Year Zero (25 page)

“Wait a second—we want to appeal,” I demanded. “To an actual Guardian.”

“Your request is hereby solemnly received, carefully considered, and curtly denied.”

“But … shouldn’t it at least be considered by a higher authority?”

“Normally, yes. But this is a
Wholly Autonomous
Boundary Court. That means there is no higher authority than me.”

“Are you saying your authority exceeds that of the Guardians? On their own
planet
?”

“Of course not,” the jailer said. “But the legal boundary of the Guardians’ planet is about twenty feet thataway.” He pointed at the floor with one of his pincers. “We’re right under the roof of a building that’s over a hundred miles tall. That puts us just barely into low orbital altitude—which means we’re beyond the jurisdiction of any planet. That’s why it’s called a Boundary Court.”

“But that makes a complete mockery of any notion of justice! How can you even call this a legal system?”

“Hmm, you raise a good point,” the jailer allowed. “But if we were in the star-spangled banana republic that you call home, do you really think a case like this would have Guantánamo fair judge than me? Oops—I mean,
gone to a more
fair judge than me?”

I turned to Carly and Frampton. They both had their
eyes shut and were moving their lips furiously, as if atoning with some deity.

“Guys,” I said. “Do something … famous!”

Carly popped open an eye and shook her head. “It’s hopeless, Nick. This guy’s a superstar himself. And there’s also no way we can Wrinkle out of here. The SensoryEmbargo™ system would prevent it, even if we had prebooked an outbound Wrinkle. And we didn’t.”

“Carly’s right,” the jailer said. “There’s no way out. And even though I’ve personally attended three of her shows on Zinkiwu, and am a huge fan of hers—I’m a huge fan of
all
of you, really—I have to do what I have to do. But I do have one small piece of good news.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The oath that you made to never listen to singing during a trial is now moot, because court is adjourned. So before your incineration, I can honor you all with my own race’s equivalent of the song ‘Taps.’ It’s somber. It’s moving. It has a great dance beat. And because of the collectivized ownership of art in my native society, it’s now the patrimony of all of the Refined League. So in a sense, it’s
your
song, too.” He took a deep breath.

I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for any sound to be more brutal than Paulie Stardust’s singing on
Aural Sculptures
. But this guy was the Slipknot to the bird’s Hannah Montana. I almost begged for an immediate incineration. But even as my will to live collapsed under the sonic assault, my mind instinctively scrambled to find a way out. Certain phrases that the jailer had said kept running through it.
I’m a huge fan of all of you … Music is my first love … I adore the music of Earth more than most Refined beings
. By the time his song ended, I had a desperate, long-shot getaway plan.

“So,” the jailer rumbled. “Do you have any last requests?” He looked at Carly and Frampton, but their eyes were still shut tight, their lips moving a mile a minute. He turned to me. “How about you?”

“Just one,” I said.

“What is it?”

“Please take me thaaaaat way,”
I crooned, pointing at the floor. Carly and Frampton’s eyes immediately popped open.

“Tell you what—we’re only here by mistake,”
I ad-libbed to the tune of the Backstreet Boys’ cloying, insipid hit, “I Want It That Way.”

“Tell you what—please do this just for my sake …”
I started snapping my fingers in time with the song. The jailer’s eye widened, and his pilot light went out.

“Tell you what—I never really meant to stay …”
Now the jailer’s eye was rolling up, up, up, revealing a bloodshot mass of tissues and green goo lying beneath it. Carly’s and Frampton’s legs started to spasm violently.

I pointed at the floor, swaying my hips like Shakira.
“So please take me thaaaaat way.”
With that, Carly and Frampton busted out their shambolic dance moves, and the jailer joined in with a sort of epileptic two-step. As I launched into a second chorus, it struck me that this was the first time that a human had sung a note in the actual presence of any of these music-addled aliens. Sure, it was an a cappella version of a crap song performed by a nonsinger. But I can more or less carry a tune. And the scale of the Perfuffinite concerts on Zinkiwu had demonstrated how much these loons love even the least authentic live performances. As for the jailer, however immune he was to fame,
no
Refined being is inured to our music—and my song was rapidly enslaving him.

