Eric Flint - Genie Out of the Bottle, Angielskie [EN](4)(2)
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Genie Out of the Bottle
Table of Contents
GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Genie Out of the Bottle
from
Cosmic Tales II
Adventures In Far Futures
Edited by
T.K.F. Weisskopf
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any
resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by T.K.F. Weisskopf. All stories copyright by the authors.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-7434-9887-9
Cover art by Bob Eggleton
Page 1
First printing, February 2005
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication:
For the next generation,
Katie, Max, Peyton & Jackson
Hannah & Owen
And, of course, for that great explorer
Grandma Vera
GENIE OUT OF THE
BOTTLE
Eric Flint lives in Indiana, Dave Freer lives in South Africa, but they both hang out at Baen's Bar,
at bar.baen.com, which is where they met and began their collaborations. This is a tale set in the
world of the authors' novels Rats, Bats and Vats and The Rats, the Bats & The Ugly.
Dave Freer and Eric Flint
Prologue
"When shall these three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?"
The dark, hook-nosed lab-coated woman looked as if she might have been one of the witches. And,
had this been one of the world of Harmony and Reason's updated Shakespearean plays at the New
Globe theatre, the setting too would have seemed appropriate. What she leaned over was no cauldron
with simmering eye of newt and toe of frog, but three tissue-cloning vats with their attendant electronics
and glassware.
The fetuses developing under the glass covers all looked like unborn rats.
Page 2
One of them was.
Mari-Lou Evans, once, twenty-four frozen light-years ago, of Stratford-on-Avon, and, like her boss, a
loyal part of the New Globe Thespian society, knew her prescribed reply. "
When the hurlyburly's
done, when the battle's lost and won
," she intoned sepulchrally. Then she sighed. "If it ever is, Sanjay.
If we don't just lose."
The colony's chief biologist shrugged and pulled a wry face. "Do you think I'd be playing God if we
faced any real alternatives?" She pointed to the third breeding vat. "No need for another standard human
control, Mari-Lou. We won't be breeding up any more vatbrats for a while. We need to gear up the
equipment for mass production of that long-nose elephant-shrew mix. The army has put in impossible
demands for quantity. If it tests out fine on emergence, then we're going to have to set up a production
line for the creatures."
The chief geneticist nodded. She pointed to the third vat. "The ultrasounds of the bat's gastrointestinal
development don't look good, Sanjay. We're going to have to tinker and tweak those genes a bit more in
my opinion. Perhaps cherry-pick from the
Tadarida
. It's the size problem. The bigger bats are
fruit-eaters, not insectivores."
"Destroy the fetus and start again, Mari-Lou. Make it smaller if need be. The army will just have to take
what it can get."
It was the geneticist's turn to pull a wry face. "I hate pulling the plug at this stage."
"And I hate making them intelligent . . . to go and be cannon fodder. I hate implanting alien-built software
and cybernetics that I don't properly understand into their heads. But we don't have a lot of choices.
Humans are too slow to produce, and the Magh' are advancing faster than we can retreat, never mind
stop them. The council of Shareholders are now talking about introducing compulsory conscription for
everyone between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Even that won't be enough. We need more
fighters."
The geneticist knew that for a truth. The Magh' tide, even with the assistance of the alien Korozhet and
their wonderful new devices, was proving very difficult to stem. She shifted subject. "What are you
planning on using for language download?"
Her fellow amateur thespian shrugged. "It's just got to be a spoken source of vocabulary in
computer-friendly format for the voice synthesizer. We're a bit short of material so I was going to
download the Complete Shakespeare, and the D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan recordings. That should
do."
Mari-Lou couldn't help but smile. "Shakespearean rats, imagining themselves to be Julius Caesar."
Sanjay acknowledged a hit. "Well, they'll make good soldiers anyway."
She was wrong about that. Both language and genetics shape character. They made merry wives,
bawds, rogues and rude artisans, or occasionally pirates. The Rats were great Magh' killers.
They made terrible soldiers.
* * *
In the months that followed, conscription was introduced. So, to the front lines, went the newly produced
Page 3
and uplifted elephant-shrew troops with their soft-cyber implants. Despite the fact that they weren't even
rodents, everyone called the small Siamese-cat-sized creatures "rats." The rats and conscripts slowed the
advance of the insectlike Magh' invaders . . . but it wasn't stopped. Rumor had it that genetically modified
and soft-cyber uplifted bats were about to be added to the war effort. The colony, planned as the new
Fabianist utopia in which harmony and reason would finally triumph, seethed with such rumors. It also
seethed with frenetic parties, and young men and women in ill-fitting new uniforms.
Harmony and reason were notably absent.
