The Red Tape War (1991) Read online

  The Red Tape War

  Jack L Chalker, George Alec Effinger & Mike Resnick

  v3.0-fixed broken paragraphs, garbled text, formatting; by peragwinn 2006-01-27

  INTRODUCTION

  It all began back at the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, at about four o'clock in the morning.

  Jack Chalker and I were sitting in the hotel lobby, talking about one thing or another, and since he hadn't yet written twenty-odd best-sellers, and I hadn't yet written any best-sellers at all or won any literary awards (all oversights that God put aright during the ensuing decade), and publishers, while not avoiding us, still weren't beating a path to our doors, we thought that it might be fun to collaborate on a book while we had some free time on our hands.

  I don't remember now who suggested it, but before the evening was over we decided that it would be even more fun to invite a third party and do a round-robin novel, one where each of us tried to stick the next guy in line with a near-insoluble problem. It still sounded like a good idea the next morning (mornings arrive at about 2:00 p.m. at conventions), so we decided to go ahead and recruit a third partner.

  The first writer we approached agreed immediately, then thought better of it and withdrew from the project before nightfall. The second looked at us like we were crazy, explained that relative unknowns such as ourselves could never hope to sell such a book, and semi-respectfully declined. The third writer didn't know any better, and agreed.

  As a show of good faith, I offered to write the opening chapter. (It also meant that everyone else had to copy the style I chose, but nobody ever figured this out. Come to think of it, nobody ever copied it, either.) As I recall, we flipped coins to determine the order for the rest of the book.

  We got about halfway through the project in something less than six months, and then it bogged down. The chapters our collaborator wrote didn't quite fill the bill, so we paid him off and decided to find yet another partner—but then Jack started churning out best-sellers with monotonous regularity, and I signed a pair of multi-book contracts, and we put the round-robin on the back burner until we could catch up with our commitments, and suddenly we looked at the calendar and it was 1989 and not a word had been written on The Red Tape War since 1981.

  We met again at the World Science Fiction Convention, which had made its rounds of the world and was back in Boston, where it seems to settle every ninth year, and decided that it was time to resurrect the project. The problem was that we not only needed a third writer, but our status within the field had changed: Jack had just turned down a million-dollar offer from one of his publishers, and was churning out best-sellers on the average of one every four months; and I had just emerged from a very successful auction of my latest book, and was clutching the Hugo Award for Best Short Story of 1989 to my bosom.

  So what we needed now was a writer of at least equal prestige within the community, one with an excellent sense of style and humor, and one who was willing to drop everything he was doing and go right to work on the project. Not only that, but he had to be skilled enough to totally rewrite the chapters our departed collaborator had submitted without removing anything that Jack or I had built upon in future chapters—all in exchange for third billing on the cover.

  "Where will we ever find anyone that naive?" asked Jack.

  At precisely that moment, George Alec Effinger walked by, hugging his Best Novelette Hugo to his bosom—and after two hours of our appealing to his ego, his bank account, and his desire to ever see another sunset (writers don't wake up early enough to see sunrises), he finally agreed.

  The rest, as they say, is history—in this case, the history of Millard Fillmore Pierce (all three of him).

  —Mike Resnick

  P.S.—It belatedly occurs to me that you might be interested in knowing who wrote which chapters. We'll let you guess for a while, but we'll slip the answer in somewhere along the way.

  "Goddammit!" snapped Pierce.

  "What is it now?" asked his navigational computer.

  "You cheated!"

  "Did not."

  "Like hell you didn't!" said Pierce. "You moved your bishop one square to the left when I wasn't looking."

  "Oh, that," said the computer.

  "Yes—that!"

  "I was ethically compelled to do it," said the computer in a sullen whine.

  "What are you talking about?" demanded Pierce. "I'm supposed to try to beat you, aren't I?"

  asked the computer.

  "So?"

  "So if I didn't move my bishop, you would have announced mate in six more moves. I had to move it."

