’Neath Quicksilver’s Moon by Jaye Michael
Chapter Seventeen ― The Rising of the Moon

 

¿Hasta cuándo, oh simples, amarán la simpleza, Y los burladores se deleitarán en hacer burla, Y los necios aborrecerán el conocimiento?

— Proverbios 1:22

How long, O simpletons, will you love being simple-minded, and you tricksters delight in trickery, and you fools hate the truth?

— Proverbs 1:22

 

 

“Oh! then tell me, Shawn O’Ferrall,
Tell me why you hurry so?”
“Hush ma bouchal, hush and listen”,
And his cheeks were all a-glow.

John Keegan Casey
The Rising of the Moon

 

 

As they walked into the room, Jack could see someone writing at an enormous desk. At one corner of the desk, incongruous in an office setting, was a large durasteel wrecking bar. The writer’s head was down, but he looked familiar, and then he looked up at them. It was World Senator Ortíz, as might be expected, considering that Jorge Churco, the Senator’s chief of security, was right behind him as Jack came to a stop in front of the desk. There were no ‘courtesy’ chairs.

“Captain Webster! How good of you to come. I take it that my good friend Captain Churco has made it plain that we’re dealing with something very strange indeed.”

“He did, but I can’t say as how I was pleased about how he went about it,” Jack said sourly.

“I apologize on his behalf, but I was the one who suggested this course of action, because intellectual reasoning is worthless in a phenomenon such as this. You have to experience it as an alchemical gestalt, not science, the essential transmutation of the human flesh and mind into something more.”

Jack was instantly leery, because he’d run into a lot of nut-cases over the years, with similar stories. “What do you mean, ‘alchemical’?”

“Nothing religious, I assure you, Captain, nor anything supernatural, but rather something completely natural that we don’t completely understand, and I need your help to solve it.”

Jack narrowed his brow. “Solve it?”

He made a little moue of resigned impatience. “Of course, Jack. Hasn’t Jorge explained that I want you to work for me. You’re a detective, and I need you to solve both a crime and a problem. The first is, of course, what you’ve been working on all along, the mystery of the ‘Burlador.’

He stood up from his chair, picked up the wrecking bar, and held it out for his inspection. It looked like a wrecking bar. Then the Senator took the bar in both hands and bent it in two as easily as if it were a paperclip. He dropped it on the floor beside him with a loud clangor, exactly what it should have sounded like.

“The second is the problem,” the Senator continued. “I’d like you to tell me exactly how is it that both you and I have vastly speeded reaction times, and a certain … enhancement of our physical capabilities that reminds one of the oldest Superman comic book stories. I have a partial explanation for you, but not the whole, which still escapes me.”

Now Jack was interested. Most nut-cases either had all the answers, or had no answers at all, merely a pressing desire to convert you to their way of thinking. “Start with the partial explanation.”

The Senator seemed slightly surprised, but then nodded. “I like that in you, Jack. You accept the evidence of your senses, even when your mind might tell you that what you’ve seen and heard is ‘impossible.’ To make a long story shorter, you had a blood test some time back in which you discovered that you had the pseudo-spirochaetes virus/bacteria, whatever it is really, living inside you, as does most of the human population on Earth that we’ve actually tested, am I right?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah, I wasn’t too pleased, but the doctor said it was benign, and that I shouldn’t worry about it. I’m not too pleased that you somehow seem to have laid hands on my confidential medical records either.” He wasn’t surprised exactly. Senators did more-or-less what they wanted to do, but he was ticked off about it anyway.

“I apologize, Captain. The matter concerned me directly, both because I took a great deal of personal interest in the assassination of yet another Senator, along with many of his aides, but also because you were reported to have lost consciousness during some sort of explosive attack. Your doctor — or the doctor provided to you at least — was also quite concerned, and conducted extensive tests without finding anything wrong, which seemed odd to him, because an explosion powerful enough to cause unconsciousness should have caused at least some minor trauma to the brain.”

“That’s true enough,” Jack said with some hostility. “He kept me there in his ‘care’ — which might as well have been called ‘custody’ — for almost a week.”

