Aces High Read online

  Unto the Sixth Generation

  by Walter Jon Williams

  Prologue

  HE WAS STILL SMOKING where the atmosphere had burned his flesh. Heated lifeblood was running out through his spiracles. He tried to close them, to hold onto the last of the liquid, but he had lost the capacity to control his respiration. His fluids had superheated during the descent and had blown out from the diaphragms like steam from an exploding boiler.

  Lights strobed at him from the end of the alley. They dazzled his eyes. Hard sounds crackled in his ears. His blood was steaming on the concrete as it cooled.

  The Swarm Mother had detected his ship, had struck at him with a vast particle charge generated in the creature’s monstrous planetoid body. He had barely the opportunity to signal Jhubben on the planet’s surface before his ship’s chitin was torn apart. He’d been forced to seize the singularity shifter, his race’s experimental power source, and leap into the dark vacuum. But the shifter had been damaged in the attack and he had been unable to control it—he had burned on the way down.

  He tried to summon his concentration and grow new flesh, but failed. He realized that he was dying.

  It was necessary to stop the draining of his life. There was a metal container nearby, large, with a hinged lid. His body a flaring agony, he rolled across the damp surface of the concrete and hooked his one undamaged leg across the lid of the container. The leg was powerful, intended for leaping into the sky of his light-gravity world, and now it was his hope. He moved his weight against the oppressive gravity, rolling his body up the length of his leg. Outraged nerves wailed in his body. Fluid spattered the outside of the container.

  The metal rang as he fell inside. Substances crackled under him. He gazed up into a night that glowed with reflected infrared. There were bits of organic stuff here, crushed and pressed flat, with dyes pressed onto them in patterns. He seized them with his palps and cilia, tearing them into strips, pushing them against his leaking spiracles. Stopped the flow.

  Organic smells came to him. There had been life here, but it had died.

  He reached into his abdomen for his shifter, brought the device out, clasped it to his torn chest. If he could stop time for a while, he could heal. Then he would try to signal Jhubben, somehow. Perhaps, if the shifter wasn’t damaged too badly, he could make a short jump to Jhubben’s coordinates.

  The shifter hummed. Strange light displays, a side effect, flickered gently in the darkness of the container. Time passed.

  “So last night I got a call from my neighbor Sally.…”

  Dimly, from inside his time cocoon, he heard the sound of the voice. It echoed faintly inside his skull.

  “And Sally, she says, Hildy, she says, I just heard from my sister Margaret in California. You remember Margaret, she says. She went to school with you at St. Mary’s.”

  There was a thud against the metal near his auditory palps. A silhouette against the glowing night. Arms that reached for him.

  Agony returned. He cried out, a hiss. The touch climbed his body.

  “Sure I remember Margaret, I says. She was a grade behind. The sisters were always after her ’cause she was a gum-chewer.”

  Something was taking hold of his shifter. He clutched it against him, tried to protest.

  “It’s mine, bunky,” the voice said, fast and angry. “I saw it first.”

  He saw a face. Pale flesh smudged with dirt, bared teeth, gray cilia just hanging from beneath an inorganic extrusion.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I’m dying.”

  With a wrench the creature pulled the shifter from him. He screamed as the warmth left him, as he felt the slow, cold death return.

  “Shut up, there. It’s mine.”

  Pain began a slow throb through his body. “You don’t understand,” he said. “There is a Swarm Mother near your planet.”

  The voice droned. Things crackled and rang in the container. “So Margaret, Sally says, she married this engineer from Boeing. And they pull down fifty grand a year, at least. Vacations in Hawaii, in St. Thomas, for crissake.”

  “Please listen.” The pain was growing. He knew he had only a short time. “The Swarm Mother has already developed intelligence. She perceived that I had identified her, and struck at once.”

  “But she doesn’t have to deal with my family, Sally says. She’s over on the other goddamn coast, Sally says.”

  His body was weeping scarlet. “The next stage will be a first-generation Swarm. They will come to your planet soon, directed by the Swarm Mother. Please listen.”

