Balance Point (6 page)

NINE

Three months after Kit and I renewed our acquaintance at her father’s boathouse, Howard Hibble invited us to join him for a picnic lunch, which invitation was an event as frequent as a total eclipse of the Sun.

We met in a field in the middle of the Okeefenokee Chemical Weapons Test Range, a hundred yards from a rusty corrugated steel Quonset known as “The Barn.” The Barn was the only above-ground structure within the perimeter fence. The Quonset had a sliding door at one end that looked to be made of weathered wooden planks, and was big enough to admit a taxiing tilt-wing, an eighteen-wheeler, or an ambling alien the size of a bus. Between the Quonset and the main gate wound eleven miles of roads that, if one thought about it, were better paved and maintained than they needed to be to provide access to a rusty tool shed.

Eighty feet beneath the Quonset, at the base of an elevator shaft, a subterranean tunnel complex radiated out like an octopus. The octopus was home to one hundred fifty troglodyte xenobiology nerds, who rotated in and out by bus in monthly shifts of seventy-five nerds per, and all the equipment they thought they needed to understand Mort. The nerds were kept happy and quiet by the opportunity to study the sole other intelligent species in the known universe, which species communicated telepathically in real time across distances that light traversed only over years. Also by a cafeteria with a passable wine list.

The whole operation was overdesigned, secret to the point of paranoia, and the work it did had the potential to change history. In other words, it was pure Howard Hibble.

Howard, Kit and I ate at a folding table covered with a red-checked cloth, beneath a four-posted canopy that shaded us from a warm sun. We dined on cold chicken, bone-in, served with a drinkable Chablis.

Howard’s third lunch guest lounged sixty feet from us, curled in the grass and mercifully downwind. Mort dined on a half-ton, three-week-old woog haunch, also bone-in, served with a wading pool of pH-optimized water. The afternoon’s calm was broken only by the drone of flies that roiled around Mort’s lunch like an impending thunderstorm.

Howard set his napkin on the tablecloth as he waved fingers at the three of us. “You all finish your meals. I’ll just get started.”

Mort twisted a tibia as long as a fence post in his forepaws. The bone creaked, then split lengthwise with a crack like a discharged rifle, and rotted marrow blebs exploded in my direction like a claymore had detonated. Mort cocked his head and scraped the bone’s exposed interior with one tusk.

I set down my drumstick. “S’okay. I’m done.”

Howard said, “I wanted to tell you three about this before I address the staff. You deserve to hear the truth in person.”

At the word “truth,” Kit looked across the table at me, eyes wide above her wine glass. Hair rose on my neck.

They say that on the first day of kindergarten, Howard Hibble’s teacher asked him “How are you today, Howard?” and he answered, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Maybe Howard was born a secretive paranoid. Maybe the War made him one. Regardless, Howard Hibble gave up the truth like Leonidas gave up Thermopylae.

Howard said, “We’re shutting The Barn down.”

Kit coughed Chablis back into her glass. “What?”

“Without proximity to Mort, the program can be conducted cheaper in a conventional setting.”

I looked over at Mort, who was washing down marrow with fifty gallons of water, and pointed. “Proximity? He’s right over there.”

“It will soon be my time, Jazen.” The first time a grezzen speaks into your head while his mouth is full, he seems like an eleven-ton ventriloquist. But you get used to it.

“Ah.” I nodded.

Mort’s “time” was the onset of puberty.

Grezzen were apex predators so perfectly adapted that they dominated their world with no need for tools or cooperation, no need to exercise the breadth and depth of intelligence with which nature had blessed them. They communicated across vast distances, joined only mentally, as an anarchy comprised of mother-and-child absolute matriarchies. If the grezzen’s place in its own ecosystem resembled the place of any animal on Earth in ours, grezzen resembled killer whales. But the two species were hardly identical.

Once weaned, grezzen lived physically isolated from one another, but socially connected by telepathy, and a mother parented her offspring from a distance throughout her life.

Physical contact occurred only once in an adult’s lifetime, during each male’s sole period of rut. The female who chose to be impregnated by him mated again only in the rare instance that her single offspring failed to survive to adulthood.

