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Copyright Information
Copyright © 2010 by Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes
FIRST EDITION
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To Brigadier General Livick
For advice both valuable
and invaluable
And to the memory of
Robert Sheckley
and Douglas Adams
INTRODUCTION
Here is my hypothesis as to how Human’s Burden came to be written. Keith Laumer and Gene Roddenberry were sitting around one day, stoned out of their gourds on ayahuasca. They decided to stitch the head of interstellar diplomat James Retief onto the body of Captain James T. Kirk—or vice versa. The hybrid, supremely handsome and conceited monster sat in cryonic suspension for forty years until Broderick and Barnes found and activated him with a hypodermic containing a mixture of Robert Sheckley’s and Ron Goulart’s stem cells, and then the two Aussie authors simply chronicled the revenant’s adventures.
Or, alternatively, applying Occam’s Razor, Broderick and Barnes are just stone-cold comic science-fictional geniuses. Take your pick.
—Paul Di Filippo,
author of Roadside Bodhisattva
CHAPTER ONE
ALIENS
The aliens stank, even from all the way across the clearing. And they were making a really terrible noise.
They sang out at the top of their voices with shrieking gusto, and the vented gases that puffed from the slots in their snouts smelled vile. Jack Wong watched the aliens cavort about, working themselves into a hot frenzy. The sweat glands under their tails sent a fetid stench billowing toward him.
Whatever they were cooking over the red and yellow fire was rotten, and green maggots crawled hastily out of it before crisping and falling into the flames, but the aliens didn’t care. Two of them stood in the heat turning the decayed carcass on a spit, and drool fell from their slimy snouts to spit and hiss in the fire.
“I’m going to puke,” Jack said, trying to breathe through his mouth. He had his fingers clamped over his nose. It didn’t help much; he could still smell the foul thing they were roasting in the roaring fire. Whatever it had been when it was alive, it had been dead far too long. He’d seen it hanging from a hook in the hot sunlight all this last week, and he had a revolted feeling they were going to make him eat some of it, once it was cooked.
An offering to their new god.
“If you are going to be sick, Jack,” his on-board AI said sternly, “try not to get any inside your suit.”
Jack shuddered. Even with his helmet open, it would be messy. No easy way to clean up vomit. He gulped hard and tried not to think about how nauseated he felt.
“Any signal from the rescue detail yet?” he asked the Machiavellian intelligence. He could hear the whine in his own voice, and it made him angry. He was an interstellar cadet, after all, not a sniveling adolescent. He’d turned nineteen years old a month ago, and he was a fully trained pod pilot, holding the Unified Academy rank of Cadet Master Chief Petty Officer. It was hardly his fault the Arcturus wormhole had belched at the wrong moment and hurled his pod halfway across the galaxy, or wherever the hell he was now, and dropped him here on some planet nobody had ever—
“Sir, you will certainly be the first to know if I detect a response to our emergency signal.” The system was not being sarcastic; Jack was convinced the AI had zero sense of humor. Not that his own was in full running order right now. Stuck here on a disgusting alien planet with a barely breathable atmosphere and an AI that acted like a prissy nanny, the sort he and his sister Gillian had shared when they were kids in the General Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco y Bahamonde Salgado Pardo de Andrade Memorial Kindergarten. That seemed a very long time ago. Now Gillian was an expert alien anthropologist.
Jack’s neck was itching horribly. His gloved fingers were too thick to fit inside the opening of his helmet, but he couldn’t take the gloves off without shucking his entire suit. He prodded at the rash under the edge of his helmet with a dry purple stick that had fallen from a tree resembling a giant anteater. The living branches of the tree, or maybe it was a bush, had in fact been swaying back and forth, scooping up and eating slow creatures that might have been rather large ants.
As he delved under the helmet, the purple stick hit a particularly sensitive scab and its end snapped off, tumbled down into the back of his suit and jammed itself there, jabbing his prickling skin. Oh, great. He’d started with an itch he couldn’t scratch, and now as a bonus he had a sharp pain halfway down his spine from the broken stick. Jack said a word prohibited on 53 worlds, and threw the rest of the twig back on the messy floor of his cell. Or his hut, or his shrine, or whatever the superstitious aliens thought it was.
“Your cortisol stress levels are rising again, Jack. Perhaps you should lie down for a while and do some math homework. Here, I will run off some ballistic curves for you to study.”
A series of bright lines sprang into place in Jack’s left eye, projected from the AI perched on the back on his suit. A list of delta-vee equations ran down beside the crisscrossing lines. He knew what they were, he wasn’t a complete fool, after all. Delta-vee, that was...that was— That was change of velocity, of course it was, a very important thing to have mastered when you were trying to pilot a lost pod that had tumbled with hardly any anti-gravitino fuel toward an unknown planet in the middle of nowhere. He blinked angrily, shutting off the education display.
“For the love of sanity, Mac! They’re about to roast me alive, and you expect me to think about class?”
“If you had paid more attention to your lessons, sir,” the AI said patiently, “we might not be in this difficult situation now.”
“I knew it!” The cadet lurched back to his feet, furious and indignant. “You’re blaming me for getting the wormhole insertion wrong! You did the calculations!”
“You, however, are the human space cadet, sir.” Jack could never win an argument with the machine. It had, after all, a mind like a computer. “The responsibility is ultimately yours, sir,” the Mac was saying. “I am no more than your assistant and lowly tutor.”
“Ha!” And goddam nanny. And, on this world, translator. The Mac had analyzed the aliens’ local dialect within minutes of their crash landing, and could bleat and bark back at them with all the ease of a native speaker. Of course the machine got some of the words wrong, and left a few more out altogether. It is hard for a human to understand an alien, and just as hard for an alien to see what a human is trying to say, even with an effective translating AI as your go-between.
Jack knew this much: The stenchy aliens thought he was a god. He just hoped that he wasn’t the sort of god that worshippers put to death. If only he had advice from Dr. Fisherking. Or his best friend in the Academy, fellow cMaster Chief Rufus Rupert Trevor Dogge.