1
A small plane rose slowly, her twin airscrews biting the thicker-than-earth air. The colony—mankind's
brave leap into the future—had meant that they had to live in the past. Technology had to be
self-sustaining without the interreliant industries of Earth. Some things had gone back a long way—like
the propeller-driven aircraft.
Conrad Fitzhugh looked out through the hole in the rear fuselage where the rear door had once been.
There was smoke on the southern horizon, where the front lines lay. They'd taken Van Klomp's plane for
a look. The alien invaders' scorpiaries had spread their red spirals, twinkling behind their force fields, all
the way to the Arafura Sea.
Fitz pulled his gaze inward. He'd see the war front soon enough from a lot closer. He looked
nostalgically at the battered little aircraft, and at his fellow sky divers. This would be the last jump for
most of them. Bobby Van Klomp had finally gotten the go-ahead to form a paratroop unit. Collins and
Hawkes were on a final pass from OCS before being posted to the front. Young Cunningham had just
gotten his call-up papers. And Conrad had finally decided to join the next intake at OCS in three weeks'
time, despite Candice. He'd have to explain to her tonight. He'd already booked a private table at Chez
Henri-Pierre.
He tightened his harness. One of the best things about skydiving was that it stopped him thinking about
her, at least for a while. Every man needs a rest from confusion.
* * *
Confusion, smoke, dust and fear. And a dead twitching thing, ichor draining from the severed chelicerae
to mingle with the blood in the muddy trench. Pseudochitin armor couldn't cover the 'scorps' joints. And,
once they'd learned to operate within the constraints of a personal slowshield, none of the Maggots, not
even the 'scorps, could match rat speed. But there were always so many of them.
Ariel twitched her whiskers and fastidiously began to clean them. All the Maggots here were dead. So
were the human troops.
Page 4
Another rat sauntered across the trench, pausing to rifle a dead second lieutenant's pockets. He shook
his head glumly at the pickings. "I' faith, these whoreson new officers aren't any better than the last lot.
Poorly provisioned. What's a rat to loot in such poverty?"
"You could try looting a Maggot, Gobbo," said a plump little rat leaning against a sandbag stack, picking
her teeth with a sliver of trench knife.
Gobbo grunted. Shoved a few things into his pouch and tossed the rest. "Even thinner pickings,
methinks, my little Pitti-Sing."
The plump little rat considered Gobbo from under lowered lashes. Gently arched her long tail. "Of
course, if it is less thin pickings thou art after,
I
wouldn't try a Maggot," she said archly.
A rat peered out from a bunker. A particularly long-nosed rat with a rather villainous cast to one eye.
"Zounds! 'Tis all done then? I fought them off bravely."
Ariel and the others snickered. "In every doughty deed, ha, ha! He always took the lead, ha ha!" she
caroled. No sensible rat wanted to fight Maggots, but Dick Deadeye took discretion to the ridiculous.
Deadeye drew himself up. "I was foremost in the fight!"
Ariel snorted. "The first and foremost flight, ha, ha!" she said, showing teeth.
Deadeye certainly wasn't about to ruin his reputation for staying out of trouble by rising to the bait from
this particular rat-girl. Ariel might be smaller than most, but she made up for it with pure ferocity. He took
in the scene instead. The dead lieutenant, with his turned-out pockets, the several dead human grunts, a
dead 'scorp and the body parts of several more of the aliens. "Methinks we'd better send a runner back
to let them know we need human reinforcements."
Rats had no problem with Deadeye's being a coward. It was his being a brown-noser that was going to
get him killed. "Art crazed?" snapped Ariel, irritably. "'Tis fully two hours to grog ration. What need have
we to alert them before 'tis needful? They'd make us work."
Gobbo nodded, sauntered over to Pitti-Sing and leered down at her. "Methinks you can hang me up as
a sign at a brothel, before I do that, eh, wench?"
Deadeye looked lecherously and rather hopelessly at the two rat-girls. "Well, then I must go myself."
Gobbo yawned artistically. "Methinks the whoreson fancies a bit of time away from the front."
"The swasher can take himself away from my front," said Pitti-Sing, trailing her tail along Gobbo's
shoulders.
"'Tis not an ill-thought-of idea, mind," said Ariel, consideringly.
Gobbo grinned toothily. "Ha. Ariel, I had not seen you flee a fight. Can it be that you've abandoned me
to go with this swaggering knave? You saucy jade!"
Ariel chuckled. "Pitti-Sing, you're in for a grave disappointment with this swasher. He's all blow and no
poignard. I'd like to stay and watch. But I might be able to buy some chocolate back there," she said,
longingly. "The vatbrats sometimes have some. Give, Gobbo. The money you found in that top pocket."
