A Cosmic Christmas Read online

  At the bottom of Jane’s bag—he presumed hers, because it contained both a small flask of perfume and what looked like a hairstyling brush—there was a small black book embossed with the words “Holy Bible.” It was an old-style book, made of paper and probably expensive, and though it had nothing written on it that might identify her, it looked well thumbed through, and he thought she might very well be upset if it went missing. So he put it in his bag, too.

  Finding the burner was harder. It took his almost taking apart their big suitcase. But he thought that they wouldn’t be able to come back here anyway. The burner—burners, actually, as there were two besides his own—were in a false bottom which took him quite a while to work out how to open, even though it was obvious from the dimensions it must be there.

  He took the belt and holsters there, and put all three burners around his waist.

  Things were barely packed, when he heard the murmur of voices outside the room. Time to go. He’d heard the sound of birds outside the window, so there must be an outside to the resort. However, he remembered he was supposed to be exploring, and that resort employees were supposed to be on the lookout for him.

  Better leave through the window than through the corridors, where people would spot him. He knew enough of human nature, from Hoffnungshaus, to know most resort employees would prefer to patrol in the cozy inner halls than outside.

  The window opened easily and he almost suspected a trap when he realized how close the tree branches were. They’d never allow that at Hoffnungshaus. But he didn’t hesitate, because he could hear people right outside the door. He jumped to the tree, then leaned over and closed the window, so as not to leave any sign of his departure. As he did, he could see the door open, but no people yet. Right. He’d left just in time.

  And he truly couldn’t believe his luck. He found himself in what might have been a primeval forest, if primeval forests had the sort of gardener that made sure everything grew in the most aesthetically pleasing way. Where he’d jumped onto the tree, there were many trees, clustered together, so that he could move from one to the other, without ever touching ground.

  As he ran, he caught glimpses of guests. Men and women walking together. Children running around, playing. A little girl crying at the top of her voice. Something like longing swelled in him. The Altermans had said they’d help him become just a normal human among normal humans. He could have this. He could have a family—maybe not natural children, but a family. He was smart enough that he could have wealth and . . . and come back to this resort, and be like these people, just enjoying themselves, with no supervisors, with no restrictions.

  He didn’t let it delay him. He moved fast, from tree to tree, as far away from people as possible, till he glimpsed the entrance to the resort. And then he stopped, clutching at the branches of the tree he stood in. He couldn’t go out that way. There were guards. Or maybe it wasn’t guards. Resorts probably didn’t have guards, even if they were dressed in uniforms. Colorful ones. Porters or valets or whatever they were called.

  Then he noticed that on the other side of the little massif of trees there was a river, and that the river flowed out of the resort. Right.

  Making it to the edge of the river was not very difficult, dropping into the river without making a sound was. First he closed the bag he had on him. The material looked impermeable, and he hoped it was. The gems would survive a dunking, but the book wouldn’t. He closed it, tying the top to increase the chances it would not let in water. And then he climbed down from the tree, ran along very soft grass to the river side and dropped in.

  They’d taught him to swim as a matter of course. They’d taught all of them to swim. He swam in the same direction the river was flowing. There was no one here, this near to the outer wall of the cave from which this resort had been made. Probably an artificial cave, and the daylight and the sky above would of course be artificial lighting and a holo. No. There was someone near the entrance. Two someones. But from the soft sounds emanating from the green shadows under the trees, Jarl thought he would be the last thing on their minds. He grinned to himself, then held his breath and dove under, going into the tunnel under the wall, into which the creek disappeared.

  There was a moment of panic, a moment of darkness, the certainty that this tunnel would go on forever, that he could never surface, never breathe. Then he glimpsed light ahead. That was just a moment before he realized the creek was outfitted with a bio-barrier. That meant no fish or plants imported into the idyllic stretch of river inside the resort could make it outside.

  Most bio-barriers had a size limit. And, Jarl thought, this one could not be set to kill people swimming out. It could not because people, or children, could fall into the river. And once you were in the tunnel there was no way out but through. It would take more strength than Jarl could muster to swim up-current, back into the resort.

  He closed his eyes and let the current carry him. On the other side, he told himself that he was not—not even a little—surprised to be alive. But he scrabbled out of the river and away from the resort, following no road, as fast as he could make it, which was faster than most normal humans.

  First, the Altermans had taken a flyer, so he needed a flyer. Second, he must figure out where they had gone. The Peace Keepers believed there was a clue in their possessions, and Jarl had to hope that he had got everything that could give him that clue.

  The flyer was a matter of finding a large, public lot. He’d never quite got in as hair-raising an adventure as this one, but he’d been in trouble before, and once or twice it had involved stealing a flyer. He passed a few individual houses but ignored the flyers by them. If those went missing it would be discovered far too quickly.

  So he trotted along until he came to a large building—probably an administrative building of some sort—with many flyers parked around it. He chose one of the cheapest flyers, both because it would raise less outcry and because it would have less secure locks and transponder.

  He still had to fry the locks, and when he got in he fried the transponder, too, but carefully, making sure the rest of the link still worked. There was a reason for this.

