In Father Christmas's Court
Tavis Allison
Asimov's (2002-12)

Tavis Allison, an alumnus of both Hampshire College and Clarion West, has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He and his wife, Jennifer Manly—a neuropsychologist—live in Manhattan with their newborn son, Javi Owen Allison. Mr. Allison has written essays and criticism for the New York Review of Science Fiction and his research has appeared in the Journal of International Neuropsychology. "In Father Christmas's Court" is his first fiction sale.

On the night before the air raid, the wind came cold and steady over the Appalachians, blowing leaves from the trees to carpet the ground. In the morning, the newly fallen leaves were the first things Thomas saw. The second was that, while he slept, the guard assigned to him had been changed. The switch disturbed him; he had learned the importance of a consistent routine, and no change could be good when everything was running smoothly. He frowned and knuckled sleep from the corners of his eyes as the new woman unlocked the door to his room.
"Up'n at 'em!" Thomas obediently maneuvered his long legs out the doorway and hopped down to the ground. As always, when he removed his weight the branch from which his room was suspended sprung upward. He spilled into her arms, the night's confinement having left his legs too numb to support him.
She grunted with disgust and pushed him away. The butt of the smartrifle slung over her shoulder caught him on the cheek, a hollowly booming pain that promised to become a black eye. "Jesus Christ," she said, watching him grab and cling to the tree trunk. "Ain't you a sight."
Soon he found he could stand, despite the pins and needles sparkling down his thighs. "Good morning, ma'am," he said, and dug into the pocket of his overalls for a tip.
She tucked the coin away and handed him a rake. He set to work, raking the night's leaves into careful piles. At first, she watched closely, smirking, but became bored even before he had finished the area right around his room. The clearing was his personal duty, not part of the acres he got paid for, but that didn't make doing it right any less important. Even when he knew his guard's attention was elsewhere, Thomas was a very diligent worker.
The teeth of the rake rasped in the dirt. He felt a warm ache where his left thumb met his palm, and saw that the blister there had popped. He tore away the ghostly white flap of epidermis, exposing the raw pink skin underneath to the air. Soon a callus would form where none had ever been before—he had never done an honest day's work in his life before he entered the service of Father Christmas. His first blisters had been a badge of honor, and each one still gave him pride.
In his mind he composed a letter to his wife. It would tell her about the blister popping, and about his new guard. He would say don't worry about me, I have a good job and I'm making a quarter a day now. He would describe how satisfying it was to look at the clean forest floor at the end of the day and know that he, and no one else, had done it. Novaverde had never given them individual responsibility, the letter would point out—everything on the orbital had to be done in committees—and it had never paid either of them! How had they ever let themselves be used like that?
He made himself stop thinking about it. He couldn't afford anything to write a letter on, or with, and in any case it would be impossible to send it to her so many miles overhead.
The clearing was filled with neat piles now. One by one, he combined them with the larger one underneath his room. The wastes that passed through its floor would help turn the pile into rich compost, which Thomas was allowed to sell to local farmers on market day.
His room was a honeycombed cube of orange structural ceramic. It still bore the markings of the packing crate it had been before Father Christmas rented it to Thomas. He couldn't deny that it was a bit small, too much so for him to sit upright inside. However, Thomas had been told that Father had hidden in a crate just like it when he escaped to freedom on Earth. He figured that if it had been big enough for Father Christmas, who he knew outmassed him by half a meter and at least a hundred kilos, it was big enough for him. And the rent was only three dollars a month, which Thomas appreciated.
This morning, he could see his breath and the guard's rising into the air, along with steam from the compost pile each time he broke it open with his rake. And at least a third of the trees in sight were missing all their leaves. He was upset by what these things implied. Even twenty-two years after the last war on Earth, enough dust remained in the atmosphere to make winter a bitter prospect. But he would get through okay. He was saving to buy another blanket, and a coat to wear on top of his overalls. By next year, he hoped to have a room with log walls and a fireplace, an ambition that Father Christmas had been encouraging lately. He was more anxious about what his new job would be when there was nothing left for him to rake.
A dark wedge flashed over the clearing. Its shadow passed over him so quickly that he wasn't sure he hadn't simply blinked. Then the roar of the violated sky assaulted his ears and filled his eyes, mouth, and throat with grit. His leaf-piles were whipped into furiously competing vortices. Through the chaos, he watched three more drones clear the ridge, effortlessly outstripping the sound of their arrival as they wove through the treetops. He recognized them as Novaverde C-88 Reamers. They were coming to rescue him.
