In my dreams, sometimes I get inside the thing, and it’s always different. Sometimes I meet these glowing little men who sit me down and tell me things that make me understand myself and the universe. Sometimes it’s filled with monsters and I find myself with pistol in one hand and saber in the other, shooting and slashing to save the human race. Sometimes I’m just walking through this huge cavity and I look up and there’s this huge heart beating slowly overhead, booming like thunder.
But I didn’t get inside the daemon; I only smacked into its hide. A rough landing…the daemon had a gravity almost as strong as Earth’s and it sucked me right down. I can’t explain the gravity—artificial maybe. I managed to brake most of my speed with the retros, but the escape pod still slammed against the daemon with a clang like a great Chinese gong. CLLAAANNNGGGG!!!
I did that to catch your attention. Here and now, girl! Keep your head in the here and now!
The first thing I did after landing was put on a suit and go out—I wanted to know what I’d landed on. The surface was broad and black, very slightly rounded and pebbly with scales. Overhead floated the Coherent, bright and silver like the moon above dark autumn fields.
I knelt and examined the daemon’s hide. Blacker than black, each scale was angled toward the Coherent, an audience of a billion eyes watching.
Then, slowly, the nearest eyes turned to look at me.
If I hadn’t been a solar cell technician, I might have run screaming in terror back to the pod…but I’d worked among our own solar collectors and seen them slowly turn their gaze on me as the robot controllers picked up my body heat and swiveled to drink it in. Absorbing the IR my own flesh emitted.
I pried loose as many of those little eyes as I could. They had to be energy collector cells and for some reason, I knew—knew!—they were orders of magnitude more efficient than anything we humans had developed. And indeed they were, my darling daughter, indeed they were.
Perhaps if I’d had more time, I could have found some way to enter the daemon…but as I knelt there plucking up eyes, I saw some of them turn away from me and I glanced back to see what they’d noticed.
The Coherent, engines streaming out a fiery cloud, was speeding through the night like a torpedo on a collision course with my daemon. I suppose in the back of my mind, I must have realized this would happen—why else would they have ordered us to abandon ship? But for a moment I was staggered and frozen by the utter stupidity of the military mind. It was the ultimate eviclass="underline" trying to kill something wonderful and magic and new.
I was paralyzed only for a moment, but it was almost a moment too long. I barely had time to get back inside my pod and slam the outer hatch before the Coherent hit and exploded. The daemon pitched wildly; my pod was bucked off, rolling end over end and tossing me around inside like a man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Through the pod’s viewport, I caught one last glimpse of the daemon before it vanished into the blackness. It was on a new heading…I don’t know if it had simply been knocked off course by the collision or if it had changed direction on its own. I couldn’t tell if it’d been damaged; it vanished as quickly as a coin in the hands of a magician.
Well, you can fill in the rest of the story. I kept the scales to myself till I got out of the navy, then analyzed them and reproduced them as well as I could. The reproduction wasn’t perfect, but it was generations ahead of anything else on the market; and as the money flowed in, I could afford to hire a team of the best eggheads, and patent by patent, they came closer to a full duplication of…well, a flake of my daemon’s skin.
I could also afford to hire scouts to search for the daemon. They never found it. I think…I think daemons only appear to a certain kind of person. You have to be ready for them. You have to be open. You have to be goddamned alive.
So. I’m going out solo.
I want to know if I’m still the sort of person who’s worthy of wonder.
Don’t cry. If you don’t want to run the company, let the board of directors do it. You’ll still receive dividend payments and the company will stay healthy. My people know what they’re doing. I just thought you might enjoy honest work.
If you prefer, you can sell your share in the company and use the money to pursue whatever dreams you want. Really. I wholeheartedly approve of people who pursue their dreams.
If you have any dreams.
Do you have any dreams, Maria?
VARIATION F: BOOJUM
(MENO MOSSO)
(SLOWER, LESS MOTION)
CONTACT: JULY 2070-APRIL 2071
So, Yorgi. You got caught.
You’re an idiot, boy.
Your mother, she wants me to make a big fuss. She wants me to smack you around. I should spit in your face and say your ancestors will haunt you.
Maybe they will.
Me, if I get to heaven, and some great-great-grandchild of mine gets caught breaking into a store, I got better things to do than sneak up on the kid and go boo. I’ll just say to myself, the boy’s an idiot, and go back to the houris.
But your mother says, Emil, talk to the boy. Okay, Yorgi, I’m talking to you.
The priests, they’ll threaten you with hell. They’re good at it; it’s their job. But you’re like me—you can’t listen to a sermon without falling asleep.
So no sermons. Here’s all I’m going to say: there are lots of things you can do in your life, but they break into two classes. Some things make you smarter. Some things make you stupider. No other possibilities.
Stealing makes you stupider. Every time you steal, you get a little stupider. It doesn’t matter if you get caught, and it doesn’t matter what you steal.
I know.
A few years back—you aren’t going to tell your mother this story—I was working for Petrozowski Energy. Cook on a freighter. But it wasn’t really a freighter, it was a hunter. We’d load up with cargo and fuel as if we were making the Red Run, but then we’d prowl space, looking for a boojum Mr. Petrozowski saw once. Crazy, eh? And the craziest thing was, our third time out we found it.
Big thing. Huge. And black, with a kind of shimmer, like the northern lights. First time we saw it, we nearly pissed ourselves. Whole crew went up to the bridge, looked at the thing. None of us had a clue what it was. Didn’t look dangerous. Just kind of spooky.
Instructions were to track it, plot its course. No radio reports…Mr. Petrozowski didn’t want anyone finding out where we were or what we were doing. Once we got the thing charted, we were supposed to fire back full thrust and report in person.
Well. We all got to thinking. Petrozowski was paying big money for all this secrecy. Triple what we’d get on a normal run. And if we reported home right away, maybe we’d get a bonus if we were lucky, but then we’d go back to the usual grind. We thought, if we put off reporting it till the next run…well, Mr. Petrozowski would still find his boojum, we’d still get the bonus, and we’d get triple pay for an extra run.
So that’s how we all started getting stupider. It was stealing, you see. Easy stealing. Didn’t have to hit someone over the head, didn’t have to get past an alarm. Just waited out our time and headed home empty-handed.
We waited out our time on the boojum. Didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Went down, looked around. It was scaly. No mouth or any other opening. Something had dented its side a bit…a meteor, I guess. We tried to cut a hole in it with laser torches, but the light just got sucked up. We pried away scales, and underneath were more scales. We dug down a long way, but the scales went down farther. They grew back too, eventually. Took a few days. They sort of pushed up from below.