Chapter 4
Gina Rinaldi: PAPER TIGRESS
Not one day in Gina Rinaldi’s life passed without pain.
The worst of it was the atmosphere on Palaccio. It had too little oxygen for her needs. So each breath, no matter how she filled her gillsacs, left her on the edge of a gasping convulsion. There were pills that helped slow her metabolism and reduce her need; and she kept a small injector nearby at all times to boost the oh-three content of her fluid stream. Neither remedy was as good as being really able to breathe.
The gee-pull here was another source of constant annoyance. Her musculature had evolved on a planet with a far deeper gravity well. Every move she made had to be choreographed in her head. Otherwise she would leap two meters through the air while the Humans around her shuffled along the ground. Without careful planning, the coffee cups she picked up would fly off their saucers toward the ceiling; the contents of file folders would sling themselves across the room. When she accidentally bumped a chair or a table, it skittered along like a fast beetle.
She thought of Palaccio as the thin world.
More serious, Gina found as she grew older that the planet’s low gravity was changing her body. Her bones were becoming brittle here as they shed their alumina content. Her tendons were contracting, causing painful cramps. The specific gravity of her fluids was altering, precipitating the lighter metals, on which she depended. Gina began to understand why neither her poly-divergents, who had immigrated to Palaccio to work the fields of Pescador Holding, nor her diploids, who had moved into Meyerbeer as contract money traders, had lived much beyond fifty standard years when the normal lifespan of a Deoorti individual was 250 years.
Worse than the physical problems was the casual contempt the Humans displayed. The “aliens” among them were valued only as convenience machines. Her gynamere had just been some land of self-replicating agricultural tractor. Her mere had been a mechanical tallyboard. Gina herself was a walking AID, when she wasn’t an automated sex toy. Tad might forget and talk to her like a real person, sometimes, but that machine mentality was always there, under the surface. What the Humans forgot was that, pound for pound in protoplasm, and outside the artificial boundaries of Pact politics, the “aliens” outnumbered them a billion to one.
For all that, the Humans fascinated her: they could doubt.
Deoorti Orthodoxy was almost a biological thing, based as much on commensalism as on Hive law. To disbelieve in a structured society, to disobey the common precepts, to distinguish oneself from the common good—these were unthinkable. A Deoorti might as well disbelieve in the stars, disobey the flow of time, or distinguish herself from sodium.
By contrast, the Humans were so diverse! They could disbelieve, disobey, and distinguish. Freely and at will. And from that raw material of discontent, they had created comedy, tragedy, music, war, commerce, and a thousand other interesting things the Deoorti had never dreamed of. Human life was a rich-smelling garbage heap of emotions and responses, some that didn’t work at all, and some that worked better than expected. As much as Gina was repelled by the waste of it, she loved the variety.
Most confusing of all was the concept of politics. Two Human beings, both of good will, honest intent, and certifiable sanity, could disagree so violently on basic questions of public action and benefit. In her own department, the battles raged between privatism and macloohanism, between the Imageurs and the Veracitors, between the careerists like Tad and the appointees like this new man, Selwin Praise. That battle would be no different from the last, or the one before it.
After several years, she had learned that the words they used, the issues they fought over, the decisions that one would make and the other unmake, were not what they were fighting about at all. Behind the words was this mystical thing called a “position.” Each of them, Tad and the currently appointed director, could have one. Neither could have the same one. In some way Gina could not understand, this “position” was linked to each man’s view of himself in relation to the political structure of the Pact, to Human society as a whole, and to the universe of one hundred billion galaxies. Each Human had to invent this view for himself and defend it vigorously against all others.
Her Deoorti body may have been patterned on the Human, but some things the mind could not copy.
Of course, in all these battles, she sided with Tad.
Not for “politics,” she reminded herself, but for “love.” That was another emotion the Hive had never produced. Love was something like Hive loyalty but focused on a single individual. It was not, could not be, the coupling of sex—although, for Tad, sex was impossibly intertwined with love. Of course, sex with a Human and sex among the Deoorti were two different functions: one social, the other biological.
It was all very hard to understand. At times, when she was alone by herself, Gina thought it might be easier to stop trying. To lapse into the machine role the Humans seemed to want for her.
On another level, however, it was all very simple. The movements of sex and the words of love had brought her a permanent work permit and temporary authorization to live within the city limits of Meyerbeer. In Human society, sex and politics were survival. That she could understand.
“Gina!”
Tad’s voice from the corner office, raised in a shout when the intercom was six centimeters beyond his fingertips. “Yes, Tad?” she called back.
“Come in here a minute!”
Inside, she found him sitting at his desk. He was bent over his artificial intelligence device, fiddling with the optical attachments.
“These lenses don’t seem to work. I’m trying to get a holo image, but they don’t even show a blur.”
Gina saw the problem in two seconds. He’d fitted the microscanner instead of the macroprojector. Now, how could she tell him this without making him feel stupid? Well, let the machine do it.
“AID?” she queried.