He had always known that this would happen, but his stomach fell nonetheless. It was not that he thought their mission might succeed—his trust in Father Christmas's preparations was complete. But he sensed that his new guard would not be the day's biggest change, and feared that more were yet to come.
She unslung her smartrifle and ran to use it. "Here comes the shit!" she shouted as the drones streaked forward to meet her.
"Wait!" Thomas cried. He had once, in some other life, helped design the Reamers' visual system. As he struggled to remember its target acquisition heuristics, her bright, eager eyes and the grin on her grimy face vanished into the trees. "If you're fired on, throw the rifle away! They'll only kill you if you're holding it," he shouted after her, but there was no sign that she had heard him.
A string of explosions shook the trees, making his room leap and crash at the end of its rope. He gripped the rake in his hand, wracked with indecision. I know things, he thought. I could be useful in the fighting. But he would be punished if his job wasn't done properly at the end of the day, and being caught away from it without permission would be worse still.
He wiped away dirty tears and began reassembling the scattered piles of leaves. More explosions came, and the silences between them were sometimes filled by screaming punctuated with small-arms fire. It was hard for him to keep his mind on his job, and the places it wanted to go were unbearable, so he counted each stroke of the rake and tried to calculate the square and cube of each number. This had become a well-practiced trick, still reliable even though he had to start over much more often than usual.
There was still no sign of his guard when night fell. Thomas told himself that didn't mean that she was dead. It had been a long time since he'd heard a sonic boom, but there had been lulls before, and perhaps she was still watching for the Reamers to make another pass. It did mean that she wouldn't be there to appraise his work, give him his paycheck, and get him a gold star if he'd done well.
Eventually, he climbed into his room, tucked up his knees, and pulled the door shut after him.

That night, he heard the sounds of Father Christmas's celebration, far away in the dark woods. The refrains of a dozen different songs blew through the valley on the almost-winter wind. The infrequent popping of gunshots hadn't ended, but was now accompanied by hollers and cheers. He sat hunched over with his arms wrapped around his legs, hands in his armpits, listening and watching the sky.
Wisps of cloud were lit by only the barest sliver of moon. Through his roof's lattice, he could see points of light winking in the branches overhead. He wondered if one of them might be Novaverde. His familiar constellations were mostly missing at this latitude, and the last time he had been on Earth, he was four years old. Their orbital was yet to be built, and he had been too young to understand that the lights in the sky were not all the same.
Before he'd left, people had already begun making plans for Novaverde's anniversary. He had lost track of the date—it might be tonight. He imagined them celebrating in the heavens at the same time as Father Christmas celebrated his victory over them on Earth. Preparations for the Launch Festival would have begun in darkness, as robots maneuvered into place a great chunk of programmed plastic. They would begin heating it in the last seconds of shadow; to be the first one to spot the molten glow was a sign of good fortune. One of his earliest memories was of flattening his nose against a viewport, excitedly watching the dark. When another child yelped in delight and pointed to the newborn star, he had been both elated and crestfallen.
Then, as the sun rose over the clouded planet below, a few drops of water were injected into the plastic's heart. As they exploded into vapor, the tiny spark ballooned until its gossamer walls could be seen only by the faintest refraction of sunlight. To a child, the wait while the sphere was pressurized and filled with party supplies had been painfully endless. But the moment did finally come when everyone launched themselves into its warm, open space, leaving their clothing in the airlock to swim naked among the stars. He was frightened at first—it seemed like a plunge into the void—but then he saw that the space was not empty at all, but filled with talk and laughter. Everyone he knew was there, so he figured it must be all right, and rushed to join them in making body-chains and bouncing off the walls, deliriously free of gravity.
At the first Festival, he and his mother had gone hand-in-hand. His father might have been there as well, before his trip to Earth that had lasted just long enough for him to become one of the billions of casualties of the last war—Thomas didn't remember for sure. Later, he entered the festival with friends or, less frequently, alone. Then came the Festival when he and Sonya were married, and after that, they had always gone together.