In most ecosystems, zero-sum procreation is a ticket to extinction. Babies get sick or get eaten, so a successful species is
ipso facto
a prolific species. But the grezz were so physically and mentally advantaged that their species dominated Dead End for thirty million years without the need to bear spares in addition to heirs.

Grezzen society, if you could call it that, was perhaps as purely libertarian as any society that had ever been tried, much less any that had flourished for thirty million years. If grezz drove cars, grezz would not only let grezz drive drunk, they would defend to the death their cousins’ right to do so.

But as the only grezzen who had ever crossed the interplanetary road to see what was on the other side, Mort had to be feeling some telepathic heat from his cousins to come home and get busy.

As a fellow bachelor, I could imagine how bad Mort needed a date when he was only going to have one. Ever. But to maintain the ecological balance point, his race needed him to get laid even more than he did.

Kit cocked her head at Howard. “So you’re sending Mort home? Releasing a high-value asset? Howard, that’s uncharacteristically compassionate of you.”

It was. We were in the middle of a Cold War. If this were the first Cold War, Americans versus Russians, a ruthless spymaster like Howard would have ignored ecological balance. He would simply have ordered his most voluptuous female agent to seduce the horny high-value asset and then satisfy the asset’s most twisted and lustful fantasies for as long as necessary.

Mort thought, “You are correct, Kit. The true reasons the nerds are repatriating me are that I have become too costly to support here, and they no longer find me useful.”

Howard tried to look hurt and failed. “Mort could’ve gone home any time he chose. He finds us as interesting as we find him.”

Mort thought, “That is true, Howard.”

It
was
true. Mort fancied himself a three-eyed Jane Goodall, enduring privation to study the cultural interactions of a lesser species on its home turf.

Howard shrugged. “But the decision
was
multifaceted.” Meaning Mort was right. Not even Howard bothered trying to lie to a mind reader.

Kit nodded like a politician’s daughter. “New administration. New priorities.” Then she shook her head, like a cold warrior. “But Howard, you can’t let Mort go. He reads minds! In real time. From light years away. He can eavesdrop on anybody.”

Howard shook his own head. “No. He can eavesdrop on
everybody
. That’s the problem. TMI. It’s been the problem.”

Now it was my turn to nod.

TMI—too much information—had been the American intelligence community’s problem ever since the early years of the last century. In those days, computing power was increasing exponentially year over year, and virtually all human information not locked in someone’s head was adrift somewhere in the electronic ether. Every shared secret was available somewhere.

True, the spooks in those days might have had to sift a thousand billion grocery lists and decrypt a thousand million love poems to find it. But eventually the Trueborn spooks built enough computers to know all the shared secrets they wanted to know.

Of course, being spooks, they still wanted to know everybody’s
un
shared secrets, too. That was where Mort was supposed to come in. He could read any human mind, anywhere in this universe, in real time. He could zero in on a mind to which he was physically close, as he had on John Buford’s when John was reading about Cutler’s pardon.

Even from a distance—a serious distance—Mort could also recognize minds with which he became familiar. For example, Mort and I had survived dangers together, in a boy-and-his-monster sort of way. So Mort could pick me out of a crowd from light years away, given time.

But the Jazen-Mort bond was nothing compared to the Kit-Mort love-in. Since the day Mort’s mother had died, Mort had been able to converse with Kit across a galaxy as though the pair of them had their heads together across a two-top bar table. The nerds ascribed their relationship to “transuniversal transparency optimized by maternal bond transference.”

Maybe I was vaguely jealous that my brawny pal liked my girlfriend best. At least I didn’t have to worry that he would wind up between the sheets with her.

Mort’s coziness with Kit and with me aside, there were fifty billion other human minds spread across five hundred planets. Each of those fifty billion minds thought, dreamed, fantasized, truthed, and lied throughout every single day. But there was just one of Mort. Mort, or even a thousand Morts, could never distill that much information into usable intelligence.