“Ready!” it answered enthusiastically.
“Show pic.”
“I can’t. I’m blind. Has that idiot put on my micros again? If he has, then he’d better give me something to read inside a three mikey-mike focus, or I’m going to sit here and recite the entire Rig-Veda. In Sanskrit. And leave out the dirty parts.”
“Oh. Wrong lens,” Tad said. “They ought to mark these things better.” He switched them out and angled the unit across the corner of his desk blotter.
“Show pic,” he commanded.
“Do you mean, ‘Please let me see the image series we were discussing?’ If so, that would be the polite way to say it.”
“Just dump the data.”
The center of his work area lit up with a blinking, strobing blur. It was over in six seconds. The images changed so fast, Gina could get only the most general idea that they were topo maps or structural plans of some land.
“Slower, please,” Tad said woodenly.
“Oh, you want reading speed,” the AID cooed. “I thought you said ‘dump.’ My mistake. Sir.”
Why didn’t Tad just disconnect or reprogram the personality codes? Gina suspected that, in some way, he enjoyed being lipped off by impudent machinery . . . Maybe that was why he kept her around.
The first holopic was a green valley, pierced by an ambling trout stream that flashed like metal in the sunlight. The image jumped back and forth between two frames, faking the ripple of water and the shiver of trees in a simulated breeze. At the center of focus was a white dome, made of prefab hexagon panels. It was a hyperwave relay station, somewhere on Palaccio, probably beyond the Palisades, far upcountry.
The next image closed in on the dome, showing a maintenance worker, for scale, and a truck sitting on its collapsed skirting to offload a rad-shielded probot. Moving into the image, a two-dimensional red arrowhead flickered across the station’s vulnerable points: access hatches, the plasma tube and power buses, the Shadowbox wave dish for signal inputs.
A third image went inside, dissecting the station like a tri-D grapefruit: containment shell, suspenders, supporting framework, primary laser injectors, cyber systems, and the probable locus of the singularity.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
“Ways to get in.”
“Door’s on the left. There.”
“No, I mean, if we weren’t supposed to.”
“Break down the door. On the left.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Who would want to get inside a hyperwave station?” Gina asked. “Nothing in there to steal except some industrial-class lasers and an old computer that’s so task-oriented you’d have to rebuild it to reprogram it. Unless you wanted the singularity itself, and you’d need a portable mass synthesizer, a big one, to grapple with it. And if you fumbled it—then you can kiss off this entire planet as real estate . . . No, nobody would break into an HSN station.”
“They might if they wanted to take control of the Cluster’s communications system.”
“Well, yes, I suppose they could jack in at one of the repeaters. That would put them in charge, technically, of just the one node and its two-way link. Wouldn’t it be simpler to infiltrate here, through this office, and command the whole system? Our cyber’s a lot more versatile. More cooperative, too.”
“I heard that!” the AID squawked. Gina rapped its carbon fiber case with her knuckles. She couldn’t hurt it with anything less than a ten-kilo sledge, but the machine shut up.
“Anyway,” she said, “who’s worried about break ins?”
“The new D.ofC. has a phobia about it. He braced and grilled me after the meeting at the Palace. Says he wants a proposal for some land of military reaction force, complete with barracks sites, training program, costs and pay schedules—probably even a retirement policy and a marching song—on his desk after lunch.”
“So that’s why you’re sitting here in a soggy uniform, still hanging with pond weeds, and looking at twenty-year-old structural. The Department decommissioned Delta Station nine years ago, you know.”
“Um . . .”
“Look, don’t try to do this thing reasonably, Tad. You’re wasting your time figuring out how to get inside a hyperwave node and, from that, computing the military forces needed to defend it. You’re neither a soldier nor a vandal. Instead, take a guess. Fifty men? A hundred? At each station? On each planet? Then multiply by the number of stations and other faculties.”
His nose wrinkled. “That’s a big force. There might not be that many trained soldiers available in the whole Cluster, outside of Dindyma’s marines or the Central Fleet.”
“So you recruit and train them. Takes six months.”
“Train whom, exactly? We can’t reclassify from our own staff; we’re already short-handed. Other departments would feel the same. And the conglomerates and latifundias are all closed labor systems.”
“Workers from the dole pool? They’re certainly outside the system.”
“Yeah, far out. Half of them thieves and the other half spies on retainer from who knows where. They’re just the sort of ragtag army we’d be defending the stations against. Praise would like that a lot.”
“What about—aliens?” It made Gina feel strange to use the word, especially when talking to a Human . . .
“Aliens? Can they fight? Even if they could, why would they fight for us?”
Good question. Still, Gina pushed on. “I think they’re capable of loyalty,” she said slowly. “Great loyalty, sometimes.”
“Well. Whatever. Put down an unspecified force, the make-up to be determined later. What else do we need?”
“Ummm—armored carriers to move them in. For weapons, you’d need repulsor rifles, HD coils, stun grenades, and portable plasma pots—”
“Where can we get them?”