  "But you broke the rules!" said Pierce.

  "Trying to beat you was a higher imperative," said the computer. "It was simply a value judgment. All Model

  XB-223 navigational computers are qualified to make—"

  "Never mind," interrupted. Pierce disgustedly. He leaned back and looked at the viewscreen, which showed nothing but a few stray stars in the distance. "You know, things couldn't get this screwed up by chance," he said, more to himself than to the computer, which in Pierce's opinion was merely the latest in a long line of things that had been screwed up. "It took a long, hard, concerted effort."

  Which, of course, was true.

  There are all kinds of truths, however. Certain truths are timeless and immutable, as in: There is no crisis so urgent today that it won't become even more urgent tomorrow. It was the maxim that seemed to provide the motive force for the entire galaxy.

  Most truths, though, are ephemeral. When Wee Willie Keeler told a mob of boyishly devoted worshipers that the secret of success in life was to hit 'em where they ain't, it was a valid statement for a member of the 1901 Brooklyn Dodgers—but sixty-seven centuries later, poor old Willie would have been hard-pressed to find anyplace where they weren't.

  Despite Pierce's current spare surroundings, the galaxy was getting crowded, and life in that galaxy had grown more complicated in geometric leaps and bounds. For, to paraphrase J. B. S.

  Haldane, the universe not only held more red tape than anyone imagined; it held more red tape than anyone could imagine.

  There were, for example, 132,476 mining worlds; the ownership of all but six was in dispute.

  There were five faster-than-light drives on the market; royalties for four of them were being held in escrow pending some 1,300 separate legal actions. The Spiral Fed—that loose economic federation of worlds on one of the Milky Way's spiral arms—possessed some 73 races and 1,786

  worlds, allpledged to each other's economic welfare and territorial integrity; there were upward of 5,000 separate and distinct military alliances in the Spiral Fed, and on any given day there were more than 200 different economic boycotts and embargoes in effect among the Fed worlds.

  Language posed another problem. It wasn't bad enough that there were more than 20,000

  intelligent races in the galaxy. Sooner or later someone could have programmed a computer to translate 20,000 varieties of groans, grunts, squawks, squeaks, roars and gurgles. But only seven worlds possessed planetary languages. The inhabitants of Earth, to name one of the less extreme examples, spoke 67 languages and more than 1,200 dialects, and her colonies had added another 27 languages over the centuries.

  Indeed, far from the world government that so many utopian writers had piously predicted, nationalism—on Earth and elsewhere—flourished as never before. The Indian planet of Gromm, for example, traded with the insectile population of Sirius VII and the purple reptiles of Beta Cancri II—but Pakistanis were shot on sight. The Cook County Democratic machine of Illinois had founded a colony on the distant world of New Daley, which interacted with the rest of humanity only during voter registration drives every fou
rth year. Kenya and Tanzania jointly opened a half dozen worlds to commercial exploitation, but the border between the two nations remained' closed. And most of the other races made humanity look like amateurs in matters of self-interest.

  And, reflected Pierce, despite it all, it was the little things that finally got to a man—like finding himself in the middle of nowhere because his computer had been so intent upon cheating him at chess that it hadn't paid any attention to where they were going.

  "It's not my fault," said the computer petulantly.

  "What's not your fault?" asked Pierce.

  "Whatever you're thinking about. Whenever you're quiet like that, you always wind up blaming me for something."

  "Forget it," said Pierce.

  "I try to do my job," sniffed the computer. "I really do.. It's not as if I were free to disengage myself from the instruments and walk around the decks like some people I could mention."

  "It's all right," said Pierce with a sigh. "I'm not mad at you."

  "You're sure?"

  "I'm sure."

  "Good," said the computer. "I feel much better now that we've had this little chat. By the way, have you got time to receive a Priority One message?"

  "Is one coming in?" asked Pierce, suddenly alert. "They've been trying to raise me for the past ten minutes," answered the computer.