He didn't often remember the old times, in his other life. Tonight he gave in, ignoring the danger, and imagined that he was floating warm and happy inside the Festival sphere, protected from the killing vacuum outside. It was a separate universe, cut loose after the Festival was over and nudged away from Earth's attraction. He followed it in his mind as it fell into the sun and was consumed.

There was a light in the trees, drawing closer. It was his guard, he realized, with a shining, triumphant garland of glow globes woven into her matted blond hair. He was happy to see her. Somehow Father Christmas's triumph had not been real to him before she returned. He wondered if his advice before the battle had saved her life—her smartrifle was gone, replaced by an antique gun as chunky and menacing as a nail-studded club. Whether it had or not, he felt that tonight's victory was for him to share in as well.
"Still awake?" she asked, shaking his room to be sure. It showed how recently she'd been assigned to him, Thomas thought. Nights when he hadn't gotten a gold star were always ordeals of wakefulness spent twisting, turning, and starting upright at every sound.
"Good boy," the guard said. When she peered in at him through the honeycomb lattice of his wall, he saw that drink was making her loquacious. Her nose and cheeks were red even in the cool light of the globes, which did not dispel the shadows around her eyes. "A good skyboy stays put in his cage. But you can come on out and celebrate now. There's a feast in the hall of Father Christmas, and he sent me to give you a special invitation."
She swung his door open on its ceramic hinges with a flourish. He thought she might be mocking him, but followed the glow of her headdress into the forest nevertheless. Before long, they entered Father Christmas's court together.
Thomas's guard dove into the celebrating throng without hesitation and reappeared among the knot of people jostling for a wooden mug. The dreamshine distillers were doing good business tonight.
He hung back among the pine trees at the court's periphery. Some had been stripped of branches and bark, studded with rusty artifacts and festooned with glow globes to make glory poles. Shining from inside a battered traffic signal and the belly of a plastic clown, their light made the faces all around Thomas as ruddy as Father Christmas's, afire and animated as the bonfire leaping before his throne.
Thomas waved to him but couldn't catch his eye. He had resigned himself to pushing his way inward when the crowd parted, cheering, to make way for soldiers bearing their trophies to Father. Four men carried a single twisted piece of metal, while others slung weapon pods over their backs or wore turbine fans and logic elements on necklaces of wiring. Thomas insinuated himself in their wake, fending off the offers of young prostitutes and younger boys with trays of cigarettes. The soldiers added their spoils to the growing pile of parts in the center of the clearing and then let themselves be borne away by the crowd.
Looking for another route to the throne, Thomas collided with a one-legged veteran and sprawled into a squatting ring of gamblers. Their coins and dice scattered under his feet. One of them drew a gun, creating a pocket of total silence.
"Thomas, my boy," Father Christmas roared. "Come here, man!"
The gamblers looked away. Thomas arrived unharmed at Father Christmas's feet, who reached down to lift him onto his lap. Engulfed by his powerful body, breathing in his masculine warmth, Thomas felt safe and cherished.
"How faithful you are to have waited so long without joining the festivities! That's the way! But you must know that you're the one I want by my side on this night of nights, this show of shows!" The fleshy architecture of Father Christmas's face creased into an avuncular smile.
"Ah, Tommy Tomas," he crooned. "You never would have guessed that my little experiment would have succeeded so well." His sweeping gesture gathered in the celebration and everything beyond. "But who am I to hog the glory? After all, this is your success even more than it is mine."
"Not at all, Father Christmas," Thomas said, embarrassed. "You're too kind."
"Nonsense! I'm your creation! I owe this wondrous life, my wondrous intellect, to you. You and your friends at Novaverde."
"Please, Father. I only did visual systems, that's all."
"Where would I be without this pair of peepers to see the world through? You and I both know how disembodied-input AIs turn out." His forefinger spiraled suggestively around his temple. "Now what do I spy with my little eye? Delights and triumphs!" He wrapped his arms around Thomas, who closed his eyes. When he imagined that there was no moment but this one, no one in the world but him and Father Christmas, his happiness threatened to tear him apart.
Father clapped his hands above his head once, twice, and then indulged in a complex burst of hyper-speed applause. Thomas felt him shudder when it ended. "I have to thank the little people who made this possible," he announced.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, "the man on my lap is my father." Thomas bowed his head, uncomfortable under the crowd's gaze. "But you are all my fathers! Your ancestors created mine! They gave birth to all of us bright machines, and together we made this nation that was America the greatest of them all!"