“Beg them from the Cluster Command, buy them in the bazaar, import them from offplanet. At any rate, once you know the size of the force, just multiply everything else—transport, housing, training, salaries—out of that. The rest is economics. I can punch it up on a wristcalc in ten minutes.”
“I don’t know. This man Praise is pretty sharp.”
“Sure. But he’s not omniscient. If you come in with a snowstorm of numbers, it will take twice as long to break ’em as it took us to cook ’em. Gives us lead time to do a solder and patch job on the project.”
“You want to take a crack at it?”
“Sure. For what it’s worth . . .”
“How do you mean?” he asked. “The new Director wants—”
“The new Director doesn’t know blip about comm theory and practice. To do real damage to the system, you don’t try to disrupt or censor just one node. You’d want to shape the information, skew it, rewrite the text and sculpt the electron flow with your own slant. That’s the subtle, the cool way. A military attack is uncool.”
“Maybe.” Bertingas stared thoughtfully at the holo projection of the station schematics. Then he shook his head. “It would be too easy to detect. The D.ofC. would clamp down before you got the project even—”
“Oh, really? Tad, the Director doesn’t pre-sample a tenth of what goes out of here. He doesn’t know or speak to any of the techies. When was the last time you saw one of the upper brass poking around in the equipment bays? We know who really runs the Department. You or I could fake a transmission, stash it in pieces in off-RAM, and spring it whenever we wanted.”
“You probably could . . . Hmmm. Do you think I’d find out about it?”
Gina felt a coldness in her lower bowel. She sometimes misread Human thoughts and emotions, having no emphatic waveform for them. However, the trend of Tad’s thoughts was unmistakable.
“I—I don’t know. Maybe not. Probably not.”
“But that isn’t what you told the Haiken Maru people, is it?” He swiveled his chair abruptly and lanced her with his eyes.
Some detached part of Gina’s mind recalled that she could, with one stiff-armed blow, take the top of his head off—right across the weakened structure of a Human skull’s eye sockets. She might even be able to get out of the building after she did it. Once on the streets . . . But Tad was more, to her, than some inconvenient blob of carbon-based jelly. Her shoulders sagged a millimeter or more.
“How did you know?”
“Twice in a single morning someone suggests to me, in a subtle way, that the images this department puts out might be doctored. The first person to suggest it goes to a lot of trouble to kill me when I refuse. And he, to be frank, knows less about comm tech than our new boss. I have to consider the possibility there’s a link.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Did you tell them to kill me?”
“No! I wouldn’t—Tad!”
“Did they pay you?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. A Deoorti Sister works in the Haiken Maru subculture. She was asking about my job, and my relationship, with you. We got to talking tech and she asked if I could scramble and fake the system anytime I wanted. I told her maybe, once, on something small. But anything too long, or a major message like a Palace transmission, and you’d be likely to find out.”
“So they had to kill me.”
“No—not—never . . .” Gina wailed. She dropped straight down to the floor, her legs folding into what the Humans called a half-lotus. For Deoorti, it was a surrender posture.
“We made a joke about it. If I had to, I could tie you up and closet you for an hour, for two. Or fuck you one-handed. To get job done. That kind of joke. Not kill, never kill Taddeuz.”
There were tears, hot tears of lithium salts. Gina could feel them eating into the creme make-up she put on her face every morning to make her look more Human. She had to get control: her body, her language, her emotions were going back to the Deoorti pattern. That would alienate him. Still, she could help none of it.
“Why are you . . . ?”
“Oh, be hush you stupid man! I love, have loved you! Not Hive, not Sister, not Right Smells, but loved no less. And you think I would have you killed. Now that you love me no more. Not fair, Taddeuz, not fair to me.”
He just sat there looking down at the top of her head, clearly wishing he were somewhere else.
“My—my people,” she began again, “were patterned on you. To kaqulendir—to mesh—with you. How could I not love you? Not stop loving even when you do. Even though, to you, I am just a thing. A soft bitch. An alien.”
“I don’t—it’s not like that,” he said.
But she knew from his voice, it was.
Gina was about to explain how she, too, was loyal to the Pact, why she had to be, when a buzzer from Tad’s desk cut her off. It was the special buzzer, from the 100th floor, which had not sounded in months.
“That’s the Director. He probably wants to see me,” Bertingas said. He sounded relieved.
She looked up at him. Her face was still wet with the Human emblem of tears, but her legs were loosening from their reflexive crouch, her shoulders lifting.
“Your uniform is a mess.”
“No time to change it, I guess.”
“No.”
“Why don’t you—ah—keep working on those figures? For some kind of military force.”
“You trust me with that? After talking to Haiken Maru? After getting you killed?”
He made a small, tight smile. She suddenly understood how near to tears himself this Human had come.
“Not your fault,” he said, “not intentionally. You’re a good woman, Gina.”
Good woman, almost Human.
She wiped the corroded make-up off her cheeks with the palms of her hands and returned his smile.
Then he was walking quickly out of the office. One dress boot squeaked with the damp still in it.