This biologic bottleneck had always been apparent to Howard and his nerds. OCWTR was never intended to enslave, or to enlist, or to breed grezzen as full-time mind readers, like some gargantuan K-9 Corps. Howard’s spooks planned to study Mort, then duplicate artificially what nature had created in him.

The spooks’ humanitarian goal was to allow mankind to communicate across space in real time, rather than by the current best alternative method. That alternative method was sending messages physically, aboard starships, like mechanical carrier pigeons. Starships jumped across narrow places where the fabric of folded space bent back upon itself. The mile-long carrier pigeons traveled distances in weeks or months that took light, or anything else that traveled as fast as light, notably radio waves, which traveled the long way round, years or centuries.

But Mort could read a mind light years away as fast as if it were across the room. Of course, since nothing in this universe could travel faster than light, the nerds assumed grezzen had a way to communicate by accessing a universe next door to this one. But no matter how Mort did it, he did it. So the nerds wanted to do it, too.

Of course, the nerds’ objective wasn’t just faster birthday cards and junk mail. They had a less benign goal, too. Eventually, whatever made Mort tick would allow them to build a vast bank of mind-reading computers. The mind-readers would feed all the information they discovered into an equally vast bank of computers that would analyze it.

The good guys would finally know everything. The bad guys would finally be cooked. And nobody would ever abuse the system. Of course.

Howard frowned. “We do think we’ve learned about all we can from Mort. But we’re years away from any sort of practical application. We can’t read anybody’s mind.”

That was a relief, considering the fantasy I was just having, with me in the role of the lustful high-value asset and Kit in the role of the voluptuous and compliant female agent.

Kit’s eyes lit. “So Jazen and I can go back to field work?”

No, that wasn’t my fantasy.

For the last eight months, Case Officer Team Seventy-one, which was Colonel Catherine Trentin-Born and her junior case officer, which was me, had been detached from field work. “Field Work” was a euphemism for nasty things done unattributably in places where we weren’t supposed to be. In lieu of field work, we were attached for organizational and pay purposes to the OCWTR task force, which in turn was funded within black-ops line item 776312 of the American Defense Budget, most of which budget was these days expended in support of the activities of the Human Union.

What that meant to anyone who lodged a Freedom of Information Act request was absolutely nothing, which was the idea.

What that meant to OCWTR’s nerds was that Mort had the only two humans who he trusted nearby. With Kit and me figuratively holding his paw, he would allow the nerds to poke and prod him until they unlocked the physiologic secrets of grezzen telepathy.

What that meant to Kit was an annoying delay in prosecuting Cold War II, which she believed she was obliged to do single-handed if the chain of command would just stand aside.

What that meant to me was a vacation from sleeping on the ground in places where I wasn’t supposed to be that were too hot, too cold, too wet or too malarial, and from getting shot, or at least shot at, regularly. And I still got to wake up alongside the loveliest woman in the universe.

Howard answered Kit’s question with a frown. “Field work? Kit, the numbers haven’t improved.”

“The numbers” referred to case-officer pair survivability. For any given field operation, any given pair’s survivability averaged thirty-two percent. The odds were marginally improved for mixed-gender pairs like Kit and me. One theory that explained the improved odds was that het couples fit more plausible cover legends, so they got caught less. Another was that mixed-gender teams made sounder decisions, because they melded contrasting temperaments and viewpoints. For example, the spook shrinks judged Kit a risk taker, and me risk averse.

Kit raised her chin and crossed her arms. “Howard, the numbers don’t take into account the quality of the pair. We’ll be fine.”

Fine? I disagreed. American Trueborns like Kit believed that the future would always work out, because for them it always had. The rest of us believed the future would fuck us, because it always had. And the future usually met expectations.

As for the quality of the pair? Even if a case officer pair was Batgirl and Robin, the Joker was bound to turn up if you played the cards too long.

Kit wanted us to return to field work. I wanted us to live happily ever after, playing the high-value asset and the voluptuous agent often. What the hell, maybe even raise some little assets.

I squirmed in my chair, and at the motion Kit burned me with a look.