  “So I got my mom onto the welfare and into this nice apartment, Sally says. But the welfare wants me and Margaret to give Mom an extra five dollars a month. And Margaret, she says, she doesn’t have the money. Things are expensive in California, she says.”

  “You are in terrible danger. Please listen.”

  Metal thudded again. The voice was growing fainter, as with distance. “So how easy are things here, Sally says. I got five kids and two cars and a mortgage, and Bill says things are a dead end at the agency.”

  “The Swarm. The Swarm. Tell Jhubben!”

  The other was gone, and he was dying. The stuff under him was soaking up his fluids. To breathe was an agony.

  “It is cold here,” he said. Tears came from the sky, ringing against metal. There was acid in the tears.

  Jube: Two

  IN THE ROOMING HOUSE on Eldridge, the tenants were having a little Christmas party, and Jube was dressed as Santa Claus. He was a little short for the part, and the Santas in the store windows seldom had tusks, but he had the ho-ho-ho down pat.

  The party was held in the living room on the first floor. It was early this year, because Mrs. Holland was flying out to Sacramento next week to spend the holidays with her grandson, and no one wanted to have the party without Mrs. Holland, who had lived in the building almost as long as Jube, and seen all of them through some rough times. Except for Father Fahey, the alcoholic Jesuit from the fifth floor, the tenants were all jokers, and none of them had a lot of money for Christmas gifts. So each of them bought one present, and all the gifts went into a big canvas mailbag, and it was Jube’s annual assignment to jumble them around and hand them out. He loved the job. Human patterns of gift giving were endlessly fascinating and someday he intended to write a study of the subject, as soon as he finished his treatise on human humor.

  He always started with Doughboy, who was huge and soft and mushroom white and lived with the black man they called Shiner in a second floor apartment. Doughboy outweighed Jube by a good hundred pounds, and he was so strong that he ripped the front door off its hinges at least once a year (Shiner always fixed it). Doughboy loved robots and dolls and toy trucks and plastic guns that made noises but he broke everything within days, and the toys he really loved he broke within hours.

  Jube had wrapped his present in silver foil, so he wouldn’t give it to anyone else by mistake. “Oh, boy,” Doughboy shouted when he’d ripped it open. He held it up for all of them to see. “A ray gun, oh boy, oh boy.” It was deep, translucent red-black, molded in lines that were smooth and sensual yet somehow disquieting, with a pencil-thin barrel. When his immense fingers wrapped around the grip and pointed it at Mrs. Holland, points of lights flickered deep inside, and Doughboy exclaimed in delight as the microcomputer corrected his aim.

  “That’s some toy,” Callie said. She was a petite, fastidious woman with four useless extra arms.

  “Ho ho ho,” Jube said. “He won’t be able to break it, either.” Doughboy squinted at Old Mister Cricket and pressed the firing stud, making loud sizzling noises through his teeth.

  Shiner laughed. “Bet he do.”

  “You’d lose,” Jube said. Ly’bahr alloy was dense and strong enough to withstand a small thermonuclear explosion. He’d worn the gun himself during his first year in New York, but the harness had chafed, and after a while it had just gotten to be too much of a nuisance. Of course, Jube had removed the power cell before wrapping t
he gift for Doughboy, and a Network disrupter wasn’t the sort of thing you could energize with a D battery.

  Someone shoved an eggnog, liberally laced with rum and nutmeg, into his hand. Jube took a healthy swallow, grinned with pleasure, and got on with passing out the presents. Callie went next, and drew a coupon book for the neighborhood movie house. Denton from the fourth floor got a woolen knit cap, which he dangled from the end of his antlers, provoking general laughter. Reginald, whom the neighborhood children called Potato-head (though not to his face), wound up with an electric razor; Shiner got a long multicolored scarf. They looked at each other, laughed, and swapped.

  He made his way around the room from person to person until everyone had a gift. The last present in the bag was usually his; this year, however, the bag was empty after Mrs. Holland pulled out her tickets to Cats. Jube was a little nonplussed. It must have showed on his face. There was laughter all around. “We didn’t forget about you, Walrus-man,” said Chucky, the spider-legged boy who ran messages down on Wall street. “This year we all chipped in, got you something special,” Shiner added.

  Mrs. Holland gave it to him. It was small, and store-wrapped. Jube opened it carefully. “A watch!”

  “That’s no watch, Walrus-man, that’s a chronometer!” Chucky said. “Self-winding, and waterproof and shockproof too.”

  “That there watch tell you the date, and the phases of moon, shit, it tell you everything except when your girlfriend be on the rag,” Shiner said.

  “Shiner!” Mrs. Holland said in indignation.

  “You’ve been wearing that Mickey Mouse watch for, well, for as long as I’ve known you,” Reginald said. “We all thought it was time you had something a little more modern.”

  It was a very expensive watch. So, of course, there was nothing to be done but wear it. Jube unstrapped Mickey from his thick wrist, and slid on the brand-new chronometer with its flex-metal band. He put his old watch very carefully atop the mantelpiece, out of the way, and then made a round of the crowded room, thanking each of them.

  Afterward, Old Mister Cricket rubbed his legs together to the tune of “Jingle Bells,” and Mrs. Holland served the turkey she’d won in the church raffle (Jube pushed his portion around sufficiently so that it looked as though he’d eaten some), and there was more eggnog to be drunk, and a card game after coffee, and when it got very late Jube told some of his jokes. Finally he figured it was time for him to retire; he’d given his helper the day off, so he’d have to open the stand himself bright and early the next morning. But when he stopped by the mantel on his way out, Mickey was gone. “My watch!” Jube exclaimed.

  “What you want with that old thing, now that you have the new one?” Callie asked him.

  “It has sentimental value,” Jube said.

  “I saw Doughboy playing with it,” Warts told him. “He likes Mickey Mouse.”

  Shiner had put Doughboy to bed hours ago. Jube had to go upstairs. They found the watch on Doughboy’s foot, and Shiner was very apologetic. “I think he broke it,” the old man said.

  “It’s very durable,” Jube said.

  “It’s been making a noise,” Shiner told him. “Buzzing away. Broke inside, I guess.”

  For a moment, Jube didn’t understand what he was talking about. Then dread replaced confusion. “Buzzing? How long—?”

  “A good while,” Shiner said as he handed back the watch. From inside the casing came a high, thin whine. “You okay?”

  Jube nodded. “Tired,” he said. “Merry Christmas.” And then he thumped downstairs as fast as he could go.

  In his cold, dim apartment, he hurried to the coal cellar. Within, sure enough, the communicator was glowing violet, Network color-code for extreme emergency. His hearts were in his mouth. How long? Hours, hours, and all the time he was partying. Jube felt sick. He dropped himself into his chair and keyed the console to play the message it had recorded.

  The holocube lit from within, in a haze of violet light. In the center was Ekkedme, his hind jumping-legs folded under him so he seemed almost to crouch. The Embe nymph was obviously in a state of great agitation; the cilia covering his face trembled as they tasted the air, and the palps atop his tiny head swiveled frenetically. As Jube watched, code-violet background gave way and the crowded interior of the singleship took form. “The Mother!” Ekkedme cried in the trade tongue, forcing the words through his spiracles in a wheezy Embe accent. The hologram shattered into static.

  When it reintegrated an instant later, the Embe lurched suddenly to one side, reached out with a stick-thin forelimb, and clutched a smooth black ball to the pale white fur of his chitinous chest. He started to say something, but behind him the wall of the singleship bulged inward with a hideous metallic screech, and then disintegrated entirely. Jube watched with horror as air, instruments, and Embe were sucked up toward the cold unwinking stars. Ekkedme slammed into a jagged bulkhead and slid higher, holding tight to the ball as his hind legs scrabbled for purchase. A swirl of light ran over the surface of the sphere, and then it seemed to expand. A swift black tide engulfed the Embe; when it receded, he was gone. Jube dared to breathe again.

