Interference Read online

  I did some research. I discovered that before the colonists had left, they had written a Constitution in ornate Classic English that devoted its bulk to matters of governance, but its “Article II: Principles and Purposes” declared plainly: “The Commonwealth declares and affirms its special responsibility to promote the full and equal participation of all its citizens in its activities and endeavors without regard to race, species, color, sex, disability, wealth or poverty, affectional or sexual orientation, age, national origin, or creed.”

  My family granted permission for my application without comment and agreed to pay for lodging and food in the least expensive women’s dormitory in Old Washington Dee Cee. A fine recommendation got me accepted, although in truth few people sought to leave the planet on a mission so dangerous it approached suicide. But suicide had its attractions.

  * * *

  I was down in the musty basement again. For helping me develop illegal mental skills, my “teacher” was going to want his payment, but he didn’t know how much I had practiced on my own. And there was only one thing a man without a wife would want from a woman, something he probably would have considered as subversive to the system as his lessons, and therefore as liberating, but it would have left me less free.

  His eyes flicked on something in his enhanced vision as he fiddled with his transmitter box again. I located it, a feed from a different, more distant transmitter. He was watching the entrances to the building. I had worried about discovery, too, worried enough to have fully imagined it. I interrupted his feed with my own version of reality.

  “Halt, police!” a voice commanded in his head. The feeds showed a blur of motion at one of the entrances.

  He jumped to his feet, eyes wild. He looked at the box, then at me. I was evidence.

  “Get out! Get out now!” he shouted at me. “The back way, take the back way!” He shoved me at a staircase. I heard him smashing the box as I ran. I never heard from him, or about him, again.

  People trust what they see. They trust the system that sends them these visions even though it is as fragile as the paper in ancient books—because they have never read those books. They know nothing about their own environment. They trust it the way people once trusted the food they ate.

  * * *

  In Old Washington Dee Cee, a few days before the announcement of who would go to Pax, Shani was swinging her arms and moving her feet to a feed of dance exercise music in a corner of the patio of our dormitory. At a nearby table, I pretended to be studying something in my own feed, but instead I watched her shadow. I was sitting between her and the antenna. I scanned for her music, tuned in, listened, thought of another song I had stored in my own feed, substituted it as if it were part of the exercise plan, and sent it.

  She interpreted the change as a programmed alteration of her routine. Now her feet moved to my rhythm. She raised her arms over her head and swung them from side to side as her hips swayed the opposite way. The music shifted to a refrain, and she bent and turned, her legs spread wide to maintain her balance as she draped her arms ever wider, front and back, left and right, with the grace of a bird navigating air currents. I glanced and saw her smiling wide: she loved to dance. She bent her knees and turned, swayed forward, stepped, and turned again, her hips making wide arcs.

  I turned away and slowed the music slightly, and her shadow moved from side to side at my command, one two three four left right …

  I continued until the headache made my eyes water. Or maybe I was weeping—for her or for me? For inflicting harm on my best friend or for proving that I was NVA, determined and cruel? I had to be prepared in case she won the chance to go to Pax. I only needed to injure her enough so that she couldn’t go. And if I failed, Mars still beckoned.

  * * *

  Several hours after the team to go to Pax had been named, on a warm spring afternoon, women working on the project had come to our favorite place in the green ruins of Washington for a happy-sad goodbye. Some would fly to another planet and some would stay behind. We all shared the bond of inequality and, beyond that, like the men, the burden of a system that decided our families, our work, and as much as it could our thoughts. I would have never doubted that the world was as it should have been had I not been able to see the world as it once was, and everything I had learned had left me with one horrible choice.

  The men who ran the Earth wanted a monster, and they created one. To survive, I had to do something abhorrent.

  “Karola,” one of my co-workers said, “since you’re staying, maybe you can join this other project.”

  “What is it?” I tried to look attentive.

  “It’s about artificial photosynthesis. We’ll need help understanding old research, and for communications.”