Page 5
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Genie Out of the Bottle
Table of Contents
GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Genie Out of the Bottle
from
Cosmic Tales II
Adventures In Far Futures
Edited by
T.K.F. Weisskopf
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any
resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by T.K.F. Weisskopf. All stories copyright by the authors.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-7434-9887-9
Cover art by Bob Eggleton
Page 1
First printing, February 2005
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication:
For the next generation,
Katie, Max, Peyton & Jackson
Hannah & Owen
And, of course, for that great explorer
Grandma Vera
GENIE OUT OF THE
BOTTLE
Eric Flint lives in Indiana, Dave Freer lives in South Africa, but they both hang out at Baen's Bar,
at bar.baen.com, which is where they met and began their collaborations. This is a tale set in the
world of the authors' novels Rats, Bats and Vats and The Rats, the Bats & The Ugly.
Dave Freer and Eric Flint
Prologue
"When shall these three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?"
The dark, hook-nosed lab-coated woman looked as if she might have been one of the witches. And,
had this been one of the world of Harmony and Reason's updated Shakespearean plays at the New
Globe theatre, the setting too would have seemed appropriate. What she leaned over was no cauldron
with simmering eye of newt and toe of frog, but three tissue-cloning vats with their attendant electronics
and glassware.
The fetuses developing under the glass covers all looked like unborn rats.
Page 2
One of them was.
Mari-Lou Evans, once, twenty-four frozen light-years ago, of Stratford-on-Avon, and, like her boss, a
loyal part of the New Globe Thespian society, knew her prescribed reply. "
When the hurlyburly's
done, when the battle's lost and won
," she intoned sepulchrally. Then she sighed. "If it ever is, Sanjay.
If we don't just lose."
The colony's chief biologist shrugged and pulled a wry face. "Do you think I'd be playing God if we
faced any real alternatives?" She pointed to the third breeding vat. "No need for another standard human
control, Mari-Lou. We won't be breeding up any more vatbrats for a while. We need to gear up the
equipment for mass production of that long-nose elephant-shrew mix. The army has put in impossible
demands for quantity. If it tests out fine on emergence, then we're going to have to set up a production
line for the creatures."
The chief geneticist nodded. She pointed to the third vat. "The ultrasounds of the bat's gastrointestinal
development don't look good, Sanjay. We're going to have to tinker and tweak those genes a bit more in
my opinion. Perhaps cherry-pick from the
Tadarida
. It's the size problem. The bigger bats are
fruit-eaters, not insectivores."
"Destroy the fetus and start again, Mari-Lou. Make it smaller if need be. The army will just have to take
what it can get."
It was the geneticist's turn to pull a wry face. "I hate pulling the plug at this stage."
"And I hate making them intelligent . . . to go and be cannon fodder. I hate implanting alien-built software
and cybernetics that I don't properly understand into their heads. But we don't have a lot of choices.
Humans are too slow to produce, and the Magh' are advancing faster than we can retreat, never mind
stop them. The council of Shareholders are now talking about introducing compulsory conscription for
everyone between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Even that won't be enough. We need more
fighters."
The geneticist knew that for a truth. The Magh' tide, even with the assistance of the alien Korozhet and
their wonderful new devices, was proving very difficult to stem. She shifted subject. "What are you
planning on using for language download?"
Her fellow amateur thespian shrugged. "It's just got to be a spoken source of vocabulary in
computer-friendly format for the voice synthesizer. We're a bit short of material so I was going to
download the Complete Shakespeare, and the D'Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan recordings. That should
do."
Mari-Lou couldn't help but smile. "Shakespearean rats, imagining themselves to be Julius Caesar."
Sanjay acknowledged a hit. "Well, they'll make good soldiers anyway."
She was wrong about that. Both language and genetics shape character. They made merry wives,
bawds, rogues and rude artisans, or occasionally pirates. The Rats were great Magh' killers.
They made terrible soldiers.
* * *
In the months that followed, conscription was introduced. So, to the front lines, went the newly produced
Page 3
and uplifted elephant-shrew troops with their soft-cyber implants. Despite the fact that they weren't even
rodents, everyone called the small Siamese-cat-sized creatures "rats." The rats and conscripts slowed the
advance of the insectlike Magh' invaders . . . but it wasn't stopped. Rumor had it that genetically modified
and soft-cyber uplifted bats were about to be added to the war effort. The colony, planned as the new
Fabianist utopia in which harmony and reason would finally triumph, seethed with such rumors. It also
seethed with frenetic parties, and young men and women in ill-fitting new uniforms.
Harmony and reason were notably absent.
