Asimov's Science Fiction (13 page)

This is more than I can remember of my father. Crippled—injured in the mines? And is it true he sold me to the Regency Guard of his own free will? I know I should feel something, but I don't have the necessary emotional triggers—that part of me was hollowed out eight years ago when they wiped my memory. "Father" has been reduced to an academic term.

"Brother" is the only word that counts for anything, now. I lift my chin. "If I ever had any debts to you, regent, I have paid them and then some."

"Duyi," she says, smoothly switching her tactic, "he has poisoned you against me. Can't you see this?"

"No, you did a perfectly adequate job of that all on your own,
Sister."
He spat out the last word as if it were a curse.

"That's enough, Duyi. You will cease this childish show of defiance at once," she snaps, her patience gone. "It's time to grow up. Gather your things, we're going back to the estate now for the ceremony."

Her casual dismissal of him, her assumption that he'll bend under her manipulations, sends black hatred coursing through my veins. A memory flashes through my mind of ten-year-old Duyi trying to hide the fact that he'd been crying so she wouldn't castigate him for being weak.

"You're a monster," I say, the words spilling out, "and the most awful part is, you're the only one on the planet who doesn't know it."

Her mouth twists, furious, and her voice turns to ice. "Drop him."

In one swift motion, all the guards lift their guns from low-ready to aim at me.

"No!" Duyi yells, getting in the way, clinging to me. Most of the guards aim away in time, but only most. A single bullet goes through both of us.

Duyi was almost sixteen when the direness of his situation struck him. A screen in his chambers had always displayed a portrait of his dead parents, and he tore it from the wall. He had smashed it against the floor over and over again until flecks of circuitry scattered across the carpet like stars in a wine-red sky.

"How could they do this to me? Have a kid just so he can be enslaved to their obsolete programming. What kind of legacy is that?" His chest was heaving from exertion and anger, and he looked as if he were thinking of stomping on the wreckage for good measure.

"You know I'll stand by you, no matter what you become." I meant it as a comfort, but it made him angry.

"What, do you
want
me to be like you? Slave to the implant! Would that finally satisfy you?" He reached out his hands to shove me, and I let him, his push knocking me back two steps.

I stared at him, baffled. What had he meant, satisfy?

"Ugh!" He threw up his hands. "Nothing ever fazes you."

Quietly, I said, "Of course things do, but I'm not supposed to show it."

His anger leached away, and he sank onto a settee, head in hands. When he spoke, the muffled words leaked between his fingers. "I'm sorry. I just don't know what to do."

"If... if there was a chance to stay yourself, would you take it?" I asked tentatively. "No matter the cost?"

Duyi dropped his hands from his face and gave me a sharp look.
"Anything."
He said the word like an oath. "I would do anything, just tell me what to do."

I sat beside him, bracing myself to voice thoughts that couldn't ever be unsaid. Thoughts of treason. "I've heard the other guards speak of a rebel group—they call themselves the Freeminers. Their mission is to bring down the Regency."

Duyi laughed bitterly. "Well they're certainly not going to help
me,
then."

"Not at first. We'll have to leak them intel, earn their trust, but we have time. We have a whole year. And in the end, you have the one thing they need the most."

His eyes widened. "The symbionts. Oh, symrock. This could actually work, Feng."

"So... you want me to initiate contact, then?" I fetched a tablet and paged through Duyi's calendar, cross-checking it against areas of recent Freeminer activity. "Perhaps at the festival in New Hsinchu next month."

"Yeah, it'll have to be sometime when we can sneak away from the guards. There'll be crowds at the festival. We need to make a plan."

I nodded, still looking at the tablet. "As you wish, young master."

"You can't call me that anymore, Brother." It wasn't the words so much as the pained note in his voice that made me look up. "Not if we're going to do this together."

I blinked at him, for a moment stunned. "You're right," I said, and held out my palm in the same gesture he'd greeted me with all those years ago. He laid his palm in mine, accepting me as an equal, and I said, "Brothers, then. Brothers forever."

I wake in the hospital, but Duyi is dead.