  Shani was elsewhere talking with a trio of women, all of whom would be leaving. As usual, they chatted by feed while they wandered separately through the ruins and its overgrown cliffs and ravines.

  “Photosynthesis for food or for energy?” I asked.

  “Both. It’s a big project. Complicated. And long-term.…”

  Shani was out of sight, but I found her feed easily. She and the others were discussing ways to coordinate their work. She was too involved with that to notice her visual overlay beyond avoiding dangers marked in red, and when she looked up at a singing bird, I switched the colors.

  “The project is going to go to Mars,” my co-worker told me.

  Shani was in immediate danger, and I wished I could know exactly how much so I could control it, make it no worse than it needed to be. I wished I could do something besides hurt her. Then I understood what I had just heard.

  “Mars?”

  “Right, I knew you’d be interested.”

  The wind made the yellow daffodils sway. Maybe I wouldn’t have to hurt Shani.

  My co-worker continued: “Earth and Mars are at war.”

  I twisted my ring. “They have been for a long time.”

  “Yeah, but now the idea is to create a new colony on Mars because the rebels are only in one place and they haven’t gotten much beyond subsistence, so if Earth can establish its own base, a superefficient base, then Earth could fight and win.”

  Of course Earth would win. I looked down at my feet because everything inside me was collapsing. I struggled to maintain the color change for Shani and twisted my ring until the band bit into my flesh. No matter what happened, no matter what Pax was like, I could never come back to Earth or Mars. There was nowhere else to go.

  Shani was surrounded by wild beauty, walking toward a wide and very bright green line on the ground, and then, a sudden shift in her visual feed spun into darkness.

  What had I done?

  My co-worker said: “… and it will need to capture every kind of radiant energy—Oh!”

  An alarm sounded across all feeds and showed us where the trouble was. Everyone rushed toward her.

  “Shani!”

  I was already weeping. I located her medical readout and it showed extremes, all of them wrong.

  2

  ARTHUR—PAX YEAR 210 SINCE FOUNDING

  Something poked up at my shoe, and I froze. Through the thick sole, I couldn’t tell what it was. Coral, burrowing owl, or maybe, finally, a red velvet worm? Or maybe I’d just snapped a twig, but I hadn’t heard anything.

  We didn’t want surprises.

  I whistled Glassmaker sounds for trouble and perhaps and pointed at my foot. A lot of things recognize the vibrations of a voice as a sign of prey, but some ignore a whistle. Would velvet worms?

  “Heard you,” Cawzee squawked behind me. Right behind me. I told the Glassmaker to stay back. Stupid. No surprise there.

  I didn’t move, except for my eyes. If it was a velvet worm, its swarm might be nearby, and with the bare branches of winter, I might spot them … if I knew what to look for. Dark red, about the width of my thumb, so they said. The locustwood trees kept reporting them here in the south forest, but those trees spooked easy.

  I saw
only dry underbrush, patches of snow, and tree trunks. I heard nothing, smelled nothing. I had a long knife in one hand, a spear in the other, both ready, and wore heavy leather boots up to my knees. That was as good as it was going to get.

  The thing under my foot poked again, then scraped along the sole. It was alive, and I wanted to find out what it was.

  “Back off,” I whistled.

  “Where?”

  I gestured with the spear at my foot.

  The thing underneath it began to push up hard.

  Cawzee leaped ahead of me in a flash of gray-brown skin and fur, and stood just out of reach. He squatted on his back legs, held his body and long head straight up, raised his front legs and arms, and froze. But a perfect imitation of a stump with bare branches, wearing a winter coat, wouldn’t help. I gestured to move away fast. Fast!

  The worm exploded from the ground and rose up as high as my knee, and I reacted a half second too slow. My knife cut only air. Cawzee jumped up and screeched loud enough to stun. I swung again and this time I whacked the worm.