  He’d noticed certain marks in the Holy Bible book, and he thought he might be able to use them to figure out where Jane and Carl Alterman had gone. But there was another chance. Peace Keepers communicated via links. One of the things that Xander often did, and that Jarl had learned to do by watching it, was alter links so they got the Peace Keepers communication wave.

  Jarl would try to figure the codes and find the Altermans, but if the Peace Keepers found them first, Jarl wanted to know.

  He set the link to scan Peace Keepers’ communications, then piloted the flyer out of the parking lot, first on a low flying pattern, so that if the owner looked out the window, he or she wouldn’t see his own flyer going by.

  When he was a good distance from the building, he gained altitude, merging with and feigning tower control, so that it would look to anyone outside as though he’d turned direction of his vehicle to the local traffic stream.

  The Peace Keepers’ bandwidth kept quiet save for a report of a flyer collision, and reports of catching a local thief.

  Then suddenly, just as Jarl headed down to the shelter of a nearby wood, to try to park and figure out the code in the Holy Bible book, it crackled to life in an exciting way.

  “. . . Have the smugglers surrounded. I repeat, have the smugglers surrounded. Need backup with all possible urgency.”

  There could be other smugglers in the area. Given the vast amount of goods that were forbidden to trade or buy—mostly for the public’s own good—there certainly were. But Jarl felt his hair rising at the back of his neck and, almost instinctively, programmed in the coordinates the Peace Keepers called out.

  It wasn’t so far. Less than twenty miles. From the air he could see them. A dark blue flyer—did they have color altering abilities?—backed up against a cliff face and surrounded by orange flyers in a semi-circle.
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br />   Jane and Carl stood, in poses that indicated they had weapons trained on the police. Behind them, three mu— three people were crouched, next to the flyer. By the light of sunset, which gilded the Peace Keepers flyers to a color that did justice to the popular nickname of pumpkins, it looked like a hopeless situation.

  But his situation had been hopeless on the night they’d rescued him.

  Jarl flew wide of the gathering, and up behind where the cliff was. By the time he found a treed area in which to hide his stolen flyer, it was full dark. He trotted back to the top of the cliff, overlooking the Peace Keepers and the Altermans. The Altermans had very powerful beams tracked on them, so they stood in relief, illuminated, like statues. He’d like, Jarl realized, to make a statue of them like that, defending the defenseless.

  It was the first time he saw Jane clearly. She was young, younger than her husband—was he her husband?—blond, and very pretty. But on her face, as on her husband’s, there were the marks of strain, and a certain resigned expression as though, at heart, they didn’t expect to escape with their lives. They were holding hands, Jarl noted, with the hands free from the burners.

  The Peace Keepers were blaring something about surrendering and submitting themselves to the law. The law, Jarl thought, allowed some people to be created to be used—for their bodies or their minds, but to be used for others’ benefit without ever having a hope at freedom. The law, he thought, needed correction.

  He laid flat on his belly and started firing both burners at the lights that lit up the scene: the bright floods on top of the orange flyers, but also the flyers’ headlights. As soon as he started firing, he started getting return fire. He heard Jane scream, “Keep down,” but he was fairly sure she was speaking to her charges, not him.

  After a few moments, the scene was dark, except for flashlights held by individual Peace Keepers, and the beam of those could not possibly illuminate well enough to let them see what he was about to do. And what he was about to do was first set up rocks, precariously balanced on an incline on the right side of the gathering. There were paths of sorts down, on the right and the left, where the cliff effaced downwards towards the surrounding landscape. Jarl set the rocks up so that with a very little touch they would cascade down the right side path, and made sure they were large enough rocks to make quite a lot of noise falling.

  Then he turned to the left side path, tripping and grabbing onto bushes to keep himself from sliding all the way down and yet managing to be almost completely silent. It brought him behind the nearest orange flyer. The Altermans were on the other side, and he must get to them.

  Getting to them could be done two ways, and he chose the least likely one. He’d gathered from the Altermans’ talk that he was undergrown for his age. Well. He’d make use of that. he dropped to his stomach. The flyers were slightly curved below as well as above, an ovoid shape, which, at rest, touched the ground only in the center of its underside. This left a large area of darkness underneath, if one were able to slither underneath quietly.

  It wouldn’t do for the Altermans. There were five people to get out from behind there. And he didn’t know how agile the mules were. But it would do for him.

  Holding his breath, almost not daring to think, in a way that seemed to him excruciatingly slow, he crawled under the flyer, and out the other side. He approached the group, still crawling on his belly, and got behind Jane, but not before she turned towards him, the burner almost but not quite swinging his way.

  “It is I,” he said, standing up and speaking as close as he could to her ear, and as low as he could. “Jarl Ingemar.”