“We know it well, Captain. The doctor prepared an extensive medical summary which was included in the case file, and the case file describing the attack on your investigatory party, and its sequelae, was provided to Captain Churco in the course of his official duties, which is how we first learned of your anomalous experience. I won’t pretend that I didn’t obtain your full medical record as well, because I did, but it actually didn’t give us much more to go on than the initial summary report. What it did have, however, was the results of blood and tissue analyses, which Captain Churco brought to my attention because they had remarkable similarities to my own, which I’m quite sure your quick mind has turned into certain knowledge of at least part of the contents of my own confidential medical file. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, after all.”

“So you stole the file?”

“In a word, Captain, yes, and with very good reason. You and I, Sir, are ‘freaks,’ and I have as little interest as you do in having this information brought to the attention of anyone at all outside this room, although there is one doctor, hopefully loyal to me, with exactly that knowledge, and the doctor who examined you might still be able to figure it out, if he managed to put two and two together, and if he still had the pertinent portions of his records. In fact, this particular portion of your medical record is far more private now than it was before, because an odd ‘accident’ occurred which happened to alter a few tiny portions of the doctor’s files, and every archival copy, to remove or alter any incriminating evidence which might later be used against you.”

“Wait a minute! That’s bullshit! You’re acting like I’m some sort of criminal!”

“Not at all, Captain, but you might be seen by some as a potential threat none-the-less, and would therefore fall within the purview of the old ‘homeland security’ laws, which were never repealed because, in more than three centuries, no one has ever dared to vote against ‘security.’

Jack was starting to realize …

The Senator continued, “Can you imagine what might happen if it became known that you were — and let’s use the alarming language that would likely appear in the gutter newsfeeds — infected with an alien virus which had taken over your body and altered it in such wise as to be no longer fully human?”

Jack didn’t have to think too long before he said, “Holy crap ….” His shoulders slumped as he thought about potential consequences.

“ ‘Holy crap’, indeed. In the best of all probable worlds, you’d be ‘quarantined’ until ‘higher authorities’ figured out what to do with you, which might well be never, authorities having a perfectly natural disinclination to do anything which might later be questioned by higher authorities. In the worst case, you’d be chopped into little tiny pieces ‘for study’ and the bulk of those pieces incinerated to prevent the spread of an alien epidemic. followed quickly by a national screening program to root out possible ‘Fifth Columnists’ which would eventually sweep me up along with you. What do the so-called ‘rights’ of what may, after all, be an alien invader matter in the context of the safety of the entire world. Even I would be unlikely to escape … consequences … should any hint of this become known, and thus I place myself in your power, almost as much as you are in mine.”

“How comforting,” Jack said dryly.

“Believe me, Captain, I mean it to be. As far as I know, we’re sui generis — on Earth, at least, and it would hardly do to alienate my only fellow. If nothing else, we can amuse ourselves by making little origami figures out of durasteel plate.”

“Okay, so we both have new hobby alternatives. What’s that got to do with my blood tests?”

Senator Ortíz smiled broadly. “Jack, you’re an absolute treasure. So few people in these degenerate times can follow a conversation through more than a dozen exchanges and still keep track of the thread. I blame the threedees, personally. People just sit and passive observe conversations without taking part in them.”

“Fifteen,” Jack observed. “Keeping track of interviews is my trade, as Heinrich Heine said about God. ‘Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son métier.’ ”

Ortíz laughed again, with much more merriment than before. “Jack, Jack, Jack,” he said, shaking his head in amusement. “ You are a treasure. Now that I’ve discovered you, what am I going to do with you?”

Jack shrugged. “Captain Churco here already likes me, and is something of a fortune teller, because he told me that my lifeline showed great things happening for me in the near future. Of course, that was before he shot me, not that I hold it against him, I can’t tell you how many friends I’ve shot along the way. These things happen in the very best of friendships.”

“They do indeed, Jack. They do indeed. Now, back to your question: You had blood drawn, and they told you that the pseudo-spirochaetes inside you most likely came from Quicksilver.”

Jack nodded again. He hated didactic exposition. “Yeah, please cut to the chase if you would.”

