The Fabulist

[Table of Contents]

“Some guy up there waving at us,” Abe commented.

I looked out the porthole; sure enough. Peering out the window of one of the observation decks. I could barely make him out. Square-shouldered, sidearm. He waved, then gave us a thumbs-up.

Play it safe, I thought, and saluted. A moment later he was out of sight.

I returned my attention to the docking procedures. Our computers had been chatting in their cursory but amiable fashion, trading little bundles of binary data, making sure everything was, so to speak, kosher.

It was, of course, and the docking lights pulsed ahead from red to yellow to an inviting green, two rows blinking along the short pier, and terminating at the currently sealed cargo bay door.

The whole process of maneuvering would take about five more minutes, and was entirely automated. But there were a few manual bells and whistles thrown in, just to give human beings a sense of involvement.

“Gideon Station Cargo Transfer Dock 7, Bay 18, confirm incoming, over.”

“Orbital tug Galilee, Gideon registered 7-18-Beta, incoming confirmed. Over.”

“Tug ID confirmed, Galilee, hazmat cargo status confirm, over.”

“Confirm hazmat status, Gideon, 85 percent nanotech, 25 percent of which is radioactive, 10 percent miscellaneous radioactive, 5 percent chemical, all fully quarantined as per protocols A-17, 24 and 37-A-dot-C-6.”

“Dot C-6? What the hell kind of jumping bugs you got on there?”

“Don’t be profane,” I said, “they’re irradiated bugs, and they may in fact get very jumpy if we’re not careful.”

“Nasty batch, Hank, I thought you retired. Seems instead you been demoted.”

“I am retired. Almost. This is my last run, believe it or not. Most of it’s from New Mexico. Santa Fe, plus some leftovers from Baton Rouge and Hanford. They even sent along a couple specialists to look after containment integrity.”

“That’s gotta be hot,” he said. “Goddamn, I hate this shit.”

“Orson!” I said. “Don’t be impious. Someone may be listening.”

“Not at this hour.”

“Especially at this hour. You been watching the news?”

“Yeah, some kind of action going on. Same as always.”

“They say it’s the biggest Godless operation since the Cheyenne Freehold.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That’s something, I guess.”

“Well, so pay attention, that’s all. And watch your impieties.”

He nodded, then, “Otherwise, anything about this haul I should know about?”

“No,” I lied. “Just don’t tip the bins, and let the techs handle the rest.”

He threw his hands up. “I ain’t touchin’ ‘em,” he said.

He scrutinized something offscreen for a moment.

“Abraham Rudolph Williams, Webster David Theodore, hazmat techs first class,” he muttered, then looked back at me. “Nice guys?”

“Seem alright,” I allowed. “Abe had me in checkmate in about 20 minutes on the way over.”

“Hah! Faster than me! I wanna meet this feller.”

“He’s all yours,” I said, and then there was a little burst of static over the comlink, and Orson was frowning.

“Something wrong with these profiles,” he said, and it was one of those moments in the life of a skeptic when one’s prayers are deeply heartfelt.

Orson tapped at an unseen keyboard, and the furrow in his brow deepened, and I wondered about the self-confirming software infection, and if it really was as airtight as Central had promised.

Theoretically, it should have already updated Gideon’s intranet with Abe and Theo’s forged Judiciary idents. It was supposed to be fast and foolproof. Our hackers were supposed to be better than theirs.

“Wasn’t matching up,” he said, “but it seems fine now.” He smiled. “Computers.”

“Maybe you should run a diagnostic, just in case … ”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s fine,” he said, still smiling. “So, is this it? Are you done? They got any more sludge for you? No rest for the wicked.”

“All I gotta do is park this thing,” I said, truthful at last. “I’m done. And I’m really looking forward to hitting the sheets.”

“No time for a quick game?”

“Orson, it’s one in the morning!”

“Hope springs eternal. Alright. So, what happens next?”

I sat back, and it was my turn to smile.

“I’m going to Mars. Tomorrow. On that convoy.”

I jerked my thumb in the general direction of the transport fleet in drydock all around us.

He whistled. “No foolin’? Mars!” His eyes sparkled. “How’d you get a ticket?”

“Scrimped and saved, you know. I’m an old man, but even if they did cut my pension, I’ve been socking it away for a while now. Got a little plot on Mount Rehoboth. Sunward, under the Negev II dome. I’ll show you a 3V. It’s a package deal. I’m buying into a co-op. It’ll pay for itself in a couple years, and maybe I’ll meet a nice girl.”

“Lucky,” he said, chewing his lip. “Dang.”

“You can do it if you put your mind to it. Earth’s not getting any more hospitable, I don’t think.”

“No sir,” he said sadly. “Don’t reckon it is.”

He gazed at some horizon all his own, then snapped into focus.

“Aw heck,” and there were a few more clicks and bleeps. “Praise the Lord and welcome aboard,” he said.

“Praise the Lord,” I replied, and he winked, and the image blinked out.

There was a muffled thunk, and we were docked. I drifted around in my chair.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum were staring at me, jaws tight, and Dee’s forehead was beaded with sweat.

I took a breath, exhaled loudly. “This is it, boys. Good luck.”

Neither of them said a thing. Humorless fuckers.

Then again, who am I to judge? I just fly a tugboat. Covert’s a whole other ball of wax.

I tapped a key on the deck chair, there was an instant of atmospheric calibration, and the door on the little cabin slid into the wall.

The cargo bay was huge, maybe a hundred yards on a side, and all the same it was just an alcove off Gideon’s mammoth west transit hangar.

