Flea Powder
by Jayge Carr
Illustration by Richard Crist
Flesh bodies make me itch.
Not that I have anything against a temporary in a natural org, mind you. I can appreciate a soft breeze, or a starfall, or a groupsie as well as the next cyb. Nonetheless, flesh bodies make me itch.
I was encybbed in a real beauty, a light-class Star-Dancer, over ten to the thirteenth Hydrogen one radii of sleek engineering, hottest legs available, double-hundred interface and every one connected, frolicking along and filling my cargo holds with some of the sweetest rares going when the call came.
I ignored it.
But whoever it was was stubborn, and had my private address code. It’s hard to keep ignoring a direct-to-brain input that can’t be turned off and seems as loud as a meteor crashing into a planet not quite on top of a natural ear. So I acknowledged.
Jolly, it’s about time, accused the mind that touched mine. I knew who it was, of course; minds are totally individual, and my association with Tango goes back to memories I’ve long since edited out. I knew my old pupil was way far away, too, from the out-of-synch flavor. I tried to explain to an anti-cybber once, who’d never experienced mind-to-mind inputs, how a cyb can tell distance in a mind touch. I had to fall back on the hoary old wheeze, about immersing in a multisense piece a little out of synchronization, so that acceleration pressure comes before the gauges show take-off, or sounds come after doors close and the like. I don’t think I got the point across, but any cybber or direct input type just knows. Tango was wallowing out, way, way into the fringes.
You know, I grumbled, used to be when a person put out a Leavemebe signal, they could depend on their friends to—
Jolly, come quick, there’s a problem!
Oh. Nova it, that was different. Where are you? How far?
We compared coordinates, and even at my top ratio, it would take me over five Half-Lives of Copper 67 to get there. (I cheated a little, too, stopping off to swoop around an unusually lovely rainbow system, and then wasting a few HLs of carbon 11 by side-tripping in a twinkle cluster, storing the sensories in my banks for more leisurely appreciation later.)
My destination was one of the dullest, most ordinary systems I’d ever seen. One, count it, one sun, an assortment of planets in a standard pattern including an asteroid belt in the warm zone around the sun, and the usual frozen cometary ring. The only ringed planet (I adore ring skimming! ) was too far out to get enough sunlight to be interesting. I did a file search but I’d never been to this system in person before, and none of my traded-for files had anything on it either. (Cybs are always trading files with each other; it’s a big universe.) I thought, anyway. I didn’t bother to compensate for big time changes, planetary evolution, long term star moves or the like. I might later, but for now—
I’d never known my usually placid friend to be so jittery. We rendezvoused, and Tango was wearing a sleek courier job, twice my legs and inputs but no cargo space to speak of—and I could almost see the field phase outer shell pulsing.
Ay, Tango, what’s the worry? Your maintenance has cross-inputted, has it? You want me to give you an external going-over? There must have been someone closer, but what the Way, what else are friends for?
No, Jolly, I’m four significant figures on all circuits. But there’s a BAD problem here, and I don’t know what to do!
Totally odd. Tango is a top-efficiency cyb, who usually has no trouble picking the optimum flow-path. (Unless there was something significant in my culled memories. But then, even I must have been newcybbed myself once, though I haven’t bothered to keep it in my personal files. For that matter Tango could have been my dupe, plenty of cybs felt the urge to reproduce every so often. Our long term mentor/disciple relationship argued for it. But I didn’t think so. We were more different than my much greater experience alone could account for.)
Well, youngster, tell me what’s feedbacking you, and I’ll help as much as I can.
I said it, and I was stuck with it.
I had pulled Tango out of a black hole once too often, and now I was going to pay the price for being Jolly Who Can Fix Anything.
Natural bodies make my mind itch.
Tango had discovered a whole world of Nats. Not a group of anti-cybbers who were Natural by choice that traded components and whatnot with cybs, but a group of Uncontacted Nats.
Worse, a world of Uncontacted Nats on the verge of true ratiodrive. Now there’s plenty of room in this Galaxy alone for worlds full of Naturals converted to cybs; when cybs find a new world of Nats, they either contact them directly if the psych profiles show opt, or leave them alone to develop star-cybbing by themselves. But these cuties were well on the way to developing star-drive without cybbing. Cybbing usually comes first, but what the Way, there are many paths to the same goal, and these babes were almost ready to shoot out among the stars in natural bodies encased in ships.
And they were warlike.
Bad.
Cybs can usually defend themselves, but few cybs are naturally aggressive. What for? There’s plenty of everything to go round. Most cybs prefer to trade honestly for what they want (replacement parts, files of unexplored areas, whatever) rather than try to be grabby. Besides, it’s too easy to crash somebody, the way we’re always sharing stuff around. Cybs are the most independent—and interdependent—individuals ever developed, I think. Effectively immortal, too, as long as we clean out our files every so often, and transfer into fresh cyberbrains when the bonds start fraying. But a cyb can die just like anything else. Deratio too close to a star, for example, and it’s goodbye cybbie. Oh, most cybs dupe every so often, but passage of time and different experience make the dupe a different indi altogether. So death is death, even for a cyb, and technically primitive or not, I’m not sure who I’d wager on, between a cyb and a shipful of these warbabies.
Something had to be done, and fast, before we found our comfortable galactic neighborhood contaminated by these shoot-first-second-and-third-Natties-come-latelys.
So here I was in a natural organic body—and itching. Could hardly think straight for that urge to scratch. What I really wanted to do was debody and encyb and shoot at highest ratio out of this place, warbabies or no warbabies. After all, ratiodrive or not, we could always throw a Quarantine ring around the local sector, warning everybody to stay away until these infants grew up a little.
Trouble was, with ratiodrive, no telling where the little darlings and their long-range stings could turn up. So it was better to erase the menace before it became a Menace.
That was Tango’s conclusion, and I agreed. Only Tango hadn’t the vaguest idea of What To Do, and so had screamed for good old Jolly, question answerer, problem solver… and now, it seemed, Nattie tamer.
They seemed a standard organic pattern, biped, bisexed, sense organs concentrated on the head with org brain inside, assortment of colors and features. Nats, plain ol’ generic naturals, except for their viciousness.
Or maybe that was standard, too. Put too many mouths on a too small world, and something has to give. Usually, it’s the pops, spreading out peacefully in ratiodrive, joining the rest of the googools of cybs playing seine the universe. But sometimes the overpop comes first, and something has to give, and usually—
I saluted (in this culture it meant holding the one arm out straight from the shoulder, elbow bent so the forearm came up vertically, and hand held flat and facing the superior) and stared assessingly at the org standing in front of a large square of a transparent synthetic looking down on the org-hive they called their major city.