“Fair enough, although I had a wonderful lead-in all prepared.” He shrugged. “We’ve been importing food from Quicksilver for several hundred years, and we’ve been eating it. We’ve also been exporting it to other colonies, because Quicksilver is by far the most productive agriculturally, while most of the rest are primary sources or minerals and raw materials of various kinds, but their suns don’t produce the exact spectrum of light that Earth-based agriculture thrives upon, or have mineral deficits that make Earth agriculture less than optimal. In short, every colony has imported at least some Quicksilver agricultural products, and every human living, anywhere in what we like to call ‘known space’ harbors this organism in their body, as far as we can tell.”

“So? The doctors said it was benign, and caused no disease, and then trotted out a list of similar organisms that live inside or on us with no particular ill effects.”

“They may not have explained themselves clearly then, because many of the organisms are actually beneficial, like the bacteria on our skin that help us to fight off other, harmful organisms, or those in our gut that help us to digest the food we eat. And they certainly forgot to mention the mitochondria, the little cellular engines that supply the energy we need to be alive, which are almost certainly ancient bacteria, with their own DNA, that moved into our cells a very long time ago and made multi-cellular life possible.”

“Okay. I’ve heard about mitochondrial DNA, because we use it in the crime lab the same way we use regular DNA, to prove identity, but the mitochondrial DNA also lets us prove maternity, so when we collect evidence containing DNA, all we have to do is search the records until we find someone’s mother, or grandmother, or some female ancestor — as long as they have DNA on file — and then work forward again until we find a suspect or victim. Not everyone has a DNA sample on file, but almost everyone has a birth certificate.”

“Exactly. Well, under certain circumstances, the Quicksilver pseudo-spirochaete is able incorporate itself into our cell structure and nervous system as intimately as the mitochondria in every cell in our body. How much do you know about the Quicksilver psuedo-spirochaete?”

He hated people who abruptly changed the subject too. “It’s a superconductor. They use it to make fancy electronics.”

“It’s also a very strong nanofiber, so it not only allows us to make devices which are very efficient electrically, but are also very strong. Do you see where I’m going?”

It was the goddamned Socratic Method, that’s what it was, and he hated people who did that too. “So if this stuff got into our cells, it might make our physical structure hold together better.”

He nodded. “And augment the electrochemical connections in our nervous systems, which are fairly slow, with true electrical connections, which travel at the speed of light in a given medium. Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘a knee-jerk response’?”

He was doing it again. “Yeah, and the doctors test your reflexes by knocking your knees with a little rubber hammer.”

“What do you think the doctors would find if they knocked your knee with a little rubber hammer?”

He thought about that one, but not for very long. It wasn’t that the Socratic Method didn’t work, after all, but that it tended to edge past the line of legitimate pedagogy into smug condescension very quickly, and it was too damned slow. His brain worked a lot faster than most people could talk, much less pose cute little puzzles for him to figure out. “Okay. I get it, and just for the record, I find Socrates extremely annoying.”

Senator Ortíz laughed a lot like Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, the good version, with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet, not the endless remakes. “Well, well, well, I’ll cut to the chase then, as you so succinctly put it. You’ve been ‘speeded up,’ as have I, and we’re held together by stronger ‘glue,’ if you will, and and it has something to do with Quicksilver, but I haven’t a clue how it’s done, or why, and I want to know. It can’t be inherent in the pseudo-spirochaete itself, or everyone alive would have experienced the same effects. I suspect that Luz Calderón knows, but she’s given me to understand through subtle hints that she doesn’t want to discuss it on the ansible links, which I can understand, since the ansible is like an infinite party line where anyone can eavesdrop on our calls at any time, and the information can’t be encrypted, because it violates some obscure (at least to me) quantum mechanical rule.”

“Hold on, Senator. I’m not volunteering to spend the next sixty years in coldsleep to be your errand boy, and I can’t see how that’s going to help you, because you’re very likely to be dead by the time I get back, if you’ll pardon my saying so, along with my Mom, all my friends, and almost everything I like here on Earth.”