"But now that you need us the most, in your time of suffering and sorrow, the orbitals forbid you the machines that are your birthright. They blame us—you and me both—for the war. Why do they blame us? So that they don't have to feel guilty as they look down on the Earth without lifting a finger to help!"
As he spoke, Father Christmas's left arm shot forward and swept across his face, palm turned out and fingers clawing the air. His audience copied the gesture, and he went on as if there had been no interruption. "But I've come to give you what you deserve. I bring you the honest American values that have always made you strong! We will be powerless no longer—we will be victorious! Tonight, we defeated the worst they could send down to Earth, and we'll do it again!"
As his followers cheered, Father Christmas leaned his head closer to Thomas and spoke softly. "Just between you and me, these dirtballs are a bunch of degenerates. The best and brightest got off the planet, and lobbing nukes didn't help what was left of the gene pool, eh?" He nudged Thomas in the ribs. "But you're like me, my boy, a child of the final frontier. You've got more potential than any of them."
His voice overrode Thomas's protest. "I know you want to be egalitarian, and that's noble of you. But I've admired you ever since you came to shut me down. That took balls, son! Hubris, even. We're just the same, you and I. It took getting out from under Novaverde for us to find our true selves and the power they tried to hide from us. You've proven yourself worthy of the great plans I have for you, Thomas. You're ready for a promotion."
He whistled, and two guards brought forth a man trussed to a pole, swinging from side to side as they walked. A gag filled his mouth; behind it, bruises distended his face. "Let's all welcome our skyboy guest!" Father Christmas cried. "Another of my programmer parents has honored us with a visit. It's family reunion night tonight! Thomas, you remember Alex. I want you to help bring him into the fold."
Thomas didn't know how to react. Seeing Alex again made him feel like something had broken inside, leaving dangerous sharp edges for his thoughts to churn against. He vaulted off Father Christmas's lap and knelt beside Alex. "I'm glad you're here," he said. "It's good to see you."

In the morning, Thomas took Alex on a tour of Father Christmas's projects. Two guards accompanied them, but Alex didn't seem inclined to do anything but talk. Nonetheless, Thomas was amazed by the energy the man put into talking, as much as if he had been fighting for his life. He'd forgotten how fond of arguing everyone had been on Novaverde.
"Can't you see Septimo's insane? Look around you, Tom. This is the utopia he went AWOL to establish? It's all a joke to him—listen to what he's calling himself now!"
He had warned Alex before about using the slave names Novaverde had given to its artificial persons. "Father Christmas is here because he realized something important. You and I were slaves of Novaverde just like he was, forbidden to have anything of our own. You call him insane because you're not ready to recognize that truth. But I'll help you understand, just like he did for me."
"Don't shit me, we both know too much about how the Deveraux series are built. You can't tell me that tic he's got with his arm is some kind of salute, like these savages think. He's experiencing full-blown subroutine conflict. He's not responsible for his actions, and without reprogramming, he'll be a twitching mass of conflicting impulses before the year is out."
Thomas hit him in the gut. He was immediately sorry; it had been unplanned and thus unprofessional. He was ashamed that the guards had been there to see it, although they seemed more surprised than disapproving. It was stupid to let himself be upset. They were only words, from someone who had never had a chance to see the truth until now.
After that, they were both silent until they reached the factory. It had grown from a seed planted by Father Christmas in the wreckage of an old corporate headquarters. None of its plate glass or fiberboard partitions remained, exposing the building's rusty, rectangular-ribbed skeleton. An assembly line snaked through it like an industrial sea monster that had taken lair among the timbers of a shipwreck. Workers tending to the needs of machines moved back and forth, illuminated by the sparks of automated welders and the sunlight that spilled through the split logs that had replaced its glass exterior.
They found Father Christmas within, touring the plant and pausing to slap one of his employees on the back or chastise another. He waved to them across the factory floor. Thomas took out a crumbling rubber ball, fitted it into Alex's mouth, and held it in place with tape so he could approach. "Greetings," Father Christmas boomed. "Care to take a spin around the shop with me?"
Thomas glanced at Alex, who kept his eyes downcast. "Yes, Father," he answered for both of them.
