Beyond the Sun Read online

  “Y-yes.”

  Lukas tucked it into his own shirt. He’d been afraid Garner might have had a biological call: a tooth-tuck, for instance, activated by a touch from his tongue. In that case, the game would be over. But evidently Garner was as cheap as he was unscrupulous.

  He gasped, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Lukas Busch. Oh—I see you remember it. Why would that be?”

  Garner began to babble. “It was an accident! I never intended—it was an accident, you must believe that!”

  Now that the moment was actually here, Lukas marveled at himself. How many years had he dreamed, planned, worked and saved for this? Sometimes his anger had threatened to immolate him. Sometimes his despair had. Through all the sicknesses, one each year, with first his parents and then Aunt Carrie nursing him, sure each time he would die. Sometimes he’d wanted to. Yet here he was, and all he felt was an icy control. No—one more thing: contempt. If Garner had denied his act, there was no way Lukas could have proved it. But the man was that thing despised even more on a pioneer world than on a settled one: He was a coward.

  Garner still babbled. “I was only experimenting, just to see if it could be done . . . DNA universal . . . scientists experiment, that’s what we do . . . panspermia . . . the wrong embryo implanted in the client . . . an accident I swear by everything that—”

  “Shut up,” Lukas said. All at once, Garner sickened him. He stood up to remove himself from the man.

  “How did you even get off-planet?” Garner said, still lying on the floor, not shutting up. “I mean you could get off Freedom, of course, nobody here checks anything, but to pass Purity Control anywhere else you—”

  “I was still in my mother’s belly. They’re both dead now, those clients you ‘accidentally’ cheated.”

  Garner switched to bluster, the other stupid weapon of stupid men. “But you’re alive! The genemod worked so nobody was cheated, and why are you complaining you’re here and alive and—”

  Lukas fired. He aimed at the floor next to Garner’s head, but even so, his finger had seemed to move of its own volition, which scared him. Garner’s eyes went so wide that the irises seemed to disappear.

  He whispered, “Are you going to kill me?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Because I had no choice. Because of you, I had no choice.”

  Garner’s eyes did the impossible and went even wider. In them crept a sly satisfaction (I did it!) that proved the greatest test yet to Lukas’s control. But he held both gun and voice steady.

  “You’re going to give me what I want. All of what I want.”

  “I can’t . . . . You must know that a genemod done in vitro can’t be undone in adulthood!”

  “I do know that.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  Lukas told him.

  *

  There was no way to hide the purchase of the three holo projectors on Garner’s credit. They arrived mid-morning the next day, MoonDay, the staff’s day off. Lukas waited all night with Garner until the truck delivered the projectors and Garner gave the trucker his thumbprint. She saw Lukas standing beside a nervous Garner, and there was no way to hide that either.

  “The export company will come after me!”

  “You know what to say,” Lukas said. “I forced you at gunpoint. Damn it, it’s the truth. For once in your miserable life, just tell the truth. But if you call them before tonight, I’ll tell them everything. They’ll do a scan on me and then the Genemod Clinic Association will deal with you for scaring off prospective customers and wrecking trade. Is that what you want?”

  Garner was too terrified to answer.

  Lukas briefly tested all three projectors. When he glimpsed the recording, Garner actually began to howl. Lukas gagged and tied him, securely enough for everyone to believe he hadn’t been able to get free till evening. After loading the three projectors onto a clinic dolly, Lukas threw a tarp over them and set off.

  The wind had shifted, bringing rare cold blasts from the Ice, and rain threatened. Lukas cursed and pushed the dolly faster. The projectors were heavy. He’d brought the recordings with him on the Far Princess, but the shuttle weight allowance could never have covered projectors, even if there had been a remote chance of his affording them.

  The poor, his mother had always said, had to take what they could get. She was a simple person, and Lukas had never pointed out to her the double meaning of “take.”