  "Ten minutes! I thought you said it was Priority One?"

  “It is."

  "You're supposed to patch those through to me immediately, even in a war zone!"

  "But you looked so thoughtful and morose, I didn't want to disturb you. And I am, after all, a Model XB-223 navigational computer, qualified to make value judgments. And besides, you were mad at me."

  "Put it through."

  "Are you still mad?" asked the computer coyly. "No, goddammit!" bellowed Pierce.

  "I wish you could see the reading I just took of your blood pressure."

  "May I please receive my Priority One message?" asked Pierce, struggling to control his voice and wonder-ing how the hell to control his blood pressure. "If it's not too much trouble for you, that is? I wouldn't want to cause you any inconvenience."

  "No trouble at all," said the computer, suddenly all business. "After all, it's my job. In ion storms and meteor showers, come nova or supernova, nothing shall stay the XB-223s from their appointed duties. Had you ever heard that before?"

  "No," said Pierce. "I never had."

  "I made it up," said the computer proudly. "I think it has a certain poetic nobility about it, don't you?" The message?" said Pierce wearily.

  "Ah, yes, the message," said the computer. "It's coming to you from Earth, by the way. It originates in Woodstock, Illinois, an absolutely lovely little town, population 31,203, mean temperature of 53 degrees, very near the Des Plaines River, which you'll be interested to know has recently undergone antipollution treatments and now abounds in bass, bluegills, and—"

  "The message!"

  "Right. The message. By all means. Let me just put it on visual display here." Suddenly the computer giggled. "Oh, that tickles! You wouldn't think a computer could be ticklish, especially a sophisticated, highly advanced model like the XB-223, but—"

  “The message!"

  "Very well. It's coming in now, on Screen 3."

  "Screen 3 is blank," said Pierce.

  "Some people are well bred," said the computer. "Some people have manners. Some people say `thank you' when someone offers to do them a favor, even if it's only a lowly XB-223

  navigational computer with no voting rights or sexuality or—"

  "Thank you," interrupted Pierce.

  "You're welcome."

  Suddenly the viewscreen lit up, displaying a hologram of a middle-aged woman in stern dress and sterner makeup.

  "It's about time!" she said ominously.

  "I'm sorry, ma'am," answered Pierce. "The computer—"

  "Ma'am is a contraction of madam," interrupted the woman. "I am not a madam.”

  "I'm sorry, sir," said Pierce, flustered.

  "Do I look like a sir to you?" she demanded.

  "Go ahead—tell her," whispered the computer.

  "No, Supervisor," said Pierce.

  "That's better," said the woman. "Now suppose we start again—and do it according to form this time."

  "Millard Fillmore Pierce, Class 2 Arbiter, receiving your message, Supervisor."

  "Very well, Arbiter Pierce. This is Supervisor Collier with a Priority One message."

  "I know," said Pierce.

  "Of course you know," said Supervisor Collier irritably. "But the protocol was created for a reason, and we must observe it at all times."

  "Yes, Supervisor."

  "Now, then, Pierce," she continued, "I have a new assignment for you, which takes precedence over those on which you are now working. Where are you located at this moment?"

  "I'm not quite sure."

  "You're what?"

  "It's a long story," said Pierce. "Can you just tell me what the assignment entails?"

  "All right," said Supervisor Collier, absently tugging at her left earlobe, which was considerably larger than its counterpart. "Now listen carefully, Pierce. This connec-tion is using a lot of energy, and I don't want to have to repeat everything twice."

  "Right."

  "As you may or may not know, a minor war has broken out between Cathia and Galladrial, which for our purposes we will call Aldebaran IX and Komonos V. Earth has declared itself to be neutral in this conflict, although of course we do support Galladrial in its war against the heathen totalitarians of Atra II."

  "Of course," said Pierce.

  "To continue: Promenade, which we shall officially term Lambda Gamma IV, commissioned a battleship from the state of Hawaii, which as you know is on Earth. Are you following me so far?"