Senator Ortíz smiled with genial amiability and spread his hands wide, as if he were a conjurer and had just completed a fantastic feat of prestidigitation. “Now there, Jack, you’re in luck. Although this knowledge is not yet widely circulated, I have a large project in the works for a replacement stardrive capable of translight speeds. The drive has already been successfully demonstrated with robot vehicles and we’re in the process of constructing ten ‘spaceliners,’ as we’ve rather unimaginatively termed them, to take advantage of this drive and to make possible voyages between all colonies presently in existence with travel times as low as seven days to Gruntovoy — if for any strange reason you actually wanted to go there — and as high as three months to the Libra and Fourier colonies, approximately five hundred and twelve times the speed of light. Quicksilver, by regular transport, will be a little more than two weeks each way. They should be available for service in six months or so, could be a bit less, could be a bit more. Does that make the task sound more attractive? Let’s say, if one wanted to see someone special?” He smiled in genial approval, a benign San Antonio, casamentero divine.

It did. On his salary, he couldn’t even afford the ansible charges to call Barbara, and would have been a little afraid to do so even if he had all the money in the world. All they’d really shared was looks, and a few words while he was being poked and prodded back in Wyoming, and even those were translated through a threedee screen, so they were far more effectively separated from each other than if she’d been behind bars, even if these bars were invisible. There was a song that said, ‘If you want to know, if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss.’ Maybe when, or if, they met in person, she’d take one look and say, “I’m sorry, you … you looked so … different on the vid screen,” which depressed him. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound.

“Okay, I’m interested,” Jack admitted.

Now the Senator grinned like the host on a threedee quiz show. “You’re in luck again, Jack. Behind door number two is yet another option. We’re also constructing what we call a ‘scoutship’ designed primarily for exploration, but it will also serve as our initial manned test vehicle. It will be wildly overpowered in proportion to its size, but will be able to reach Quicksilver orbit from Earth orbit in a tad more than four days, one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight times the speed of light, less than fifty-seven years to cross the entire diameter of our Galaxy in coldsleep.”

“I’m not particularly interested in crossing the Galaxy, just going to Quicksilver.”

“And back, Jack. I’ll turn the scoutship around and send it back with you aboard the next day if you can provide the answers I seek, but it doesn’t do me any good if you know what Luz knows and still can’t tell me, because you’d have to use an ansible terminal to do it.”

“Okay. You’ve got a deal. Three and a half round-trip tickets.”

The Senator was puzzled. “Three and a half?”

“I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy, Senator. If things turn out well between us, I’ll bring her home to meet my Mom, maybe a sibling or two, and Mom can come back with us for the ceremony.”

“Five, then.”

“Five?”

“I’m an old-fashioned man, too, Jack. If she’s to accompany you to Earth and back, it seems appropriate for her to have a female companion as her chaperone. Believe me, your mother will appreciate the gesture, even if you don’t see the need just now, and I believe Barbara will too. You might also consider the fact that your mother might be pleased if you had two ceremonies, one on Earth and another on Quicksilver, so that no one is slighted on either planet through not being invited to the wedding. It’s generally the custom for a bride to know her maid, or matron, of honor, so you’ll have to bring her along. You’ll have one spare ‘voucher’ then, or two, if Mom decides to stay, if any one — potentially two — of your siblings wants to emigrate from Earth to Quicksilver quickly, and I’ll personally guarantee transport gratis on the scheduled service for any of your siblings, their spouses and children, who wants the same. Distant cousins and hangers-on pay cash.”

Jack raised his eyebrows at that, and took the deal. Quicksilver was one of the most desirable of the colony planets, so most emigrants had to post a substantial bond. He was being offered the rough equivalent of ten year’s salary, a remarkably generous offer, and it would get his immediate family off Earth — and away from its endless squabbling over resources and corruption — and out to the edge of things, where things were changing. “Done! Senator, I’m your man.” He held out his hand to formalize their agreement with an old-fashioned handshake.

The Senator found it charming.