As I hit the third refrain of the chorus, I started clapping
in time with the beat, and strutting around the courtroom. My groupies followed me, doing this creepy-ass zombie march. I started pointing theatrically at the floor every time I said “please take me that way.” Soon enough the jailer caved in, and rotated his eye in a peculiar way while facing the podium. This caused half of the floor to drop like a trapdoor.

As the floor fell away from us, it transformed into a sort of carpet that flopped down and covered the top several steps of an otherwise transparent staircase that descended below us as far as I could see—maybe the full hundred miles to the planet’s surface. It was your typical stairwell, with about twenty steps separating each landing, and the staircases switching back and forth as they went down. But the steps and landings were clearer than museum glass and were surrounded by these unreflective, jet-black walls. The effect was one of an endless tunnel, tapering downward to a point beyond seeing. I pointed at the top step, commanding my disciples to lead the way. Comfortable as I’d become about heights, there was no way I was blazing a trail into that seemingly infinite pit.

So the jailer went first. And this was a very lucky thing.

The jailer had just started
descending the staircase when his gooey underside suddenly released its grip on the steps. As he started to slip, his head whipped backward, its gruesome eye suddenly lifeless and unfocused. Moments later, he started to roll. Anyone standing below him would have been carried along and crushed when he hit the wall at the base of the first landing—a violent collision that flung him backward and down the next set of steps. It took maybe three bounces for him to reach the second landing down. He bashed its wall even harder, then cleared the next set of steps with a single bounce. After that, he just ricocheted from wall to wall on his way down, slamming harder and harder, and flying faster and faster—like some kind of repulsive, sludgy pinball. We watched him careen down dozens of flights of steps until we could no longer pick him out.

“Lucky fellow,” Frampton murmured as he vanished from sight.

“
Lucky?
Didn’t I just … kill him?” This thought sickened me. Our jailer hadn’t been human, but he’d been intelligent and conscious. Did that make me a murderer?

“Actually, it’s more like you sent him to paradise.”

“Almost literally,” Carly agreed. “His body went limp when his brain hemorrhaged on a massive overproduction of endorphins. This not only creates a sense of supreme bliss, but it causes subjective time to halt. So you basically drove him into a state of eternal ecstasy.” Misinterpreting the horrified look that hadn’t yet left my face, she added, “Don’t worry—it’s a nonsexual sort of feeling. For the most part.” With that, she started us down the steps again.

“Humanity’s music did this to entire societies early on,” Frampton reminded me as we followed her.

“That’s right,” I said. “But I thought that everyone who was vulnerable to it kind of … died out.”

“Apparently, live music is more lethal than recorded music to some beings,” Carly said. “We always suspected this, and now we know.” She stopped abruptly in front of the wall at the end of the third staircase down and gazed at it closely. “I think we’re here.”

“Where?”

“Guardian territory. We’re below orbital altitude.” With that, the wall before us snapped up like an old-school roller blind. Behind it lay an empty, octagonal room with transparent walls and a matte black floor. It was nighttime outside, and a dazzling galactic core sparkled in the sky overhead. I looked down, and saw that we were in the tallest building of a unending city that glittered below and around us. The planet’s curve was plainly visible at the horizon.

“Come in, come in, whoever you are,” a grumpy voice urged from the octagon’s far corner. “And make it snappy. You’re not on my calendar, so when my next appointment arrives, you’re out. But since you’re here, you may as well state your name, species, and planet of origin—and tell me why you’re barging in on me.”

Carly and Frampton both looked at me. Apparently I was now our spokesman. And I realized with a start that I was okay with this. More than okay, in fact. I’d been following everyone’s lead but my own since Carly and Frampton first showed up. And until I took over with the jailer, things had gone steadily from extremely bad to unspeakably awful. Of course, the situation was still within the tiniest rounding error of unspeakably awful. But at least it was finally improving.

I strode confidently into the spacious room, which seemed to be empty. “My name is Nick Carter,” I said in my courtroom voice, wondering if this was, in fact, the “Intake Guardian” who would one day determine if humanity was ready to become Refined. “Individuals in my species are referred to as humans. And my planet of origin is Earth.”

