Orphan's Triumph

Nat leaned forward on his elbows. “I’m not your shrink. I’m not your commanding officer anymore. But I am your friend. Jason, you’re disconnected from the people you love. Worse, you’re uncertain whether they love you back.”

I spread my palms. “Jude’s been behind the new Iron Curtain. Mimi’s duty stations and mine have been light- years apart, and the human race is at war for its survival. What did you expect me to do, desert?”

Nat said, “No. But maybe you could add a functional relationship to soothe the pain of the dysfunctional ones.”

A female orderly, blonde and smiling, stepped onto the porch with a decanter and refilled our glasses.

I watched her walk away. “You mean proposition cocktail waitresses half my age?”

“I’m serious. There’s plenty you can do. Socialize more.”

“Away from Earth I outrank my potential buddies by a couple of stars, sir.” I turned to President Irons. “You know the problem. You can’t even get people you’ve known for years to stop calling you Madame President. Poker’s no fun when the other guys let you win. And Ord’s idea of guys’ night out is ironing his battle dress uniforms.”

A dachshund, Fritz the Fourth, if I remembered the press releases, waddled onto the porch and got scooped onto the former presidential lap. Maggie scratched her dog’s ear. “Animal companion holistic therapy’s been accepted practice for decades. Centuries, really.”

I rolled my eyes. “A pet? There are no pugs in space. The poop issues alone-”

Nat said softly, “You mothballed Jeeb after Second Mousetrap, didn’t you?”

My chest softened inside. “He’s so old that maintenance cost would have been prohibitive, outworld.”

Jeeb was a four-decade-old, J-series Tactical Observation Transport, a turkey-sized, six-legged mechanical flying cockroach. Nobody remembers brain-linked spy TOTs like Jeeb for two reasons. First, faster, smaller, stealthier, cheaper Autonomous Mechanicals obsoleted them by 2050. Second, the Department of Defense quietly swept everything about brain-link technology under the rug a decade after that.

The combat intel value of brain-linking had been that instructions passed from wrangler to ’bot, and intercepted communications and images passed back from ’bot to wrangler, immune to interception and jamming, and at least as fast as the speed of light.

The mutual link was so strong and transparent that TOTs, though the cyberneticists deny it to this day, permanently imprinted the personalities of their wranglers. But if combat or, for that matter, a bus wreck killed the wrangler or destroyed the TOT, the surviving partner effectively experienced its own death. The few wranglers who didn’t suicide lived out their days as vegetative guests of the Veterans Administration. Surviving TOTs just got scrapped.

So, by dint of a Department of Defense salvage title, I “adopted” Jeeb when he was orphaned by the death of his wrangler, and my friend, at the Battle of Ganymede.

Nat snorted into his bourbon until it bubbled. “Expense, my ass. All you do is bank your paycheck, anyway. Dust the little rascal off and take him with you.”

I frowned. “If I agree to do this, can I finish my bourbon?” It wasn’t really a question. A former president and a former four-star were accustomed to having their “suggestions” followed. Besides, I missed the little roach.

Maggie actually had the tilt-wing make an intermediate stop on its way to deliver me to New York, at the storage unit complex where I kept my Earthside worldly goods. The night ’bot didn’t know what to make of a visitor who didn’t enter through the main gate, but my ID checked out. Twenty minutes later, the ’bot tracked the tilt-wing as it took off, now laden with the crate within which nestled the night ’bot’s elderly, distant relative, plus spares and diagnostic ’Puter.

I sat in the tilt-wing’s presidential-purple upholstered passenger compartment, staring at the crate. My reunion with Jeeb would require no more than unpacking baggage.

I stared into the darkness as the tilt-wing bore me north. The reunion that awaited me in an hour, and the baggage, would be more complex.

TWENTY-ONE

IN MY LIFE, I’ve flown into many cities at night. Into Lhasa glowing under a Himalayan full moon. Into Marinus, its weapons forges painting drifting clouds red, in a two-mooned sky. Into Paris, sprawled like a glittering tapestry across the Seine. There are bigger cities. There are prettier cities. There are certainly friendlier cities. But no city in this galaxy quickens my heart like the boil of lights that is New York.

The tilt-wing banked above the East River ’s silver ribbon, then feathered down onto the pad atop the shoreward tower of the United Nations-Human Union complex.

The old UN Tower’s bustle made it glow like a Wheaties box, but the Human Union Tower stood dark, except for marker lights flashing on its roof pad. A young woman in a powder blue uniform met the tilt-wing and escorted me to ground level.

I scuffed the elevator floor as we rode down. “Carpet’s like new.”

She smiled. “Only the bottom three floors of this tower are occupied.”

The Human Union Tower replicated its United Nations twin in size and in antique, Atomic Age slab architecture.

It sounded inadequate that the diplomatic center of fourteen planets could be as small as the diplomatic center of just one. But most of the union’s populations, descended from Earthborn humans discarded by the Slugs, were preindustrial at best and Neolithic at worst. Earth sugar-daddyed the baby union the way the United States had the United Nations a century ago.

My guide led me across the Human Union Tower ’s lobby, our footsteps echoing on marble, and out onto the plaza that overlooked the East River. Traffic rumbled beneath and around me, and beyond the police barricades that ringed the plaza, crowds buzzed.

My guide pointed at the full moon as a shadow eclipsed it. “You see the holos, but…”

Maybe Ganymede had been brought in at midnight to preserve its visual impact for the next day’s ceremony, but the buzz of the crowds beyond the barricades built like the roar of the monsoon cascading off the Tressel Barrens rainforest. New Yorkers have seen it all, but when they haven’t, they turn out like kids for a circus parade.

I stared up, where my guide pointed, and let my jaw drop. Seeing a cruiser in space provides no sense of scale. Ganymede’s royal drift to Earth marked the first time a cruiser had ever tested its structural strength against Earth-normal gravity, though the shipwrights and physicists had insisted for years that a vessel shielded and strong enough to transit a Temporal Fabric Insertion Point could certainly withstand one puny planet’s gravity.

When Ganymede’s hull fully eclipsed the moon, the assembled thousands gasped. When she dropped below the moon and settled noiselessly above the river, like a reeled-in parade balloon on Thanksgiving morning, they cheered.

Ganymede was a blindingly white cylinder that hovered, oblivious to gravity, like a spidery, disaerodynamic dirigible, so close above the East River ’s chop that water splashed her hull. Yet the observation blister on her nose’s centerline nearly touched the top of the ancient iron suspension tower of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, three hundred fifty feet above the waves. A New Yorker who wanted to travel from Ganymede’s tip to view the Cavorite baffles on her tail booms would have to walk a mile, twenty blocks, from Fifty-ninth Street south to Thirty-ninth Street.

My guide’s mouth hung open. “My. God.”

“Your tax dollars had more to do with it than He did.” According to Maggie Irons, one reason for this extravaganza was to show the public what it had been paying for. And also to demonstrate that moving production to Mousetrap would free up unimaginably large manufacturing capacity on Earth, capacity that could be reconfigured to produce necessities like sports electrics and beach hoverboards.

A City of New York fireboat, spraying water from its nozzles in hundred-foot arcs, skittered out to Ganymede like a roach chasing a bus. Ganymede rolled silently around her axis, until the door of Bay Six out of thirty-six midship bays stabilized ten feet above the river, and then