  Pierce nodded.

  "Good. Now, it seems that Promenade sold the battleship to Springfall, which we shall officially term Belora VII. Springfall contracted to deliver the ship to Cathia, but had to set it down on the neutral human colony of New Glasgow for minor repairs. New Glasgow happens to be in the war zone, and when Galladrial found out that the ship was there, they sent in a squadron of fighter ships to destroy it."

  "Where do I come in?" asked Pierce, thoroughly confused.

  "I'm getting to that. It seems that seventeen humans sustained injuries during the attack.

  Worse still, none of them were Hawaiians." She paused dramatically. "Now, five were merely civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the other twelve people were actively effecting repairs on the ship." She paused again, this time to catch her breath. "So the question is this: do we give them battle pay and free hospitalization despite the fact that we're not at war with either of the parties in conflict? Do we settle for handling it through. Workman's Compensation? Or do we present our grievances, and a bill, to the government of Qalladrial?

  Your job is to appraise the situation and send me a recommendation that I can act upon."

  "Why not just ask someone on the scene?" asked Pierce.

  "Chain of command was established for a reason, Pierce," she said severely. "You will interview people on the scene. I will act after analyzing your report."

  "Whatever you say," sighed Pierce.

  "Fine. Good luck, Arbiter Pierce. Supervisor Collier signing—Oh, by the way, have you figured out where you are yet?"

  The computer posted a readout on Screen 2.

  "The Pirollian Sector, as near as I can tell," said Pierce.

  "Interesting place," said Supervisor Collier. "Lots of activity."

  "No, Supervisor," said Pierce. "There's no activity here at all. It's all empty and deserted."

  The screen went blank.

  "You're sure we're in the Pirollian Sector?" Pierce asked the computer.

  "Absolutely. XB-223 navigational computers are in-capable of error."

  "How did we get here, then?"

  "Now you're going to be angry with me again,"
whined the computer.

  "Not again—still." Pierce paused. "Fix me up a sandwich, will you?"

  "I don't think that would be wise," said the computer. "Why not? I'm going to have a little lunch while you lay in a course for New Glasgow."

  "But it may be an hour or two before I can pinpoint our position and lay in the course," said the computer. "We XB-223s pride ourselves on our pinpoint accuracy."

  "So it'll take an hour. Big deal. Now make me a sandwich."

  "I still don't think it's wise."

  "Why the hell not?" demanded Pierce.

  "Well, I've only read about human physiology, you understand, so my knowledge of your body is really based only on hearsay, so to speak. But if you're going to have to fight for your life, I don't think you'll be at your most efficient shortly after glutting on sandwiches."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "There's a dreadnought of unknown origin approaching us at light speeds," replied the computer. "Of course, it may prove to be friendly, but on the not-unlikely supposition that it isn't, you may soon be put to the ultimate test. And, not to put too fine a point on it, Millard, you're such a skinny little wimp that you're probably going to need all the strength at your disposal if you're to stand any chance, however slight, of surviving this encounter. And, knowing how overeating tends to sap the energy of the human body, I think that—"

  "Back up a minute," interrupted Pierce. "What kind of ship is it?"

  "I haven't the slightest idea," said the computer. "After all, I am merely an XB-223

  navigational computer. Identifying dreadnoughts is another union."

  "Great," muttered Pierce, grinding his teeth. "All right. Raise the nearest human base on Screen 3."

  "I didn't hear the magic word."

  "Please."

  "Consider it done."

  A moment later the image of an elderly man appeared on the screen.

  "This is Millard Fillmore Pierce, Class 2 Arbiter," said Pierce with a note of urgency in his voice. "I'm facing a potentially dangerous situation and require immediate assistance."

  "Benito Lammers here," said the old man. "What can I do for you, Arbiter Pierce?"

  "I'm having my computer transmit a visual readout of a ship that is approaching me for unknown purposes. Can you identify it?"