  But it had already squirted glue strings that hit him on the belly. The strings tightened and yanked the lopped-off head against him. Freshly dead, it could probably still bite, and its poison could kill a lion.

  Cawzee panicked. He dropped to all four legs and started running, still shrieking.

  “Get back here!”

  Something else burst through the dead leaves. I looked, but it was gone. Cawzee had stopped, his big long head bobbing. I ran toward him, shrugging off my backpack to get the antidote.

  “Stay there. I’m coming to help you, Cawzee. Stay there.”

  He reached for his belly, tugged at the worm head, and made a rattling sound. Glassmaker faces don’t show emotion, but he scented fear strong enough to make my eyes water.

  “I’ll help you.” I was standing next to him now with a fruit out and shoved it into his hand. “Eat this.” I grabbed the worm head and yanked it off. Blood ran fast. Good, it would clean the wound from inside. I groped in the bag for another fruit, crushed it in my hand, and ground it into the bleeding hole.

  Cawzee started trembling and whining. He held the fruit in long, thin fingers, but he hadn’t eaten anything. Well, I wasn’t going to lose him. The hassle of him dead would be even worse than having him alive. I put an arm down around his shoulders and pushed the fruit at his mouth. Something rustled off to the left. I jerked my head to look. A boxer bird, harmless.

  “Come on, eat that, it’s good for you.… Yeah, there you go. There’s no seeds, just bite and swallow fast. Here’s another one. You know you have to eat this. Here, chow it down.”

  He shook worse and dropped his head. Don’t throw up, I wanted to say, but that might give him an idea. His stink was making me queasy. I let go of his shoulders, fell to my knees, grabbed another fruit, and rubbed its pulp into the belly wound again. It was bleeding less, and the flesh seemed firm. He rested his head on my hat. I heard him chewing. Good. I’d get that brainless insect home alive.

  “You say move back, but you not tell me where,” he squawked. “I not know where I go-me.”

  Right. With Glassmakers, it’s always our fault, us Humans. Whatever we do isn’t good enough.

  “Can you walk?”

  He took a couple of shaky steps. “You will help me.”

  “Let’s go to the camp.” I stood up, my elbow at the same height as his shoulder. “Here, I’ll help you hold up your head.” His big, faceted eyes glittered. A thread of saliva dripped from the bottom of the vertical slit of his mouth. I wasn’t sure where to hold his head, so I wrapped my hand around where his chin would have been if he had one, and we began to walk. Supposedly there were things like this on Earth called insects but tiny and truly brainless, and some old records said a species that looked a lot like Glassmakers was called praying mantis, or preying, or whatever. No matter what, “insect” was not a polite word on Pax, but somehow it had never been forgotten.

  I stayed alert for anything underfoot or in the brush, but it was winter and quiet, except for the crusty snow and dead leaves crunching as we walked. Cawzee was young and new at hunting, I reminded myself, and the Hunter’s Committee had assigned me the job to take him on his first winter hunting camp, since I was young but experienced. If it worked out, we might make a permanent pair, but of all the Glassmaker majors in the city, I’d never want him. Their queens assigned them, and we Humans could only agree. Next time, I was going to argue. Stupid queens.

  Instead of teaching hunting, I could have been doing real hunting. Or exploring. Both would have been more fun. Maybe after I got him home, I’d just take off on my own.

  Within an hour, I had him resting in our tent, had a fire going, got him some tea and then some food for both of us.

  He said, “I perhaps live-me, yes?”

  “I gotta say yes.” Glassmakers whistle and chatter and squawk and emit scents, and we understand them mostly, and they understand Human speech mostly, so I could entertain myself with sarcasm he wouldn’t catch. “There’s no chance you’ll leave me alone.”

  “I be-me cold.”

  “Take my blanket, too. Here, take all the blankets. Take everything.”

  “We will go now home?”

  “The sooner the better. I wish I could throw you all the way there.”