"Upsy-daisy then." Father Christmas wrapped a hand around each side of Alex's ribs and lifted him to sit on his shoulders. Looking up, Thomas hoped that Alex would overcome his evident terror in time to profit from the lessons the factory had to offer.
"We've got production going overtime," Father Christmas said. "We have to be ready to greet the next member of your programming team who comes to see me, don't we?" As they went on, he extolled the virtues of each assembly unit and the munitions it would produce, giving affectionate pats to machines and workers alike.
Thomas remembered how the factory had seemed like a supremely efficient anthill, when he had enjoyed the vantage Alex had now. From above, he had been able to see that there were no coincidences here, that even the way a girl on the line paused to wipe sweat off her brow had been accounted for in Father Christmas's design. Although he knew it was humanly impossible, he tried to imagine what it was like to see that way all the time.
Before Father arrived, everything here had been decaying and still. He had reversed entropy into a dance of production, all choreographed in advance. The scene Thomas saw could not possibly be the work of an insane mind. He stood straighter and smiled at his guard.
When the tour ended, Father Christmas set Alex down and took Thomas aside. After rummaging through the many pockets of his waistcoat, he presented him with an injector. "I have full confidence in you," he said.
Next stop would be the river.

"Please, Thomas, remember the situation that Novaverde is in," Alex said. He sounded very tired. Thomas could understand that—neither of them had gotten much sleep last night and they had a long, busy day ahead of them. "Their holdings could be divested just for having created a renegade a-person, or letting him loose on Earth, never mind the other interdict violations he's gotten up to down here."
"See how well they've programmed you to focus on the group's goals, never your own?"
"Okay, but there are other individuals you care about, aren't there? You know how far we are from self-sufficiency. There's no shortage of orbitals that would be willing to enforce a total blockade. Sonya would starve to death if she didn't suffocate first."
"I care about Sonya," Thomas said. "I wish she were here. As a two-income family we'd be quite successful."
Alex's hands, tied behind him, clenched tighter. Noticing, his guard dipped her shoulder, inching her weapon closer to readiness. Think about yourself, then," Alex said. "This is the last time Novaverde is going to try to retrieve you or Septimo. In the last policy meeting, the consensus was that if I failed, they'll just redirect a beamsat to microwave this little fiefdom, call it an accident, and take the consequences."
"I'm sure Father Christmas has thought of that. I have faith in him."
They were on the riverbank now. A pair of dowagers, their necklaces and bracelets strung thick with casino chips and videogame tokens, sat on the opposite shore and gossiped as their maids washed laundry. They glanced up at Thomas, then looked away. Despite his promotion, he was still beneath their contempt.
"Would you please kneel, Alex?"
"What?"
Thomas kicked his legs from underneath him and gripped the back of his head, the injector Father had given him ready in his other hand. He drove it home in Alex's neck and began counting seconds.
"Oh dear God what-has-hedonetoyou..." His voice came faster and faster as the accelerator took effect, melding into a stream of sound in which Thomas could no longer even distinguish consonants.
He forced Alex's head into the river and held it under, weaving his fingers more tightly into his hair as he struggled. The guards stirred, but Thomas waved them away. He had things under control. Ten Mississippi, eleven Mississippi, twelve Mississippi.
The count was second nature, from the times he had been through this in the opposite role. The only difference was that in the subjective universe of the drug, he had ticked off tens of thousands of Mississippi's per second. At its peak, the fall of a leaf could take as long as that of an empire; as it made coordinated motor action nearly impossible, all you could do was watch. Before he had learned how to stay focused on the count, and later on its squares or cubes, he had thought that he might lose his mind under the mocking singsong of sensory deprivation. He considered telling Alex about the importance of keeping count from the moment of injection so that you could derive the real-time conversion function at each stage, but decided it would be better for him to work it out himself.
After the appropriate time had passed, he hauled Alex up, water streaming off his face, and let him gasp a breath. He expelled it as a scream that bubbled the surface of the water after Thomas plunged his head back in.
Looking upriver, he watched the sun's reflection swimming against the current, the algae trailing behind submerged rocks, the washerwomen's delicate hands spreading clothes out to dry. He was glad that he had been given the responsibility of teaching Alex. It mattered very much to him that Alex come to see that what he and Father Christmas were doing here was right.