Group Captain Cyril Farquhar struggled toward consciousness with the throbbing hammer of the electronic ‘Call to Quarters’ klaxon pounding on his brain. ‘What the fuck?’ This was supposed to be easy duty, a hundred year Extended Reserve service — with full pay and benefits for his dependants — in his case his parents and one sister — with the entire duration of his ‘service’ spent in transit and orbiting picket duty as a corpsicle around one of the colony planets. He’d fully expected to wake up back on Earth, or on one of the colony planets if his parents had taken his advice and emigrated off Earth. He’d left conditional instructions about his demob port if that were so, but had never expected to see his parents alive again, and his sister only if she’d emigrated to wherever he demobbed. He yawned, trying to get air into lungs which hadn’t breathed for at least fifteen years subjective time or more. They’d told him that he would feel like crap for an hour or so, but they were being optimistic; he felt like … he couldn’t think of anything bad enough to describe how he felt right now.

In the meantime, the damned klaxon was still throbbing, adding a growing headache to his long list of complaints, and obviously designed to make the most of his hellish experience, like the joke about the people in Hell standing up to their necks in a lake of stinking shit, and then ordered to get back on their heads because their coffee-break was over. And still the noise went on, rattling right through his brain. He struggled to remember the steps of the self-extraction procedure, trying to feel the call-button strapped to his hand, which would supposedly open his drawer — unlike many of the air officers and marines under his command, he refused to call it a coffin — and turn off the goddamned noise.

He found it … ‘At last!’ and the sound died away without touching the ghostly fading echo of it still sounding in his brain, if not his ears, until it too died away.

The drawer slid open and the stale air of the narrow corridor flooded in, tainted with the smell of lubricating grease and oil meant to prevent corrosion over the long years. His muscles still stiff and protesting, he reached to his chest to press the quick-release device that would free him from the straps and webbing that had held his body away from the surfaces of the … drawer. He wriggled around to squirm his body out of his container, getting hung up several times on small projections as he tried to float free into the corridor without leaving important pieces of his anatomy behind.

Finally, he was free and suddenly desperate to find the Zero-Gee Urination Fixture (male) so he could relieve himself. He did not want to spend the next half hour collecting floating blobs of piss.

 

 

Back in control of himself and his bladder, dressed at last — he felt much more like a commissioned officer in uniform, since it’s difficult to assume a military bearing when nude — he pulled himself down the corridor, opening the control panels beside each container and pressing the bright red ‘REVIVE’ button inside. He heard hidden machinery start the process of evacuating the coldsleep serum from the men’s veins and arteries as NuBlood analogue replaced it. Eventually, the artificial blood would be replaced with natural platelets through normal biological processes, but the first men out, his officers, would be ready to be helped from their containers in an hour or so, depending on how much body mass needed to be warmed. It was a tedious business, since there were a hundred and twenty men under his command. Only when the last man was on his way toward consciousness did he make his way to the bridge and activate the ansible console, a lo-rez military model, but adequate for command and control. Eventually, a face appeared, an ordinary airman to judge by the insignia on his fatigue uniform, and it must have been a dog watch on Earth, since he had that slackness of bearing that often appears toward the end of the normal working day. “Group Captain Farquhar, commanding UEA-Ulysses, reporting in. Please notify the Commanding Officer of the start of our transition to readiness.”

Then, he began reading the airship’s log to figure out where and when they were, since he, and the entire crew, had been in coldsleep from before they began their journey to their duty station until just now. Command didn’t feel it necessary to tell anyone where they were headed because it might change along the way, depending on the tactical situation of the moment. Since they weren’t at war with anyone, their destinations were largely random, selected to provide the best statistical ‘coverage’ for theoretical dangers, and were changed as needed by tactical protocols never divulged to lowly Group Captains. As he read, he smiled. They were only twenty light years from Earth, and in the L-3 Lagrangian point directly opposite Quicksilver in its orbit around Delta Pavonis. Maybe when whatever this exercise was about was over, he could arrange a week or two of liberty for his men on-planet. They were still fifty years from their scheduled rotation back to Earth, and he knew the men would be reluctant to crawl back into their drawers so soon. He had to admit — to himself at least — that the idea of climbing back into that narrow box made his skin crawl just then. He hoped it was something simple; a returning probe gone astray, a vessel fallen out of drive, and needing repair before it could proceed. It happened from time to time, and one of the many tasks their airship was fitted for was salvage and repair. Since any passengers would be in coldsleep, there was rarely any particular hurry for rescue efforts, although the passengers might be startled to arrive twenty to a hundred years late.