  She took a deep breath. “Jarl,” she said. She pronounced it properly too, ee-arl. And she smelled different from men, in a way that Jarl could not define, but which hit him like a kick to the head, making him feel suddenly slightly drunk. “How—”

  “No,” he said. “No time. No time to talk about it. I’ve set things up. Here, here is your bag. It has everything but your clothes and toiletry articles in it. I couldn’t bring anything more. They were looking for you at the resort. I thought— When I start the distraction up, you are to leave, crawling under the that flyer on the left. I’ll show you where. All of you. I left a flyer for you,” he told her the coordinates. In the dark, he could see her hand that held Carl’s move. It seemed to him she was tapping on her husband’s wrist with her finger. He thought she was telling him what he told her. “On my mark, be ready to go.”

  “No,” she said. “No. What about you? You must come with us. We’ve talked. We’ll adopt you. Where we live, no one knows what we do. We have no children. My husband . . . He was rescued, years ago. We can’t have children. We’ll adopt you. We’ll erase the markers. You can live a normal life.”

  Jarl closed his eyes. The temptation was almost unbearable. He wanted that normal life. He wanted the freedom he’d seen back at the resort. But if he filed in after them—if no one stayed in the circle to distract the Peace Keepers—they’d be pursued. And, on foot, with the Peace Keepers in flyers, they’d be caught. They’d be killed.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll stay. Don’t worry. I have no intention of dying for this. I’ll get out of it—somehow. And I’ll get back to where I’m supposed to be. Besides, I have friends. Xander and Bartolomeu are supposed to keep me from getting out. They’ll be half killed if I don’t come back. Now, mind you, on your mark.”

  “We do this,” Jane said. “Because we believe that God made man in his image and semblance and that his son once took human form, and therefore every human form is sacred.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Jarl said, slightly impatient. “I have a human form.”

  “You have a human heart,” she said, softly. “And today is the anniversary of the day we believe the son of God was born. They say angels sang in the sky to heraldhim. You’ve been our angel tonight.”

  It was nonsensical and stupid, but he felt tears in his eyes, even if all he could get out was a gruff “go.”

  And then took the rock he’d put in his pocket, and making use of those bio-improved physical abilities, he aimed at where he left the rock pile, and threw. Hard.

  The sound of someone slipping and sliding down the path on the right came. “Go,” Jarl whispered to Jane.

  She got the mules out first, crawling beneath the edge of the flyer, the way Jarl had come in. It was easy, because all the Peace Keepers had run to the end of the other path, hoping to catch Jarl.

  Jarl waited just long enough to make sure that the Altermans were some way away, then he started working on his own escape. He pointed at the nearest flyer, and burned. Then the one next. Then the other. He knew precisely where the power packs were—he’d stolen one of these before. Hitting them in the power packs caused a most satisfying explosion, and then some of the debris caught the other flyers, until even the blue flyer behind him was burning.

  Jarl dove behind it, anyway, for some modicum of protection from the flying debris. Most of the Peace Keepers had run the other way, to avoid the debris, and he could hear them calling frantically for help, so they must have at least one working transponder. He could vaguely see orange flyers converging.

  But they weren’t here, yet, and the other Peace Keepers were too far away to fire at him. The cliff face was craggy and naturally had much better hand- and footholds than the wall around the zipway. And he could move fast. Very fast.

  He climbed the cliff face quickly, thanking whoever had designed him for superhuman speed, coordination and balance. The God of normal humans might have made them in His image and semblance. Jarl’s creators had improved on the design.

  He was at the cliff top before the Peace Keepers’ reinforcements arrived and started sweeping the cliff face with brilliant lights. They found nothing.

  Jarl found nothing as well, when he got to where he’d parked his flyer. He’d hoped to find nothing. He hoped they were well and away.

  As for him, he turned and, tiredly, started to make his way towards Hoffnungshau
s. If he got there in the next twenty-four-hours, perhaps Bartolomeu and Xander would avoid extreme punishment.

  He couldn’t leave for a week after that. Not only was he too sore from the truly spectacular whipping he’d got as punishment, but he wasn’t left unwatched a single night. And he was not just watched by Bartolomeu and Xander, but by a sentinel, outside this door.

  But after a week on his best behavior, vigilance relaxed. Hoffnungshaus did not have the resources to devote that much to their most troublesome charge. And besides, Jarl might escape, but he always came back and of his free will. While they held his friends, he would not disappear for good.

  And so a week later, Jarl escaped and made it back atop the zipway wall, where he’d been when the sirens first sounded.

  When he opened the panel, there was something in there, besides the circuits. At first he thought snow had got in there and not melted, but that was stupid. It would, of course, have melted. Touched, the whiteness revealed itself for a slip of paper. By the light of the holograms he read it. “Dear Jarl, I want you to know you are on our thoughts and in our prayers. On Christmas night, you were our savior angel. I don’t think we can rescue you—even if we found the location of your creche, it would be very well guarded. But we want you to know the mules you rescued that night are your age, quite normal as to intelligence, and will have a chance at a normal life because of you.” It ended with a very odd phrase in quotes, something Jarl had a vague memory of hearing sung in an old holo, “Angels we have heard on high.”

  He let the paper go in the wind, of course. He could not take it back to Hoffnungshaus, but in a way it would always be with him.

  Jarl’s fingers worked furiously, blindly, tying and connecting the circuits in a way they’d never been meant to go, and then tapping a mad dance on the buttons, reprogramming the hologram.