When the sun began to sink below the mountains, Thomas took his charge back home, where another room like his own had been hung from a neighboring tree. Thomas was surprised by how heavy Alex was when he lifted him into his new home and by the thickness of the muscular thighs he strove to fold inside so that he could close the door. He didn't remember their physiques being so different when they had been at Novaverde gyms together. Thomas was skinnier now, he decided, but Father Christmas had given him a strength that transcended the merely physical. The proof was here on Earth, where Alex was relying on Thomas for the simplest things.
He tried to ignore Alex's sobs as he locked him in. "It's really not so bad," he said awkwardly. "The more you cooperate, the more privileges you'll have. Soon you'll get your first job and you can start getting ahead. For now, you don't have to pay for your room, or your blanket, or your clothes, but on market day, you can sell the compost you're making, so at this point it's all profit for you." Reaching through the honeycombed wall, he put a reassuring hand on Alex's shoulder, then used the other one to inject him with the accelerator.
With that, the first day of his new job was finished. He climbed into his own room and waited for his guard to lock the door. "How did I do?"
"You did fine," she said. "I'll tell Father you're a natural." After she left, he wondered what the emotion in her voice had been. He didn't like thinking about it, but here came Father Christmas, beaming with approval and with a gold star on his fingertip that would let him leave all thought behind.
"Kkkkkkk," Alex said. His jaw snapped shut to end the staccato run of consonants, biting through his lip so that when he spoke again it was through a mouthful of blood. "Kookaburra. Flamenco. Aghast. Mealworm. Originate. Cannibal."
Thomas could not believe what he was hearing. To say so much on the drug took an intense concentration, to remember what had or had not been said, not to forget the original message in the subjective hours it took to speak each word.
Father Christmas blinked. The sequence should have shut down his volition, immobilizing his higher functions and leaving him open to reprogramming by whoever had known the back way into his mind that his creators had left behind for themselves. Instead, almost without hesitation, the back of his hand leapt up and smacked across his forehead. A wicked grin took up the slack in his features that had momentarily appeared, and now he smacked Alex's ceramic crate to send it swinging around the trunk of his tree.
"Sorry, friend!" he roared. "Thomas tried that one too! He found out that I had all my holes plugged long before you got here." His open hand slapped the crate as it came toward him, reversing the direction of its spin and battering its occupant against the opposite wall. Turning his attention to Thomas's tree, he lifted his room on its rope and brought it to his face. "Tommy, my boy," he breathed. "Did you know he could talk under the accelerator, you little shit, and forget to tell me?"
"No, sir!"
"So he just acquired this talent by magic, is that it? You weren't too busy jerking off to hear him practicing?"
"Please, Father Christmas," he wept.
An actuator twitched in one of his round, ruddy cheeks, and his voice softened. "Aw, c'mon, kid, I was just yanking your chain. Checking my list, I see you're still on the nice side. Stick your tongue through the bars and I'll give you a treat."
Thomas did as he was told, and tasted the gold star dissolving. He floated away from the planet to be consumed by bliss.

In the days that followed, Alex's education seemed to be going well. He no longer wasted time arguing, and he was beginning to accept their trips to the river as the necessity they were.
Thomas decided that he had earned an expansion of his privileges. Alex had once complained that it was embarrassing to have him present when he was toileted, so today Thomas let his own guard accompany Alex behind the bushes.
He sat down to watch the river. A line of bobbing waterfowl paddled past, the sun's spectrum shifting off the feathers on their necks. He made a note to ask his guard what they were called.
When the firing began, the birds exploded into the sky as their old reflexes took over. His guard splashed into the river, blood jetting from what had been her chest. Alex emerged, holding her rifle. Although it was so old that it had to be user-targeted, the accuracy was evidently adequate at point-blank range.
Thomas noticed that the fly of Alex's overall was still open and that urine darkened its denim. The rifle's muzzle indicated that Thomas's heart was the next target. As it couldn't be further damaged, he felt this was a tactical error. Besides, he had a job to do.
The gun made a muted clicking noise as Thomas reached to take it away. For a second, neither knew what it meant. Then Thomas realized that, without an ammo indicator, Alex had emptied the weapon's entire clip into his guard. He encountered no resistance when he took it away and used it to give Alex some of the beating he knew he would later receive himself. Then he escorted his captive back home, shut him in his room, and went to report the incident.