He yawned again and decided to check in with Quicksilver while he waited for orders. Since they were on opposite sides of Quicksilver’s sun, neither radio nor tight-beam laser would work, so he used the ansible terminal, entering the parameters needed to select the local authorities from the vast amount of ‘noise’, both other ansible contacts and the quantum flux generated by black holes. “Group Captain Cyril Farquhar commanding UEA-Ulysses, stationed on picket duty in your vicinity, calling base commander.”

A woman’s voice answered. “Welcome to Quicksilver, Group Captain Farquhar, this is Barbara Big Horse, base commander, chief cook, and bottle washer.” She grinned. “We’re a relatively quiet backwater here, Group Captain, and fairly informal. If you don’t mind my asking, ‘Farquhar’ is a rather unusual name. You wouldn’t happen to be related to Judith Olivia Farquhar, would you?”

Group Captain Farquhar blinked, unmanly tears starting at the corners of his eyes. “Judi? Here? I’d never thought to see her in this life again.”

She smiled again, “This must be your lucky day, then, Group Captain. She lives in town, is married to a local resident, and has three children now.”

“How’s she been doing? The last time I saw her, she was quite young.”

“She’s doing well, and very well. She works as a local producer for our threedee series, Quicksilver Passion, which is number one in the ratings back on Earth. Would you like to talk to her? I know she’d be glad to see you.”

“She’s there?”

The woman laughed. “Oh, no, but she’ll be in the studio now, and they have more ansible bandwidth available than I do here. Let me transfer the parameters to your device.” She made motions below the view of the camera and a little amber light appeared on his console. Group Captain Farquhar stared at the light, almost afraid to touch the control to store the information lest it somehow be lost.

The woman smiled again and said, with that peculiar softness women have when they see men caught up in strong emotion, “I’ll sign off now so you can call your sister. I’m sure you have a lot to talk about.” The screen dissolved into utterly random ‘snow.’

His hand was just reaching toward the lighted control when the device switched automatically to the command and control parameters, his report was evidently being acknowledged. ‘Prick, ass, fart, shit,’ he cursed mentally, then came to attention as an Air Marshal appeared in Mess uniform. Evidently he’d interrupted something of importance. ‘Good!’

“Group Captain Farquhar, good of you to respond so quickly.”

“Sir!”

“I’m Air Marshal Vidkun Quisling, in command of 1 Group Air Combat, and we have a grave situation on Quicksilver. I’m entrusting you with the vital mission of resolving it to the satisfaction of Earth Authorities.”

“Sir?” His suspicions were instantly aroused. Air Marshals don’t ordinarily hie themselves out of full-dress dinners to give orders to lowly Group Commanders. Surreptitiously, he thumbed the ‘record’ control on his console.

The Air Marshal continued, “The Quicksilver colonists have revolted, and at last report had slaughtered those few armed forces stationed there and threatened to cut off further transfers of needed agricultural products and murder the commander of the civil forces, as well as remaining members of the government, unless we meet their outrageous demands. I hereby order you to proceed immediately to Quicksilver, destroy their stronghold in the central portion of the main town, and dispatch a contingent of Marines to capture, hold, and defend the planetary spaceport under martial law.”

‘This is crazy!’ he thought. “But, Sir!” he protested …

 … and was cut off. “This is a matter of world importance, Group Captain, and vital to the survival of Earth itself. Are you refusing a direct order?”

“No, Sir!” Now he was worried, and caught in a terrible trap. The penalty for mutiny was no longer death, but might as well be, since the prescribed term of imprisonment was an even thousand years in coldsleep.

“Then carry out your mission, Group Captain! You are to make no further contact with Command until that mission is accomplished, lest your ansible transmissions be intercepted and the mission be compromised.”

“Yes, Sir!” He saluted …

 … and the screen went blank, evidently shut down on relayed orders from Command, so he was cut off from the Universe outside. He stared bleakly at the dead screen, then smashed his fist onto the console. “Jesus H. Christ on a crooked crutch! What mole-headed fuckwit back at HQ dreamed this up?”

Copyright © 1993, 2010, 2011 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

All rights reserved.

 

DEDICATION:

To my loving wife, Betty. She completes me.

 

 

Copyright © 2011 Levanah