  He set up the first projector on the strut of a bridge over Deoxy’s small river. There was a lot of foot traffic here and many people would see the holo. He was less happy with the location of the second projector, behind a trash can on Keynes Street. Here, too, foot traffic was heavy, but the location was exposed enough that the machinery might be stolen before it was activated. But he was running out of time. With the third projector, he had a stroke of luck—a construction site right beside a glossy genemod clinic. The projector was easy to hide in the rubble. Someone had even scrawled a graffito on a half-finished wall: STOP THE PUPCAT TRADE!

  Perfect.

  Late afternoon, and the clinic closed for the day. All over Deoxy, workers were leaving their jobs and heading home, picking up their children at daycare, heading for restaurants and bars. Tourists in their roverbuses drove in from the pupcat feeding grounds, heading for their hotels. The evening was cold but the rain held off.

  Lukas pushed the buttons on the remotes, and all three projectors shot out high-quality holos ten feet high.

  A pupcat wearing a pink bow, outside a house in Kali City on the planet Lennox. Night, and Freedom’s red-dwarf star, only three light years away, hangs low on the horizon. The pupcat jumps toward the star, twisting and leaping, leaping and twisting, until it collapses in exhaustion. Quick dissolve to the same animal, thinner, its fur falling out in patches, still jumping toward the star. Another dissolve and the pupcat, emaciated and covered with sores, makes a final futile jump toward Freedom and dies.

  A pupcat on the terrace of a high-rise somewhere in the Orion Arm; the center of the galaxy arches overhead in a curve of stars. The pupcat faces the other way, in the direction of the unseen planet Freedom, and jumps toward the sky. Two more jumps and it hurls over the edge of the terrace and disappears.

  An exhausted, clearly dying pupcat, unable any longer to leap, raises one paw to claw toward the night sky. A child, crying, tries to comfort it. The pet bites the child. In the pupcat’s huge, non-human eyes is a very human despair.

  Two more vignettes and the holo began to recycle, silently shouting its visceral message. The electromagnetic beam from the remote was, of course, clearly detectable. At the far end of the construction site, Lukas sat down on a pile of foamcast bricks and waited for the Freedom Export Company thugs to arrive and kill him.

  They didn’t. Or if they did, they were too late. A flyer swept down from the sky; the door was flung open. A girl’s voice shouted, “Are you insane? Get in here, quick!”

  Lukas hesitated only a moment. He climbed into the flyer, and it raced off.

  *

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” the girl said.

  Her name, she’d said, was Marianne. Her mother, who’d been piloting the flyer, was Eva. The three of them sat in the kitchen of a small, expensive apartment overlooking the river, not far from the strip of glossy tourist hotels. Three redbeers sat on the stone tabletop, but only Eva was drinking. She gazed at Lukas steadily, an unblinking assessment that he found unnerving. Both women were beautiful, with masses of dark hair and golden skin. He had no idea what he was doing there.

  “I’m trying to stop the pupcat trade,” he said. “If people know what happens to the pupcats after they leave Freedom . . . You see, the migratory instinct is so strong, stronger than anything found genetically anywhere else in the galaxy, that the animals must obey it, and they die trying to get back to the Ice and—”

  “We know,” Marianne said. “Haven’t you
seen the graffiti? We’ve been trying for a year to stop it!”

  “With graffiti? Are you insane? If you knew what happens to the pupcats off-world, why didn’t you just broadcast the recordings?”

  “You don’t understand,” Marianne said.

  Eva removed her gaze from Lukas to her handheld. “All three projectors destroyed. Thirty seconds, one minute, twenty-nine seconds.”

  Lukas said, “So hardly anybody saw the holos?”

  “No,” Eva said.

  He did reach for his redbeer then, groping over the table in blind fury, blind despair. To die for nothing at all . . . .

  “You’re not going to die,” Eva said, and his startled eyes swung toward her. She said, “That is what you were thinking, wasn’t it? Yes, I’m sure they can trace you. But I don’t think anybody saw us snatch you up, and so nobody knows you’re here. It may be possible to get you safely off planet.”