The voice considered this. “You know, I actually fell for that once. It was in the year 9PK. Joking about the Planet of Song was still beneath even the lowest beings back then, so I was caught off guard. The perpetrator—I had him defenestrated, by the way—did a reasonably convincing human voice. But I must say, yours is much better. The attack in your consonants has every nuance that’s associated with the human palate. The resonant frequency structure is impeccable, and the inharmonicity levels are precisely as they should be. I am therefore impressed. But you will be defenestrated anyway. Lying to a Guardian is a serious crime.
So is barging in on one without an appointment, come to think of it. As is stepping on a Guardian’s testicles. So will you kindly move your left foot?”

I yanked my foot off the floor, but had no sense that I had been stepping on anything. Then I saw a ghostly hint of motion down there. It was like a tiny splash of light, or a flicker of shadow.

“Thank you,” the Guardian said.

“I—I’m sorry about that.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. It actually felt kind of good. Not that I swing that way.”

Gazing closely at the floor, I could faintly make out an exotic geometric form drifting right in front of us. It was perfectly flat, and had an irregular, kidneylike shape. Its interior was filled with a complex set of interlocking segments and patterns. Bending closer, I could see that countless tiny points of light were swarming along a network of intricate pathways that connected its internal regions.

“He thinks you’re beautiful, Your Illustriousness,” Carly predicted in a bored tone. “And please forgive our intrusion and my colleague’s confusion. He is in fact human, and he’s never seen a two-dimensional being before. And we just escaped from detention in low orbital altitude, having been abducted by a Guild-affiliated jailer who intended to execute us.”

“You mean they’re back to doing
that
?” the Guardian huffed, as if she’d said that someone had just left the lights on in the garage again. “We’d ask them to stop, but they’d only go on strike. Clerks and peasants unite, blah, blah, blah. The government allegedly works for us. But you try telling a public sector union what to do. Anyway, what brings you here?”

“We were hoping that Your Illustriousness might be the Intake Guardian responsible for Earth,” Carly said.

“Yes, I’m with Intake, and humanity is among the many, many candidate races that I’m responsible for tracking and eventually promoting or rejecting.”

My pulse quickened and I felt almost giddy. Carly had said that not even the Guild would dare to harm a Refined species. So maybe this guy was our salvation! “Your Illustriousness,” I said. “Please pardon my ignorance, but what are the criteria for graduating to Refined status?”

“They involve attaining minimal thresholds of competence in thirteen technical disciplines. A civilization that reaches them without self-destructing is deemed to have survived its adolescence. It can then be entrusted with the Refined League’s truly sophisticated technologies without any fear that it will destroy the universe, reverse the flow of time, or otherwise cause a nuisance. Our criteria are very strict. But they are also entirely objective, and extremely fair.”

“And how is humanity doing against them, Your Illustriousness?” I asked.

“Oddly. When we first discovered you in 1977, you seemed to be on the threshold of what we call the Great Acceleration—a period when compounding improvements in a diversity of scientific areas push a society forward with stunning momentum. A Great Acceleration would normally take you from your hopelessly backward state to a full mastery of the Thirteen Disciplines in less than a quarter century. And once a civilization gets to that point, it’s just a standardized test and a few simple essay questions away from joining the club.”

“So what happened?” By that schedule, we should have made the cut ten years ago.

“Your development almost stopped in its tracks. Which probably isn’t evident to you, since you are in fact modestly more advanced than you were in 1977. But you should have started experiencing drastic advances in computing technology about thirty years back. And that simply didn’t happen. It’s quite baffling to the entire Intake team.”

“Seriously?” It seemed to me that digital technology had been moving along at blinding speeds my whole life.

“Absolutely,” the Guardian said. “You suddenly started having terrible problems with software. And your crap software has hobbled everything else. Biotech, caliology, nanotechnology, materials sciences, oikology—you’d be flying along in all of these areas if you had just one or two decent programmers between you. Not to mention that your dismal ECAD tools have crippled your integrated circuit design—so your software problem has also become a hardware problem.”