I grabbed my datapallette and stepped into the big room, the twins in tow. Orson was striding lightly towards us with that springy gait peculiar to low-gee environments.

“I turned the gravity down, just to go easy on the cargo,” he said, suddenly among us. “Hank,” he smiled, clasping my hand, and then those of the two techs.

“Orson Bainbridge, pleased to meet you,” he said, “and that tall, skinny feller over there is Wally Krummholz, my assistant engineer, he’ll be the one actually running the board while we offload, lemme introduce you all …”

They wandered off and I wandered, myself, up to the big picture window.

The hangar was full of twinkling lights, and floating night-shift longshoremen in their zippy little conveyer pods, outfitting the interplanetary freighters with supplies and materiel for the Midway-Mars Convoy.

Outward-bound tomorrow night, 2300 hours.

“That’s gonna be one hell of a trip,” Orson said, abruptly beside me.

I started, then found myself grinning.

“You’re so damn impious!” I said.

We both got a long laugh out of that, then stood gazing out at the slo-mo, free-fall spectacle.

“There’s something funny about them tech boys,” he finally said, softly. “There was something with their profiles. But now I can’t find hide nor hair of it.”

“What are you talking about, Orson?”

“Don’t play coy, goddamn, Hank. We’ve worked this shift for five years. There’s something funny about them boys, and you’d be a fool not to know it. A fool, or maybe something else.”

He paused, and I considered the many types of interrogation the Jurists practiced upon betrayers of the Cross.

“Whatever you have going on, I want in. Don’t say a thing, just keep me in mind. You’re damn lucky it ain’t Childs or Wharton on duty tonight, they’d turn you in and feel shit-eating righteous about it.”

I took his advice and kept my mouth shut.

“You know, I woulda done it too, once. Turned your ass right in. But after the whole affair with Belle Purdy and her girls, goddamnit. I don’t know. I think those bastards can all go to hell.”

A klaxon blared suddenly, lights flashing yellow, and my ears twitched as the ponderous cargo bay doors slid open on faintly crackling a-grav runners.

“Just whatever happens, keep me in mind,” he said, and turned then, looking at me with an unnerving urgency.

“We’re always told the time of reckoning is imminent,” I said, so very carefully. “I think at that time, folks will know what’s right and wrong. And they’ll do the right thing. If that ain’t a ticket to heaven, I don’t know what is.”

He nodded, and then gazed at the tiny shuttles crisscrossing the hangar.

“That’s gonna be one hell of a trip,” he said. “Sure you don’t have time for one more game before you go?”

I sighed. “You win. 1500 hours at the Apple Cart.”

“Deal! Let’s see how the boys are doing.”

We made our way across the gunmetal floor of the bay, up the utility ladder and at last to the control room, where the twins were working over the assistant engineer.

“Most of it’s from Santa Fe,” Abe was saying. “We tow it out on a solar intercept trajectory and off it goes. But some of it they want out at Elysia for testing. Nanobots.”

Krummholz made a face.

“Some of it’s hot, too,” Theo chimed in. “That’s why they bombed the place, to kill the bots, but apparently they didn’t kill all of them.”

“Didn’t kill,” the assistant engineer said, uncomprehending.

“No, they’re some sort of rapid-adapting form. The radiation has them subdued, but they’re maintaining structural integrity. Boss thinks it could be trouble if they do adapt.”

Krummholz yelped. “For God’s sake!”

“Don’t worry, they’re in a deep freeze. Liquid nitrogen.”

“But if they’re fast adapting …”

“I guess they have this new containment field,” Abe said, shrugging. “Anyway, they’ve been quiet so far. See for yourself.”

He tossed a memchip over to Krummholz, who dutifully plugged it into his dp.

The display blinked and he scrutinized the scrolling text, and the insidious little virus fragments overran the Gideon datastream, triggering self-updating subroutines that corrected the record re: the fictitious Elysian mission.

“Well, I wish they’d of told me, for crying out loud.” He gazed unhappily at the readout.

“At least it ain’t sticking around,” said Orson. “Let’s get ‘em offloaded and on their way. Abe, I hear you play a mean game of chess.”

And they were off, pushing buttons and pulling levers, and with rails and cables and servobot operators began transferring all the freight train container cars full of books, books, books — acres and tons of volumes, hardbound, paperback, dusty, slipcovered, smelling of age and vaulted old buildings.

Oh yes, and fire.

So many of them must have smelled of fire.

I remembered it all, of course. The Burning. In my hometown of Madison they burned the library at night, and then went house to house, bringing in the sheaves.

Threw all the books in a pile in the grassy quadrant near the statehouse and sprayed them with jellied gasoline. You could see the glow for miles. From my bedroom window, C.S. Lewis and the Brothers Grimm hidden under my floorboards. It smelled of smoke for weeks.

These were the lucky ones, somehow preserved through the decades that followed. Though we had a ways to go.

Operation Alexandria. Who thought that up? An outrageous gambit. But many a museum’s worth had somehow been rescued from the Judiciary, from their so-called, God-damned Tribs!

And now this. The biggest and the last load I’d ever run.

I want to see it. I can’t wait.

Alexandria. Just to walk its corridors, and browse its shelves, and sit at its long quiet tables, reading all those beautiful, banned, burned books.

“Good night,” I called, “God bless.”

And they turned and waved. Good night, Gideon. Good night.

And tomorrow, to the Kingdom.

Next: The Separation — Chapter Six

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson