Breach the Hull Read online

  “How?”

  “By encrypting the spaces.”

  I knew the answer to the next question before I asked it. “If the encryption alphabet is absolutely random, which I assume it would have to be, the frequency count would be flat. Right?”

  “Yes. Given sufficient traffic, it would have to be.”

  “One more thing, Hutch. A sudden increase in traffic will alert anyone listening that something is happening even if he can’t read the text. How do you hide that?” “Easy. We transmit a continuous signal, twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes it’s traffic, sometimes it’s garbage. But you can’t tell the difference.” God have mercy on us, I thought. Poor Dickinson.

  We sat at a small corner table well away from the main dining area. I shivered in wet shoes and a damp sweater. A small candle guttered cheerfully in front of us. “Are we still talking about Procyon?” he asked.

  I nodded. “The same pattern was received twice, three years apart, prior to the Procyon reception.”

  “But that’s not possible.” Chaney leaned forward intently. “The computer would have matched them automatically. We’d have known.”

  “I don’t think so.” Half a dozen prosperous, overweight men in topcoats had pushed in and were jostling each other in the small entry. “The two hits were on different targets. They would have looked like an echo.”

  Chaney reached across the table and gripped my wrist, knocking over a cup. “Son

  of a bitch,” he said. “Are you suggesting somebody’s moving around out there?” “I don’t think Ed Dickinson had any doubts.”

  “Why would he keep it secret?”

  I’d placed the book on the table at my left hand. It rested there, its plastic cover reflecting the glittering red light of the candle. “Because they’re at war.” The color drained from Chaney’s face, and it took on a pallor that was almost ghastly in the lurid light.

  “He believed,” I continued, “he really believed that mind equates to morality, intelligence to compassion. And what did he find after a lifetime? A civilization that had conquered the stars, but not its own passions and stupidities.”

  A tall young waiter presented himself. We ordered port and pasta.

  “You don’t really know there’s a war going on out there,” Chaney objected.

  “Hostility, then. Secrecy on a massive scale, as this must be, has ominous implications. Dickinson would have saved us all with a vision of order and reason . . . ” The gray eyes met mine. They were filled with pain. Two adolescent girls in the next booth were giggling. The wine came.

  “What has The Decline and Fall to do with it?”

  “It became his Bible. He was chilled to the bone by it. You should read it, but with caution. It’s capable of strangling the soul. Dickinson was a rationalist. He rec-ognized the ultimate truth in the Roman tragedy: that once expansion has stopped, decay is constant and irreversible. Every failure of reason or virtue loses more ground.

  “I haven’t been able to find his book on Gibbon, but I know what he’ll say: that Gibbon was not writing only of the Romans, nor of the British of his own time. He was writing about us. Hutch, take a look around. Tell me we’re not sliding toward a dark age. Think how that knowledge must have affected him.”

  We drank silently for a few minutes. Time locked in place, and we sat unmoving, the world frozen around us.

  “Did I tell you,” I said at last, “that I found the reference for his inscription? He must have had great respect for you.” I opened the book to the conclusion, and turned it for him to read:

  The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws, and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of potherbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes.

  Chaney stared disconsolately at me. “It’s all so hard to believe.”

  “A man can survive a loss of faith in the Almighty,” I said, “provided he does not also lose faith in himself. That was Dickinson’s real tragedy. He came to believe exclusively in radiotelescopes, the way some people do in religions.”

  The food, when it came, went untasted. “What are you going to do, Harry?”

  “About the Procyon text? About the probability that we have quarrelsome neighbors? I’m not afraid of that kind of information; all it means is that where you find intelligence, you will probably find stupidity. Anyway, it’s time Dickinson got credit for his discovery.” And, I thought, maybe it’ll even mean a footnote for me.

  I lifted my glass in a mock toast, but Chaney did not respond. We faced each other in an uncomfortable tableau. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Thinking about Dick-inson?”

  “That too.” The candle glinted in his eyes. “Harry, do you think they have a SETI project?”

  “Possibly. Why?”

  “I was wondering if your aliens know we’re here. This restaurant isn’t much further from Sirius than Procyon is. Maybe you better eat up.”

  ________________

  First published in Asimov’s, April 1983. Copyright 1996 Cryptic, Inc.

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  PETER POWER ARMOR

  John C. Wright

  LET ME TELL YOU A STORY ABOUT A GIRL NAMED ETHNE. I DIDN’T LIKE HER WHEN I FIRST met her, but all that is changed now.

  I found the power-armor I used to wear as a child in the wall-space behind my parent’s attic, behind a door paneled to look like part of the wainscoting. No dust disturbed this miniature clean-room; no looters had found it here, not in all the years. The fact that smooth white light filled the room when the silent door opened filled me with a premonition. I stepped inside and saw, (as I had not dared hope) that an umbilicus connected the little suit to sockets in the wall. The energy-box above the socket was stamped with three black triangles in a yellow circle. Behind me, in the main attic space, I could hear the little brat named Ethne grunt a little high-pitched grunt as she picked up a crow-bar. A moment later there was a shivering crash as she tossed it through one of the living stain-glassed dormer win-dows. I remembered the day Mother had purchased those windows, grown one mol-ecule at a time by a nano-mathematician artist. Those had been days of sunshine, and even the upper windows no one saw had been works of fine art, charged with life. You see, Ethne was a naughty, silly girl. It is really not her fault. She was raised to be that way.

  “Darling,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Don’t kill the windows. They are special. They were bulletproof, once, back before their cohesion faded. They’re antiques, and cannot reproduce. It makes them the last of their kind.”

  Ethne was bright enough to ask a question: “So what? What makes them special?” It is always good to ask questions.

  I said gently: “You see how the old building had their windows facing outward?

  Not like modern buildings. Remember your school? All the windows only face inside, toward the courtyard. And your dorm is the same way, isn’t it? You can tell a lot a about a culture by where they put their windows.”

  The courtyard-based construction of modern buildings reminds me of European designs. I don’t really like Europe.

  I heard little Ethne whine to the matron: “Mother Hechler! Mr. Paine is trying to oppress me again!”

  It was not my real name. I always introduced myself as Thomas Paine, these days. No one ever caught the reference, not even people my age. The chestplate of the power-armor was set with large phosphorescent buttons, with little cartoon-character faces to indicate the function options. I hit the Peter Power-Armor Power-on Pumpkin with my thumb. There was a goo-ga flourish of toy trumpet noise, a whisper of servomotors, and the suit stood up. I know Ethne did not know her parents. I am guessing the age at about seven years old. Her mother, her real mother, had been a lovely, lively, caring woman, smart as a devil and with a sense of humor to match. That sense of humor managed to get her declared an unfit parent.

  The father, Geoffrey, had been an environmental engineer. Very bright man. He had written papers, back before the Diebac
ks, questioning whether the trends showed a General Global Warming or a General Cooling. Those papers had cropped up again after Ethne was born. Geoffrey had been sterilized by the committee in charge of the First Redistribution; they believed in Global Warming. He had been made to vanish by the Second. They believed in Cooling.

  And little Ethne was just not as bright as Geoffrey’s daughter should have been. I knew the ugly reason why.

  The helmet came only about to my waist, even when the armor was upright on its stubby legs. It looked like a miniature King-Arthur’s knight, although I remember other attachments could make it look like a deep-sea diver’s suit or a fireman. The smart-metal was made of a flex of microscopic interlocking strands, and I saw telescopic segments at the limb-joints and breastplate-seams, enabling the suit to expand to fit a growing child.

  I heard, behind and below me, a soggy, heavy noise as the stairs whined under the bulk of Mrs. Hechler’s footsteps. I heard her pant. She said, “Ethne!” she was calling up the stairs. Hechler was too inert, it seemed, to make it all the way. “Stop familiarizing with the People’s Helpers. You are to call him ‘Janitor’ or ‘Shit-sweeper.’ We don’t use his name, moppet: it makes them uppity.”

  Tiny xylophone-notes came from inside the helmet as the suit ran through its sys-tems check. I could see the colors of a puppet-show reflected backward in the face-plate during the warm-up, as big-eyed rabbits and ducks in sailor suits pantomimed out safety messages as each suit function went through its automatic check.

  It may seem absurd, but tears came to my eyes when Battery Bunny turned into a skeleton-silhouette surrounded by twinkling lightning-bolts above the words: KEEP FINGERS CLEAR OF THE RECHARGE SOCKET! Battery Bunny had once been a best playmate of mine, since I had had no real, non-virtual friends.

  (Billy Worthemer was a real friend of mine. A real flesh and blood boy. Lots of blood. I will tell you about him if I have time. But, after Billy, no, after that I had had no real friends, except for Bunny. Well, maybe one.) Good old loyal bunny. How could I have forgotten him?

  I wiped my eyes. At the same time, to cover the xylophone-noise of the suit-check, I was saying loudly: “Matron Hechler! The student-child is destroying property of the state! This may lead to bad habits later!”

  Another soggy noise as Hechler climbed another step. She wheezed a moment, then said, “Let her have her fun. This stuff is from the Time of Greed. It’s worthless. Go ahead, Ethne.”

  I heard a dull giggle, and then more smashing.

  I twisted and removed the adult-override key from the armor’s chestplate, picked up the remote handset from the socket, and thumbed the test button on the mi-crowave relay. The LED lit up. I tapped my fingers on the handset and the little ar-mored suit did a silent little jig of joy. Such elegant controls! Such a well-made machine!

  Another button made Mr. Don’t-Point-Me come out of his holster. I had forgotten, or I never knew, that the holster had a child-safety relay on it, which made an alarm-noise blatt from the handset. With one thumb I pushed the suppress button on the handset to kill the noise. With the other I reached for the larger, colored controls on the chestplate. I remembered that the Deadly Donkey button armed the lethal rounds. I hit Sleepy Sancho Pancake, and watched as a clip of narcoleptic darts was jacked into the chamber. The little armor twirled the gun on its gauntlet-finger and slid Mr. Don’t-Point-Me back into the holster. I had programmed that little flourish in, when I was a child. I had seen Laser Cowboy do it on STV, and I had practiced and practiced in front of a mirror. That was my hand motion.

  Hechler had heard the alarm. Her voice came nearer, sounding angry, “What’s that noise?”

  I said in a loud happy voice, “Ethne! Come quick!”

  Ethne, sullenly, “What . . . ?! Is a machine? They’re bad for you.”

  “Never mind,” I called out. I heard her little footsteps coming closer. “I’ll just keep it all for myself.”

  Ethne’s footsteps sped up. Any adult who cannot outwit a seven-year-old should turn in his license.

  I also heard the Matron’s voice coming at a lumbering trot. Stairs squealed, and then the attic floorboards protested. “What—what’s that light up there!” I had to get her to come up. I said loudly, “It should be obvious what it is, you soggy old fart! I’ve found a working light. Don’t you have eyes? I must say that I am continually amazed, now that each village and hamlet is divided into work zones and care zones for the communal raising and nurture of children, at the consistently low quality of the substitute parents involved.”

  Ethne was in the doorway, now. Her eyes grew big and round. I remember days when children often had such looks on their faces, at birthday parties, or at Christmas. Back when we had Christmas.

  I took Ethne by the shoulder and guided her toward the armor. My other hand pushed the introduction menu sequence with the handset. The armor turned to-ward Ethne, evidently recognizing her as having the infrared profile and radar-sil-houette of a child. It performed a perfect courtly bow toward her. She watched in awe as it took her hand and bent over it, pretending to kiss it.

  And the little brat (her brattyness forgotten, or on hold) actually blushed and looked pleased, a modest princess. She was utterly charmed. I had to smile. I continued talking the way I used to talk, in a loud voice, “But we cannot have a society where all child-rearing is public, without expecting it to end up in the same state as our public bathrooms. And what kind of low, common, ignorant folk will volunteer to serve as wardens for children not their own, whom they cannot adopt or make their own? Who would be willing to raise a child by rulebook? By committee? I suspect those who cannot get jobs as prison guards . . . ”

  But that was enough. Mrs. Hechler was here, red-faced, and angry enough that she had forgotten to use her radio-phone to call Jerry. Jerry, downstairs, was not a Regulator; he was an Infant Proctor, which was something between a Baby Sitter and the Bull. But I think he was packing heat.

  Maybe she was too dumb to call him; too dumb to think I was dangerous. Or maybe her phone was broken again.

  Her eyes grew round when she saw the lights, the atomic-power symbol on the wall, the brass-and-gold little armored figure. I do not think she recognized what the armor was; I think she thought it was a statue or a toy or something.

  A woman raised in her generation, of course, could not understand the kind of folks people of my parent’s generation were.

  And so she stepped into the room. She did not know what kind of thing Peter was; or what kind of person I am.

  Let me explain it to you. I don’t know how much room is in the file: I’ll try to be brief. But I have to tell you the way it was.

  My dad was there the day the rules of war changed. He was about eight years old. He had climbed a tree, and found a little green-and-brown colored aerosol spray-can wedged into the branches, pointing over the sidewalk below. I remember him telling me how bright and sunny the day was, how the sidewalk sparkled, how the people looked so happy, so normal, when they walked by, walking dogs, carrying groceries, herding children, balancing schoolbooks on heads.

  Every time someone walked by, the little aerosol can button went down. Activated by a motion sensor. Dad put his hand in front of the nozzle, and felt a wet invisible spray touch his palm. He sniffed it; it was odorless. He wiped the sticky wetness off on the green-and-brown label of the can.

  His district was one of the few with a death toll under one hundred. A day or two later, a swarm of self-propelled smart-bullets, maybe launched from a passing crop-duster, maybe mortar-shot off the back of a flatbed truck, swept through the area, and homed in on everything which had been tagged by the invisible radio-active mist.

  One of the bullets struck the aerosol can, of course, so that no further tagging was done, and the second and third wave of smart-bullets which came the next day, and the next week, found no targets.

  Everyone who walked by on the sidewalk that day—Dad used to tell me their names, they were his neighbors and playmates�
�was gone.

  When I was young, and played with my Dad, he used to pretend to be Captain Hook. His prostethic was actually a complex thing, that could open and close almost like a pair of fingers. But it did look like a hook.

  The next generation of smart bullets were even smarter, smaller, and able to fly longer distances. With a shoulder-launched booster, a rifleman could throw a packet of smart bullets over the horizon.

  And warfare wasn’t warfare any more. No more gathering on battlefields, no more getting into big battleships, and steaming out to meet other battleships. No sir. Sol-diers traveled in pairs, not in platoons. One rifleman to launch the bullets. He would sit in a tree, or wearing a diving suit and lay on the bottom of a lake or something. His partner, the forward observer, would walk into town with a laser pencil. He would sit on a park bench and pretend to eat a submarine sandwich or something, or smoke a cigarette—which was legal, back then—and point the laser pencil at a passer-by. A bullet from out of the sky would drop down and hit the target. In a crowd, who would hear the noise? Maybe he’d get two or three, he’d pack up his sandwich, walk down the street, find another bench.

  You could launch smart bullets from a normal shotgun, or even a lead pipe. Heck, if you dropped one off a tall enough building, it could pick up enough speed for its lifting surfaces to get purchase, reach terminal velocity, and if your target was anywhere below the building, the bullet could angle over. There wouldn’t even be the sound of a gunshot. Same thing dropping a boxful from a cropduster.