. “And a half contingent of troops.” Monitor’s square-jawed visage was still for a moment (milliseconds in actuality, of course) in Theory’s virtual command space.

  He’s receiving incoming information, Theory thought. Monitor had never seen any need to run animation algorithms to keep his face display in motion when he wasn’t using it.

  “We have a fix on the fourth ship. She’s another Dabna-class, the Debeh-Li-Zini. She’s a minesweeper, with a half contingent for deployment. Stand by…”

  Again Monitor went into face-freeze.

  “We’re getting some e-m data on the outer-system group,” Monitor reported. “This will take a while to correlate. Seconds.”

  Theory sighed. The merci jamming really would have an effect on decision-making. But at least they were no longer totally blind. And while he was waiting the several seconds it would take the outer-system data to stream in, he could devise and issue a set of orders for Cloudships Austen and Twain. He turned to his communications officer.

  “Tell Twain to get on the Martian Dawn ,” he said. “And tell Austen to engage fully as she sees fit.” His orders were issued. A moment later, Twain’s booming voice rang through the command center. The cloudship obviously did not let communications protocol stand in his way when he had a point to make.

  “Austen’s got two DIED cruisers on her!”

  “I’m aware of that,” Theory replied. “She’ll have to fight it out. You have to stop that destroyer from taking out the Mill. We suspect it contains demolition devices.”

  The briefest pause.

  “Will do,” said Twain.

  Theory knew Cloudship Twain would follow his orders. He liked
the old ship. Twain understood tactics. Plus, he was one of Theory’s heroes—the first human being to journey to the Centauri system. Theory also respected Cloudship Austen, whose grasp of strategy and economics was well beyond his own. That was the reason he’d given the two ships the crucial role of defending the Mill.

  “It’s up to them now,” Theory said to the room.

  Major Monitor paid him no mind, as this information added nothing whatsoever to his current understanding of the situation.

  You can always count on Monitor to let you know where you stand, Theory thought. Theory turned back to studying his situation displays.

  Where you stand, he thought. Or where you fall .

  Twelve

  PLUTO SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 18:27, SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 3017

  FEDERAL FLAGSHIP BOOMERANG

  Sherman’s lightning raid on Charon was supposed to be just that—fast, hard-hitting, and done. Instead, he’d run into complications in the grist. Pluto and Charon had what amounted to entire pellicles themselves, just like the human skin. There wasn’t a surface on either planet or moon that wasn’t coated an inch thick. So, theoretically, introduction of Gerardo Funk’s new grist-mil brew should have had a devastating effect. And it had—only on the wrong forces.

  Somehow the stuff had interacted with the local substrate and mutated. The change had momentarily paralyzed the DIED surface-based defenses, and Sherman had dropped his troops in that time period. But then Pluto—and particularly Charon—seemed to come back online and bite back. Whoever or whatever had taken over the command and control structures down there was firing like a madman at anything in range—including both Sherman’s own forces and the DIED ships.

  The DIED carrier Streichholtzer and its battle group had moved out of range of its own planetary base. It had taken sporadic fire from Pluto, and then a concentrated barrage from Charon. At first Sherman believed this might mean that his soldiers had stormed the fortress and were in control of the weapons. But upon drawing nearer to inspect, his ship and Cloudship Tacitus had both been subject to the same intense fire.

  As a result he had ten thousand soldiers trapped on Pluto, and another five thousand stuck on Charon. What was worse, he’d lost contact with an entire company on the knit. Quench’s command had dropped on Charon, and no one had heard a peep from them for the past two hours.

  Sherman had a decision to make. Should he stay in the vicinity and slug it out with the local forces, or should he withdraw and attempt to lure the DIED navy after him? The latter had been his original plan—especially since his attack, as planned, had drawn off some DIED ships from the Neptune invasion. But to turn tail and run now would mean abandoning his deployed troops.

  He had a positive option as far as that went: Major Meré Philately and her Virtual Extraction Corps. Sherman had taken a chance on Philately and a contingent of other DIED POWs who had been saved from the destruction of the DIED ship Montserrat at Neptune three years ago. Their only method of escape had been as converts, while their bodies were blown to smithereens when the Montserrat was blown to atoms and energy. They were now free converts—free converts who had violated the Met Containment Principle when it came to soldiers. Should they ever return home, they would be imprisoned—most likely in one of the Met’s free-convert concentration camps that were beginning to look like much more than a rumor.

  So Philately had requested an interview with Sherman. When he’d visited her in Triton’s virtual sector POW camp, she presented Sherman with a plan.

  “You saved our lives, and some of us want to work for you,” she told him. “We know you won’t trust us in everyday operations. But we want to volunteer for hazardous duty—for the bad shit that nobody wants to deal with. And everybody knows what that is.”

  “Counteroperations against large-scale military grist deployment,” Sherman said. “That’s as bad as it gets. So far, at least.”

  “What’s worse is sitting in this prison watching our lives drain away,” Philately had answered him. “Not having a home or hope or anything to do.”

  “I take your point,” said Sherman. “So let’s hear what you’ve got to say.”

