"Hey. Hibbing is a tough town during a recession." They floated up toward Aces High. Cyndi reached into her jacket pocket and produced a small package wrapped in red ribbon. "I got you a present," she said. "Seeing as it's our last night together. Merry Christmas."
The android seemed embarrassed. "I didn't think to get you anything," he said.
"That's all right. You've had things on your mind." Modular Man opened the package. The wind caught the bright ribbon and spiraled it down into the darkness. Inside was a gold pin in the shape of a playing card, the ace of hearts, with the words MY HERO engraved.
" I figured you could use cheering up. You can wear it on your jockey shorts."
"Thank you. It's a nice thought."
"You're welcome." Cyndi hugged him.
The Empire State threw a spear of colored spotlights into the night. The pair landed on Hiram's terrace. The busy sounds of the bar could be heard even over the gusting wind.
A Christmas Eve crowd was celebrating. Cyndi and Modular Man gazed for a long moment through the windows. "Hey," she said. "I'm tired of rich food."
The android thought a moment. "Me, too."
"How about that Chinese place? Then we can go to my apartment. "
Warmth filled him, even, here in the Siberian jet stream. He was airborne in a fraction of a second.
Down the alley, something bright caught the eye of the bag lady. She bent and picked up a strand of red ribbon. She stuffed it into a bag and walked on.
JUBE: THREE
"The holidays are the cruelest time," Croyd had told him one New Year's Eve, years ago. Times Square was full of drunks waiting for the ball to come down. Jube had come to observe, and Croyd had hailed him from a doorway. He hadn't recognized the Sleeper, but then he seldom did. That time, Croyd had been a head shorter than Jube, his loose, baggy skin covered with fine pink down. He'd had webbed feet and a hip flask of dark rum, and had wanted to talk about his family, about lost friends, about algebra. "The holidays are the cruelest time," he'd repeated, over and over, until the ball fell and Croyd had puffed himself up like a balloon from the Macys Thanksgiving Day parade and drifted off into the sky. "The cruelest time!" he'd shouted down once more, just before he vanished from sight.
It wasn't till now that Jube had understood what he'd meant. He had always enjoyed the human holidays, which afforded such colorful pageants, such lavish displays of greed and generosity, such fascinating customs for study and analysis. This year, as he stood in his newsstand on the morning of the last day of December, he found that the day had lost its savor.
The irony was too cruel. All around the city, people were preparing to celebrate the start of what could be the last year of their lives, their civilization, and their species. The newspapers were full of retrospectives on the year just ending, and every one of them had pegged the Swarm War as the year's top story, and every one of them had written it up as if it were all over, except for some mopping up in the third world. Jhubben knew better.
He shuffled some newspapers, sold a Playboy, and looked up glumly into a crisp morning sky. Nothing to be seen but a few cirrus clouds, high up and moving fast. Yet she was still there, he knew. Far from Earth, moving through the darkness of space, as black and massive as an asteroid. She would blot out the stars as she drifted across them, silent and chill, to all outward appearances cold and dead. How many worlds and races had died believing that lie? Inside she lived, evolving, her intelligence and sophistication growing daily, her tactics honing themselves with each setback.
Among the races of the Network, she was the enemy with a hundred names: the demonseed, the great cancer, hellmother, devourer of worlds, mother of nightmares. In the vast minds of the Kondikki godqueens, she was called by a symbol that meant simply dread. The Kreg machine-intelligences referred to her by a string of binary impulses that signified dysfunction, the lyn-ko-neen sang of her in notes high, shrill, and pain-wracked. And the Ly'bahr remembered her best of all. To those vastly long-lived cyborgs, she was Thyat M'hruh, darkness-for-the-race. Ten thousand years past, a Swarm had descended on the Ly'bahr birthworld. Encased in their lifesustaining shells, the cyborged Ly'bahr lived on, but those who had stayed behind to wear flesh instead of metal were gone, and with them all the generations to come. The Ly'bahr had been a dead race for ten thousand years.
"Mother?" Ekkedme had cried out, and Jube had not understood, not until he slit the cord on his stack of newspapers the day the buds landed in New Jersey. It must be some mistake, he had thought inanely when he saw the headlines. The Swarm was a horror from history and legend, it was the nightmare that happened to other planets far distant, not the one you were actually on. It was outside his experience and his expertise; no wonder he had suspected the Takisians when the singleship was lost. He felt as though he was a fool. Worse, he was a doomed and helpless fool.
She was up there still, a palpable living darkness that Jube could almost feel. Inside her festered new generations of swarmlings, the life-that-is-death. Soon her children would come again, and devour this perversely splendid race that he had come to have such affection for… devour him too, for that matter, and what could he do to stop them?
"You look like a pot of excrement this morning, Walrus," a voice like sandpaper rasped casually.
Jube looked up.. and up, and up. Troll was nine feet tall. He wore a gray uniform over green warty skin, and when he grinned, crooked yellow teeth stuck out in all directions. A green hand as broad as a manhole cover lifted a copy of the Times delicately between two fingers, nails black and sharp as claws. Behind his custom-made mirrorshades, the red eyes sunk beneath his heavy brow-ridge flicked over the columns of newsprint.
"I feel like a pot of excrement," Jube said. "The holidays are the cruelest time, Troll. How are things at the clinic?"
"Busy," said Troll. "Tachyon keeps shuttling back and forth to Washington for meetings." He rattled the Times. "These aliens ruined everybody's Christmas. I always knew that Jersey was just one big yeast infection." He dug in a pocket, handed Jube a crumpled dollar bill. "The Pentagon wants to lob a few H-bombs at the Mother-thing, but they can't find her."
Jube nodded as he made change. He had tried to find the Swarm Mother himself, using the sensing satellites the Network had left in orbit, but without success. She might be hiding behind the moon, or on the other side of the sun, or anywhere in the vastness of space. And if he could not locate her with the technology at his disposal, the humans didn't have a chance. "Doc won't be able to help them," he told Troll glumly.
"Probably not," the other replied. He flipped a half-dollar into the air, caught it neatly, and pocketed it. "Still, you have to try, right? What else can you do but try? Happy New Year, Walrus." He strode off on legs as thick and gnarled as the trunks of small trees, and as long as Jube was tall.
Jube watched him go. He was right, he thought as Troll vanished around the corner. You do have to try.
He closed the newsstand early that day, and went home. Floating in the cold waters of his tub, awash in dim red light, he considered his options. There was only one, really. The Network could save humanity from the Swarm Mother. Of course, there would be a price. The Network gives nothing away for free. But Jube was sure that Earth would be only too glad to pay. Even if the Master Trader demanded rights to Mars, or the moon, or all of the gas giants, what was that weighed against the life of their species?
But the Opportunity was light-years off, and would not return to this system for another five or six human decades. It must be summoned, the Master Trader must be informed that a sentient race with enormous profit potential was threatened with extinction. And the tachyon transmitter had been lost with the Embe and the singleship.