1
A small plane rose slowly, her twin airscrews biting the thicker-than-earth air. The colony—mankind's
brave leap into the future—had meant that they had to live in the past. Technology had to be
self-sustaining without the interreliant industries of Earth. Some things had gone back a long way—like
the propeller-driven aircraft.
Conrad Fitzhugh looked out through the hole in the rear fuselage where the rear door had once been.
There was smoke on the southern horizon, where the front lines lay. They'd taken Van Klomp's plane for
a look. The alien invaders' scorpiaries had spread their red spirals, twinkling behind their force fields, all
the way to the Arafura Sea.
Fitz pulled his gaze inward. He'd see the war front soon enough from a lot closer. He looked
nostalgically at the battered little aircraft, and at his fellow sky divers. This would be the last jump for
most of them. Bobby Van Klomp had finally gotten the go-ahead to form a paratroop unit. Collins and
Hawkes were on a final pass from OCS before being posted to the front. Young Cunningham had just
gotten his call-up papers. And Conrad had finally decided to join the next intake at OCS in three weeks'
time, despite Candice. He'd have to explain to her tonight. He'd already booked a private table at Chez
Henri-Pierre.
He tightened his harness. One of the best things about skydiving was that it stopped him thinking about
her, at least for a while. Every man needs a rest from confusion.
* * *
Confusion, smoke, dust and fear. And a dead twitching thing, ichor draining from the severed chelicerae
to mingle with the blood in the muddy trench. Pseudochitin armor couldn't cover the 'scorps' joints. And,
once they'd learned to operate within the constraints of a personal slowshield, none of the Maggots, not
even the 'scorps, could match rat speed. But there were always so many of them.
Ariel twitched her whiskers and fastidiously began to clean them. All the Maggots here were dead. So
were the human troops.
Page 4
Another rat sauntered across the trench, pausing to rifle a dead second lieutenant's pockets. He shook
his head glumly at the pickings. "I' faith, these whoreson new officers aren't any better than the last lot.
Poorly provisioned. What's a rat to loot in such poverty?"
"You could try looting a Maggot, Gobbo," said a plump little rat leaning against a sandbag stack, picking
her teeth with a sliver of trench knife.
Gobbo grunted. Shoved a few things into his pouch and tossed the rest. "Even thinner pickings,
methinks, my little Pitti-Sing."
The plump little rat considered Gobbo from under lowered lashes. Gently arched her long tail. "Of
course, if it is less thin pickings thou art after,
I
wouldn't try a Maggot," she said archly.
A rat peered out from a bunker. A particularly long-nosed rat with a rather villainous cast to one eye.
"Zounds! 'Tis all done then? I fought them off bravely."
Ariel and the others snickered. "In every doughty deed, ha, ha! He always took the lead, ha ha!" she
caroled. No sensible rat wanted to fight Maggots, but Dick Deadeye took discretion to the ridiculous.
Deadeye drew himself up. "I was foremost in the fight!"
Ariel snorted. "The first and foremost flight, ha, ha!" she said, showing teeth.
Deadeye certainly wasn't about to ruin his reputation for staying out of trouble by rising to the bait from
this particular rat-girl. Ariel might be smaller than most, but she made up for it with pure ferocity. He took
in the scene instead. The dead lieutenant, with his turned-out pockets, the several dead human grunts, a
dead 'scorp and the body parts of several more of the aliens. "Methinks we'd better send a runner back
to let them know we need human reinforcements."
Rats had no problem with Deadeye's being a coward. It was his being a brown-noser that was going to
get him killed. "Art crazed?" snapped Ariel, irritably. "'Tis fully two hours to grog ration. What need have
we to alert them before 'tis needful? They'd make us work."
Gobbo nodded, sauntered over to Pitti-Sing and leered down at her. "Methinks you can hang me up as
a sign at a brothel, before I do that, eh, wench?"
Deadeye looked lecherously and rather hopelessly at the two rat-girls. "Well, then I must go myself."
Gobbo yawned artistically. "Methinks the whoreson fancies a bit of time away from the front."
"The swasher can take himself away from my front," said Pitti-Sing, trailing her tail along Gobbo's
shoulders.
"'Tis not an ill-thought-of idea, mind," said Ariel, consideringly.
Gobbo grinned toothily. "Ha. Ariel, I had not seen you flee a fight. Can it be that you've abandoned me
to go with this swaggering knave? You saucy jade!"
Ariel chuckled. "Pitti-Sing, you're in for a grave disappointment with this swasher. He's all blow and no
poignard. I'd like to stay and watch. But I might be able to buy some chocolate back there," she said,
longingly. "The vatbrats sometimes have some. Give, Gobbo. The money you found in that top pocket."
Page 5
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