  Philately had outlined a special unit that went into grist-mil anti-information zones and extracted Federal troops that were trapped therein. It was the perfect job for free converts—but the mortality rate was almost guaranteed to be high. Grist-mil was nasty stuff—and was particularly deadly for free converts, who existed in the grist and moved through it. It would be like swimming in a sea of poison. Hell, it would be like breathing in a poison atmosphere where you weren’t adapted for survival.

  It was an incredibly brave proposal.

  If the Montserrat survivors could be trusted.

  Five hundred free converts on the loose was not something Sherman wanted to deal with.

  He made his decision.

  “You’ll train in prison. We’ll expand the grounds. When it comes time for deployment, you’ll be flashed to your destination,” he said. “If. If you conduct yourselves well, we’ll give consideration to commuting your sentences.”

  Philately had nodded and given Sherman a smart salute.

  “That’s all we ask, sir,” she replied. “A chance.”

  “You’ve got it,” Sherman said. “Make the most of it, Major.”

  And now the time had come for the VE Corps either to deliver on their promise or be found wanting. Several thousand soldiers’ lives depended on the outcome.

  He’d sent Philately’s corps to the surfaces of Pluto and Charon to extract the troops who had become trapped by the grist.

  They would do what they would do. In the meantime, Sherman and the rest of his forces must fight a holding action to buy them time.

  In the virtuality, Sherman looked at the arrangement of his ships. The enormous bulk of Cloudship Tacitus hung a few hundred kilometers sunward from Sherman’s own ship, the Boomerang. Tacitus himself was present here with Sherman in the Boomerang ’s partly virtual, partly real bridge. Tacitus, being present only in the knit, was of course confined to the virtual portion of Sherman’s bridge.

  Sherman gazed out at the bulk of the cloudship—an almost perfect stormlike spiral in shape. Although the formation was naturally occurring when a cloudship accreted, Tacitus claimed to have shaped himself into the profile of an early hurricane he had particularly admired from the twenty-second century. He had never been clear on whether he’d actually seen the storm or was merely working from pictures.

  Sherman turned to Tacitus’s “old man” avatar. “We have to buy time now, one way or another.”

  “That was the plan all along,” said Tacitus.

  “But at the moment I need a big target to draw off the bulls.”

  “That would be me , I take it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll play the matador with Boomerang , I presume?” Tacitus replied.

  Sherman nodded. “And we’ll both provide cover for the dropped troops until we manage to get them back up here.”

  “Just don’t forget to aim your sword carefully when the time comes for the kill, señor,” said the old man. “You may only have one chance to get it right.”

  Thirteen

  PLUTO SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD TIME UNKNOWN

  CHARON

  They had been in the jungle a long, long time. Melon said it was years, but Kwame Neiderer had long ago ceased to keep track of the months, and he suspected Private Melon had as well

  The passage of time didn’t matter much when you weren’t the same person from moment to moment, and when nothing around you stayed stable either.

  The platoon emerged from the foliage and approached the river they had named the Smoky, because you never knew whether it would flow with water or ground-hugging gas. Sometimes you could cross by holding your breath and running down through the river bottom and up the other side. You didn’t want to breathe the stuff that surrounded you. Benetorro had breathed it once, and ever since, he
r fingers grew an extra joint each day. After a week, somebody had to take a hatchet to her hands and prune them. The wounds sealed up quickly, but Benetorro still screamed like a motherfucker every time the ax came down.

  Today the Smoky was water, and it was running fast. Kwame threw in a twig, and it was swept away downstream within seconds. There would be no swimming across. Yet they had to move on. They were being followed by their mortal enemies, the Shadows.

  The Shadows were them . They were exact physical copies of Kwame’s platoon. Only they weren’t striped orange, black, and white like Kwame and his group. Instead, the Shadows were pasty white—even Kwame’s copy. Whatever their skin color originally had been, the Shadows were now all albinos.

  Kwame’s platoon called themselves the Tigers because of their own striping. The striping changed from day to day, but the basic colors had remained the same for several weeks. Kwame supposed that was because the topical camouflage algorithms within their grist pellicles were undergoing random mutation, or more likely, were under the control of a virus. The jungle was rife with nasty bugs that fucked with your grist in all sorts of unpleasant ways.

  So they had to find a way across the Smoky River or else risk fighting the Shadows. The problem was, you couldn’t kill the Shadows with gun, rocket, or antimatter death ray. They reconstituted like zombies. Of course, the Tigers were themselves almost impossible to kill. The Shadows had managed to kill the lieutenant only after taking her in a nighttime raid and boiling her down in a vat of moon shine.

  It was real shine from the moon that hung perpetually in the jungle’s sky—a big moon the size of Earth’s. It provided the perpetual twilight illumination to the jungle. When rain fell in the jungle, the rain was moon shine. The leaves glistered and glowed for many hours after a shower.

  You could even climb up the high mountains to the north and touch the face of the moon if you wanted to. The platoon had done it once. The moon was not solid, but was a sort of coagulated liquid—like elemental mercury. Daring himself, Kwame had stuck his hand inside. The moon’s surface tension broke, and moon shine flowed down his arm and soaked his leg and boots. The substance was cold to the touch. When you heated it up over a fire, as the Shadows had to boil poor Private Mansard, it never got a degree hotter—yet in every other way it acted like a scalding fluid. The Shadows had cut Lieutenant Twenty-klick like potatoes before cooking her in it.