  He said flatly, “I can’t go.”

  Marianne, who seemed much bossier than her mother, snapped, “Of course you can! But—what did you say your name was? Luke?”

  “Lukas.”

  “Lukas—” she leaned forward, painful intensity on her face—“are there copies?”

  “Of the recordings? Yes.”

  Eva let out a long, reverent breath. She looked at her daughter. “Then maybe we still have a chance.”

  Lukas said, “If you knew what happens to the pupcats, and if you think my recordings will help stop the trade, then why didn’t you just use them yourselves? I collected them off the Link—do you think someone like me has actually been to all those worlds? You have money—” he waved a hand around the apartment—“ so are you just cowards? Afraid to risk your lives for something you say you believe in?”

  Marianne reached across the table and slapped him.

  Shock spread through him—no woman had ever hit him before. He was too surprised to be angry. At the look on his face, Eva smiled and said gently, “You really don’t understand, Lukas. Link transmission from off-world is tightly controlled by the Export Company. They own the equipment, so there’s nothing to stop them from doing what they like with it. Their techs are so good that most people on Freedom don’t even realize the Link is censored. The Company knows that pupcats all die trying to migrate back to the Ice, but practically no one else here knows. We few trying to stop it simply aren’t believed. It’s not a large group of people involved in the trade: a few hundred trappers and the Export company. If everyone else on Freedom knew, we might be able to sway public opinion to shut down the trade. In a Libertarian society, public opinion counts for a lot because it mobilizes strikes, boycotts, and maybe even violence. At least, it does if not too many people’s livelihoods are involved. We’re not cowards—we just had no proof. But if you have copies of the recordings—please tell me they’re on your person right now!”

  “Yes. But—”

  Marianne said fiercely, “If people off-world know that the pupcats die, why hasn’t the Coalition stopped the trade?”

  Lukas said, “It’s not that easy. The Company has sold only a few thousand pupcats, and they’re scattered over cities, over continents, over worlds. You have a pet, and it gets sick, and you take it to a vet. She says, ‘It’s an alien animal and I don’t know how to treat it.’ She Links to Freedom, and the Company denies knowledge of what’s wrong or how to cure the pupcat: ‘Could be something environmental where you are, could be an anomalous genetic defect, could be some sickness picked up that their immune system hasn’t evolved to handle.’ That sounds plausible, and the pupcat dies, and the case is closed. Nobody connects the dots. And when I did, nobody was interested in a crackpot kid with no medical credentials.”

  After a moment, Eva nodded. Now it was Lukas who turned fierce. “I still don’t understand. You could have gone off-world and collected the proof. You could—”

  Eva stared at him steadily, and then he understood.

  “You can’t go to other worlds,” he said slowly. “You’re genemod.”

  Marianne said, “I am.” She looked at her mother.

  Eva’s eyes filled with tears and she left the room.

  Lukas hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. The redbeer muddled his head. He’d experienced too many emotions, in too rapid a succession. He put his hand in front of his eyes and mumbled something, not even he knew what.

  Marianne’s voice suddenly turned as gentle as her mother’s. “Come with me, Lukas.” She tugged him from his chair and he stumbled after her to a bedroom. “Sleep,” she said, and he did.

  He dreamed of Aunt Carrie, sobbing on the floor because he was leaving forever. Carrie, who had raised him after his parents died, who loved him. In his dream, she held a dying pupcat, who looked up at him and whispered in First Officer Bridges’s voice: “For nothing, nothing. All for nothing.”

  *

  When he woke in the morning, Eva sat beside his bed in the small guest room. Startled, Lukas sat up, clutching his blanket, under which he was naked. Eva didn’t seem to notice. Her voice sounded thick. “She’s ready.”

  “Who’s ready? For what?”

  “Marianne. Stay where you are.” Eva left.

  Bewildered and becoming angry—why the weird mystery?—Lukas reached down to the floor for his pants. A moment later, he stopped dead, one arm dripping fabric.