He did save me, after all, though not in the way he had intended. When the bullet passed first through him, then through me, the infection transferred blood-to-blood. By law, not even the regent has the authority to order the execution of a symbiont host. Duyi's blood renders me untouchable, a walking one-man sanctuary.

The transfer shouldn't have been possible. The regent's family has certain genetic markers that predispose them to supporting the symbionts, but I have no genetic compatibility. The doctors theorize it may have something to do with chronic exposure, my years of proximity to Duyi's symbionts giving my body time to adjust to them and them time to adapt to me.

They tell me he died in my arms, but I imagine it was more that we slumped to the floor in a tangle. I don't remember. I have plenty of time in the hospital to regret I was not conscious for his last moments of life. His absence feels unreal; I know he is dead, yet I keep expecting him to walk through the door. The doctors tell me I will adjust, in time, but they tiptoe through my room as if I am as fragile as blown glass.

I think they worry the Imperative will drive me insane, now that the focus of its in-fluence is gone. They don't understand that the Imperative hasn't really mattered, not for a long time now.

I wish I could tell my younger self,
all of this is real,
so I wouldn't have wasted so much time doubting Duyi's sincerity. But I suppose you can't truly
know
someone loves you enough to die for you until they do.

The regent wants me remanded to her custody. The night before my release date, the Freeminers send an escort of two men dressed as Regency guards. We walk right out through the front doors. The hospital staff isn't stupid—they can tell what's happening—but the uniforms do them the service of plausible deniability.
What do you mean he's disappeared?
they'll say in the morning.
A Regency escort picked him up last night.

The Freeminers tell me Santiago's still alive. There's a certain irony, here—the regent was so focused on capturing us that the leader of the revolution slipped out of town undetected. The Freeminers act as if this counts as a victory.

They deliver me straight into Dr. Anwang's care. Santiago hovers, anxious to hear that I'm fit and able, but Anwang shoos him away. She prescribes more rest and runs her own set of scans and blood work. I sleep most of the day away, because it's so much easier than being conscious.

The next afternoon, Anwang has results, so she and Santiago pull chairs up close and huddle at my bedside.

"I know this is a hard time for you to talk about this," she says, taking my hand and squeezing it, "but you need to hear what I found. It wasn't just Duyi's colony that was adapting to you. The whole Regency strain has been adapting to humans for half a millennium. It's not nearly so specific anymore, probably hasn't been for a long time, we simply didn't know because so few people ever get exposed to Regency blood."

I blink slowly at her. "Are you saying that I'm... infectious?"

"Not yet," she says. "But when your symbiont load is mature, we might be able to infect as much as 5 or 10 percent of the population from your blood."

Santiago's head snaps up. "You think there could be that many viable hosts?"

She shrugs. "The data are only preliminary, and it will take time to do so many inoculations, but I think it wouldn't be unrealistic to aim for a stable five-percent infection pool in the future."

Santiago steeples his fingers in front of his mouth, looking humbled by the news. "That would change... everything. We could put an end to the whole political structure."

Where before he hoped to depose one dictator in favor of a somewhat less sociopathic replacement, now he can eliminate the Regency's power altogether. I can almost see the thoughts and plans churning behind his wet, shining eyes. The cognitive dissonance is intense, watching Santiago feel more hope and joy than he ever expected possible when the ashes of my own life's destruction have hardly cooled. I'm not ready to feel happy about anything yet; I can't even imagine what it might be like.

I agree to cooperate with whatever they need. Dr. Anwang does more tests, takes more blood, prepares for the initial round of infection trials. I follow Santiago to political rallies and show off what I can do. He does most of the talking. I'm shaky at first, but I gradually gain some proficiency at controlling the symbionts.

I tell people I will overthrow the Regency to honor Duyi's memory, because he died for the cause. But the truth is, he died for me. I simply need
something
to do with my life, now that he is gone.

This will do. I am Moserothi—a speck of hope is as much as I can ask for.