  The transmission broke off abruptly an instant later.

  Jube punched for a replay, hoping he had missed something. He could only watch half of it. Then he got up, rushed to the toilet, and regurgitated an evening’s worth of eggnog.

  He was steadier when he returned. He had to think, had to take things calmly. Panic and guilt would get him nowhere. Even if he had been wearing the watch, he could never have gotten down here in time to take the call, and there was nothing he could have done anyway. Besides, Ekkedme had escaped with the singularity shifter, Jube had seen it with his own eyes, surely his colleague had gotten to safety …

  … only … if he had … where was he?

  Jube looked around slowly. The Embe certainly wasn’t here. But where else could he go? How long could he survive in this gravity? And what had happened up there in orbit?

  Grimly, he linked to the satellite scanners. There were six of them, sophisticated devices the size of golf balls, loaded with Rhindarian sensors. Ekkedme had used them to monitor weather patterns, military activity, and radio and television transmissions, but they had other uses as well. Jube swept the skies methodically for the singleship, but where it should have been he found only scattered debris.

  Suddenly Jube felt very much alone.

  Ekkedme had been … well, not a friend, not the way the humans upstairs were friends, not even as close as Chrysalis or Crabcakes, but … their species had little in common, really. Ekkedme was a strange solitary sort, enigmatic and uncommunicative; and twenty-three years in orbit, locked in the close confines of his singleship with nothing to occupy him but meditation and monitoring, had only made the nymph stranger still—but of course that was why he had been chosen out of all those the Master Trader might have pegged when the Opportunity came this way so long ago, in the human year 1952, to observe the results of the Takisian grand experiment.

  Unbidden, the memories came. The vast Network starship had circled the little green planet all that summer, finding little of interest. The native civilization was promising, but scarcely more advanced than it had been on their previous visit a few centuries earlier. And the vaunted Takisian virus, the wild card, seemed to have produced great numbers of freaks, cripples, and monsters. But the Master Trader liked to cover all bets, so when the Opportunity departed, it left behind two observers: the Embe in orbit, and a xenologist on the surface. It amused the Master Trader to hide his agent in plain sight, on the streets of the world’s greatest city. And for Jhubben, who had signed a lifetime service contract for the chance to travel to distant worlds, it was a rare chance to do important work.

  Still, until this moment there had always been the knowledge that someday the Opportunity would return, that someday he would know starflight again, and perhaps even return to the glaciers and ice cities of Glabber, beneath its wan red sun. The Embe nymph had never qu
ite been a friend, yet Ekkedme had been something just as important. They had shared a past. Only Jube had known the Embe was there watching, listening; only Ekkedme had known that Jube the Walrus, joker newsboy, was really Jhubben, a xenologist from Glabber. The nymph had been a link to his past, to his homeworld and his people, to the Opportunity and the Network itself, to its one-hundred-thirty-seven member species spread across a thousand-odd worlds.

  Jube looked at the new watch his friends had given him. It was past two. The message had been received just before eight. He had never used a singularity shifter himself—it was an Embe device, still experimental, powered by a mini–black hole and capable of functioning as a stasis field, a teleportation device, even a power source, but fantastically expensive, its secrets zealously guarded by the Network. He did not pretend to understand its workings, but it should have brought Ekkedme here, where Jhubben could help him. If the shifter had malfunctioned, the Embe might have teleported into airless space, or the bottom of the ocean, or … well, anywhere within range.

  He shook his massive head. What could he do? If Ekkedme was still alive, he would make his way here. Jube was powerless to help him. Meanwhile, he had a more urgent problem: something, or someone, had discovered, attacked, and destroyed the singleship. The humans had neither the technology nor the motives. Whoever was responsible was clearly no friend of the Network, and if they were aware of his existence, they might be coming after him as well. Jube found himself wishing that he hadn’t just given away his weapon to Doughboy.