  Something was happening in his mind.

  Blurry at first, the intrusion abruptly sharpened. Moving images, strong and clear—his images. The pupcat with a pink bow, jumping toward Freedom in the night sky until, emaciated and covered with sores, the animal died. The pupcat on the terrace, falling to its death in the futile attempt to leap toward home. The pupcat unable to leap any longer, biting a child from its total despair at not being able to migrate, as every instinct of its genes forced it to do.

  Lukas jumped out of bed, heedless of his pants, and hurtled himself from the room. Marianne slumped in a chair in the corner of the living room, breathing hard, pale as dawn. A small holo player, switched off, sat on the floor beside a glass of sludgy green liquid. He gasped, “How . . .”

  Silently Eva removed his recording cube from the machine, handed it to him, and left the room. Her face looked like a hillside ravaged by storm.

  Marianne tried to speak, couldn’t, waited a few moments, and then got out, “Drink.”

  Lukas raised the glass to her mouth. Whatever was in it revived her, and more. Color raced back into her face, and her eyes grew too bright. She sat up straight and put a hand on his arm.

  “Don’t blame my mother.”

  “For what?” But he had already guessed. “You’re genemod for telepathy.”

  “No. I can only send, only over short range, and at great cost. Lukas—you know what that means. Even on Freedom.”

  He did. Purity Control banned all genemods throughout the Coalition not because people with purple skin or augmented muscles represented a threat to society, but because genetic changes to the brain did. And among those changes possible, the most feared was anything that affected the electromagnetic field that both surrounded, and was, the human brain. Strengthen that field, extend it, manipulate it, and you created a tool to affect other fields, both machine and human. No one liked having their minds suddenly invaded with someone else’s images. Even less did they like having images read from their own minds. Before he knew he was going to move, Lukas took a step back from Marianne, and his face distorted into a grimace.

  She noticed. Her smile was bitter. “I can’t read, only send, and that only for about twenty feet. No one knows. I would probably be killed.”

  “I thought Freedom was the sanctuary for genemods!”

  “For most, yes. And probably some ad hoc vigilante group would avenge me. That’s how it works here. But I’d still be dead, wouldn’t I?”

  “I—”

  But whatever drug had revived Marianne kept her talking. “I said don’t blame my mother, and I meant it. I blamed her when I was younger. Oh, how I blamed
her! But not since the—Lukas, do you know who emigrates to Freedom? Do you?”

  Her intensity was making him uncomfortable. He wasn’t used to people more intense than he was. He shook his head.

  “Three groups emigrate to a society without laws: criminals, idealists, and inventors. My parents were the last two. They had an idea that if the human race could be engineered to be more empathetic, more sensitive to each other’s suffering, that might create a society that was just and good and caring. Eva is a scientist in fluid dynamics—she knew how one little alteration in direction in the right place, at the right time, can end up producing huge changes in the system overall. I was supposed to be that little alteration. But genes are funny things, and we don’t really have control over their interaction, and it didn’t quite work out that way. But, then, you already know that, don’t you?”

  Her eyes were very bright. Her whole body tensed toward him. Lukas, powerfully aware of her beauty, knew what she was asking. He knew, too, that she was his last chance. For many things. Could he trust her? No way to tell. But what other choice did he have?

  Still, he hesitated; alone with his secret for so long, the idea of telling someone the truth seemed painful. But she didn’t let him evade.

  “What was done to you?” she said. “What genemod? Where?”

  “Here,” he said, and once he’d started, the rest came out more easily. “Here, on Freedom. I was an experiment, too, but not for an idealistic reason. I have pupcat genes in me.”

  Her eyes widened and her hand went to her mouth.

  “Why not? After all, it’s all just DNA, right? Only it wasn’t supposed to actually work. But it did.”

  Marianne said, “You—”

  “I’m compelled to migrate. Every year, to the Ice, like the pupcats. And since I couldn’t, I got sick, every year, like the pupcats. Very sick. The only difference is that I didn’t die.”