The author tells us, "I really did get lost over the Olympic Peninsula when I was sixteen years old, trying to accomplish my first solo cross-country flight. And I really did land at the near-abandoned airfield described in the story that follows. After that the truth gets a little sketchy." Jack's new novel,
Life on The Preservation,
recently came out from Solaris books. In December, he will be a teacher on the Bahamas-bound writer's workshop and cruise, Sail To Success, along with Nancy Kress, Mike Resnick, and a few others.

Three thousand feet below the wheel fairings of my Cessna 150 trainer, a perfect sheet of fog pulled off the Pacific and covered the Washington coastline. To my right, the Olympic Mountains bulked jaggedly against the sky. I had to duck and crane to see the top of Mount Olympus, nearly four thousand feet higher than my flight path. I was sixteen years old, alone on my first solo cross country flight, a requisite part of my training before I could apply for my pilot's ticket.

And I was lost.

Okay, not
lost,
exactly. I knew my approximate location. All I had to do was look out the windows. VFR is what they call it when you can see where you're going: Visual Flight Rules. Even though the coast line was obscured by fog, the Olympic Mountains still presented a pretty distinctive reference. But mostly I was relying on my VOR instrument, and that was a mistake.

VOR is short for VHF Omnidirectional Radio. Aviation is full acronyms—it was even back in 1982, when I got lost over the Olympic Peninsula. With a VOR you tune in the station, center the little arrow on a compass dial, and fly straight along the selected radial. Theoretically you don't need VFR conditions to do that. It's how I found my way from Crest Airpark, a small private field east of the Kent valley, to the logging city of Hoquiam. From there I turned north, switching to the next station, which was in Port Angeles—and that was the mistake. VORs are line-of-sight signals, and I did not have a line-of-sight to Port Angeles. The mountains were in the way. I should have stayed on the Hoquiam signal until I'd traveled far enough up the coast to clear the mountains.

The signal was faint. I got worried and hauled back on the yoke, trimmed the elevators, and started climbing, on the assumption increased altitude would translate into a stronger VOR signal. My hands were damp, and I gripped the yoke too hard. I was sixteen. Not only was I an inexperienced pilot, I was an inexperienced
human being.

A 150 trainer is a very small airplane. Four cylinders and a hundred horsepower start to feel inadequate the higher you go. My airspeed had dropped to fifty-six knots. Considering my steep angle of attack, that was uncomfortably close to a stall.

The Cessna's airframe shuddered in the unstable air around Mount Olympus. The controls felt mushy.

A peculiar white cloud hung in the sky directly in front of me. It had the general look of a small cumulus, that vaguely popcorn shape that encourages day dreamers to see dragons or schooners or whatever. To me this one looked like a Mickey Mouse head. But what made it peculiar was its seeming flatness, the way it appeared to be painted right on the sky, in two dimensions. Soon it felt like I was falling toward the cloud instead of climbing laboriously. That scared me, and I attempted to veer off but I was too late. It was almost as if the cloud were pulling me in by gravitational attraction. In the next moment the world turned white.

My name is Paul Birmingham. I don't know how old I am now. But in 2012, when I was forty-six and dying, I decided it was time to go flying again—thirty years after that day I got lost over the Olympic Peninsula. The idea came to me late at night in a nearly deserted office bay. I was an engineer by profession, and I worked graveyard shift for the Boeing Company in Everett, Washington.

I liked working graveyard for the same reasons most people hate it. Being awake in the small hours after midnight put me out of sync with a world I always felt out of sync with, anyway. I shut off the overhead light panels and set up a lamp in my cubicle, the kind of lamp you'd find in somebody's bedroom. Over the course of my six-hour shifts I toggled between 3D renderings of structural spars and dense blocks of text on physics websites. Only the spars were part of my job.

I was not a "God" man. I was not a believer in the mystical—and I still am not. That's important. I was an engineer and possessed an engineer's mind, the kind of mind that wants to figure out how things work in the real, observable world. If I were imprisoned in a medieval fortress, I would not waste my time praying for freedom. I would study the foundation. I would contrive tunnels. The physics stuff—much of it beyond me—was like studying the secret layout of the world prison in which I found myself.