  It was about noon, so after we’d eaten, I struck the camp. He didn’t lift a skinny finger to help me or carry a thing besides his side baskets, empty because he felt too weak, so I had everything on my back, and had to help him tremble through every rough spot. That night, he stank and snored worse than ever. I moved my sack outside and lay there, staring up. It was cloudy, no auroras to light the sky, no moons or planets or stars to help me track the time.

  I thought about red velvet worms. Most people thought they were just worried prattle from the locustwoods. Those trees were always reporting eagles where there were merely owls. They weren’t the brightest species of tree, except for the huge ones, but we had planted them in the south forest on the deal that they would keep watch, and they took their job seriously.

  There had been a lot of little changes in the south lately. We needed to do something about it, and I decided to volunteer. I had the proof, a red velvet worm dead in a sack. We needed to go hunt red velvet worms. With the right team, it would be the best sport yet.

  * * *

  It began to rain the next morning, and we were cold and wet hours later when the trail took us out on a little ridge at the river. Far off, we saw the domed glass roofs of the city. It looked better than ever. We just had to hike along the river past the fields and orchards, cross the bridge, march up the bluff, enter the gates in the city wall, and we’d be home.

  The bamboo in the city stood green even in winter. We were too far to see the rainbow stripes on its stems, but the colored glass in the roofs was arranged in circular rainbows, and we could glimpse that. It was called Rainbow City for a reason.

  “It’s great to see home,” I said. Best of all, I thought, when we got there, I could dump Cawzee on someone else.

  “We build good city. Home for us, not for you.”

  “Home? You abandoned it because you wanted to be nomads again. You thought you were going to lead better lives. While you were gone, we rebuilt it for you.”

  “And you keep it for you, not us.”

  If he wanted to fight over ancient history like his queen, so could I. “We invited you to live with us when you came back after you failed as nomads, but no, you had to have a war.”

  “We have now little room.”

  “There’s still plenty of room to grow. And there’s more of you now than there used to be. Life is good with us.”

  He puffed the scent of rotting fish. “You cheat and use plant to fight or we win-us our old home.”

  “That was a hundred years ago, and Stevland is for all of us.”

  “He be-he plant.”

  “And you’re a stupid tulip.”

  “Fast tuli
p. With you, I have bad trip, and you almost kill me.”

  “You seem to be doing fine. Wanna carry something? Maybe your own food?”

  His four legs began to wobble again. “I go to clinic in city, get good care.”

  “I’ll take you myself and leave you there. Don’t ever partner with me again.”

  “Bad hunter, I learn nothing.”

  “Shut up.”

  We hadn’t talked much before and we didn’t talk at all after that. The path took us past fields covered with stubble. Not even caterpillars were out crawling over the dirt, and of course we saw no farmers. They didn’t work in the cold rain like us hunters, water seeping into my boots and squishing in my socks. But on the far side of a field a team was digging, and when a Glassmaker worker saw us, he came running over in boots covered with mud up to his first knees.

  He greeted Cawzee with whistles and a cloud of alcohol for welcome, and they sniffed each other, as if they had to. Even I knew the worker was one of his brothers, Chesty or something like that. He chattered and looked at Cawzee’s bandaged belly, took him by the hand and screeched back to his team, “I now go-me with family to city.”

  Good, he could carry something.

  His team members waved him off, then waved at us, and one wore a black hat like mine. I waved my hat at her. She didn’t wave hers back. I couldn’t charm women at all.

  Chesty took Cawzee’s side baskets and didn’t offer to help me carry anything, but I dropped his bedding and weapons into them anyway. The worker puffed laughter and something fishy.

  I entertained myself by ignoring them and inspecting the scenery. A hunter had to be prepared everywhere, since we defended the city, too. A checkerboard of trees and shrubs grew on the side of a little rise and nothing was lurking between them, but closer to the river, a dragon gecko hunkered under a little palm tree for shelter, looking miserable. It probably just got kicked out of its own burrow by a boxer bird. I knew how it felt.