like dandruff being shrugged off the zepp’s scalp.
Dad’s harrier screamed over to the battery that had attacked me, flipping and rolling as he opened up on it, pouring fire down until the side of the platform nearest me literally began to melt, liquefying under withering fire and dripping molten metal in rivulets down the side of the platform. I could see men and mechas running to the affected area, moving up replacement guns, firing on Dad, and then the harrier screamed past me. I caught a glimpse of Dad, in his augmented reflex helmet and crash-suit. He seemed to be saluting me, though he went past so fast I couldn’t say for sure. I saluted back and engaged the zepp’s props, setting a course east.
I put the zepp on autopilot and turned all the sensor arrays up to maximum paranoia and then went back to watch the dogfight between the harrier and the platform from the rear of the gondola.
Something had hit Dad. There was smoke rising from the mid-section of the harrier, just behind the cockpit. Those things could soak up a lot of damage and still keep turning over, but it was clear, even from this distance, that Dad wouldn’t last forever. I found some binox in an overhead compartment and watched Dad dodge and weave. I wanted to call him before I got out of range of our towers, but I didn’t want to distract him.
It didn’t matter. One of the questing, bent fingers of lightning seized the harrier and followed it as it tried to circle away. Smoke poured from the harrier’s engines. The lighting stopped and the harrier began a lazy, wobbly glide toward the platform, Dad’s last charge, a suicide trajectory. Two missiles lifted off from the platform, arcing for the harrier, and they caught it before it could crash.
My heart thudded in my ears, audible over the growl of the zepp’s turbines. I dialed the binox up higher, letting them auto-track, then switching back over to manual because they kept focusing on the damned
shrapnel
, and I want to find Dad.
Maybe I saw him. It looked like a man in a crash-suit, there amid the rolling smoke and the expanding cloud of metal and ceramic. Looked like a man, maybe, for an instant, lost amid the smoke. Maybe he landed on the platform and fought his way free—or was taken prisoner.
Maybe Dad was still immortal.
In any event, I still was.
Part 2: No Privacy At All Around This Place!
THE CULTISTS DIDN'T MIND THAT I keep the Carousel up and running. Twenty years before, I’d set it down before the old administrative building of the college where they had their headquarters, and they’d never once asked me to shut it down.
Oh, sure, they put a wire in my head, did it on the first day. That wasn’t optional: if you stayed with the cultists, you needed to have the wire in your head. It was for the good of the colony.
But being immortal has its advantages, besides the obvious ones. My brain just kind of
ate
that wire—denatured it, anyway. It took a couple weeks, so for the first little while, I was just like all the other cultists, a transceiver for human emotion. I remember that period hazily, but it wasn’t altogether terrible. Once you were attuned to the emotions of everyone else in town, everything was kind of . . . It’s hard to describe. Huge. Mellow. The emotional state of three million people has a certain inertia, and it’s hard to shift in one direction or another. It dampens all the extremes. Sometimes you’d get a
little
happy, or a
little
miserable, but never those raging, spectacular blisses and rages.
It was probably good therapy for me, just then. It probably helped me get by without Dad.
But like I say, it only took a couple weeks for the wire to lose its efficacy. I could still feel a little tickle that let me know, more or less, what the groupmind was thinking, but it never loomed up large. And I could get as angry or happy as I wanted and my neighbors never seemed to notice, so I guess I wasn’t transmitting much.
Here’s what