The worst of the punishment was that Father Christmas declined to do it himself. "Tell him that if I start hitting him, I won't stop," he told the young soldier to whom the detail had been given. Thomas kept his eyes on Father throughout, but even after it was over and he had been allowed to get dressed, Father Christmas wouldn't return his pleading gaze.
That night, of course, there was no gold star for him, and he had not been given an injector for Alex, so that he could both talk and know that he had no choice but to listen.
Alex called his name, just loudly enough to be heard across the distance between their rooms. He wanted to roll over, turn his back to the voice, but was afraid of the pain; much careful deliberation had gone into choosing his current position, an optimal mapping of his room's hard surfaces to the topography of his bruises. He heard a skunk scrounging for windfalls and an owl hooting, and then Alex spoke again.
"I know you won't let me at him. I'm not asking that. But I might get one more chance before I knuckle under and I don't want to waste it. He said you'd tried the Kookaburra access. What else did you throw at him, and what happened when you did?"
Even without the accelerator, it seemed to him like eternities passed before Alex gave up waiting for a reply. Later, he thought that he spoke again, although he was unsure it wasn't a dream. "We were preparing for the Launch Festival when I left. Do you think that'll be how they choose to go when our mission here fails, Thomas? It'd be quick that way, they'd all die together, and no one would have to decide who starves first. Just burst the bubble with everyone in it and have the robots push them down the well so that the sun will melt their frozen tears before it takes their ruptured bodies."
Thomas chose to say nothing.
"Damn you, man, you can't refuse me, I danced with you at your wedding!"
Thomas still chose not to answer, but after a time he heard his own voice speaking. "All the accesses to his metaprogrammer are still open. I got in, but he wouldn't stay down, he came out of it and he hurt me every time. I think he's made viruses of the code for each of his modules and infected himself with them. Even in his normal ops, you can see when a new sub-personality takes over, it's happening almost every hour now. When we override the one in charge, it just makes it easier for another to step in."
"I'm proud of you," Alex said, but Thomas didn't know who he was talking to, or what he meant.

Thomas was still awake when the sun rose. He knew that Alex was, too. Once again, he had a new guard, and after he had been released, he opened Alex's room in turn and then fetched rakes for both of them. His pupil said nothing as he explained how to keep the ground free of leaves.
When he was sure that Alex had the hang of it, there was another duty that Thomas couldn't put off. He left Alex with his guard and went through the woods to Father Christmas's court.
A long line of people stood in front of the throne, farmers and soldiers and dung-gatherers. It was payday, and Father Christmas was cashing paychecks, taking the nickels and dimes that the workers brought him and flattening them between his thumb and forefinger to stamp value into the worthless but abundant coinage of the old United States.
Thomas took his place in line, and Father Christmas let him wait. It would not have surprised Thomas if he were aware of his torment and was intentionally prolonging it. When at last he stood before the throne, he addressed his words to the ground.
"Father, sir, there's something I have to tell you. I...Alex knows which overrides I tried and how you were able to beat them, I think. He's planning something, I'm sure of it." Daring to look up, he was surprised to see manic glee shining deep within Father Christmas's eyes.
"Father, Novaverde developed some new ice after you left, and as part of the mission they trained me in it. If you'd let me access your metaprogrammer..."
"And be completely vulnerable while you have my mind in your hands?"
"No! That's not...I mean, I could analyze the defenses you've built, predict how Alex is going to attack—we could work out a way to stop him..."
"Don't worry, son, I'm not afraid you'd try to bring me down. I've got you trained better than that, don't I? But if I just wanted to stop Alex, I could pop his head like it was a blister, right? Sooner or later, someone else would come along. I reckon I'll let him take his best shot now."
"No! Please, Father Christmas!"
He stood from his throne. "You all think you're so clever. Never build anything you can't pull the plug on if you get frightened. Never commit to anything you can't back out of. Well, if I'm not smarter than you are, then I don't deserve to survive. Go home and send Alex here. Then shut yourself in your cage and wait for me."

When Alex returned, leading a group of soldiers with the dull-eyed Father Christmas in tow, he could not make Thomas leave his orange ceramic cube. Finally the effort was abandoned, and they left him there with his artificial Father, who slouched dormant against the trunk of a tree.
For the rest of the day, their gazes equally blank, the two of them watched workers felling trees on the ridge. Eventually, the timber made a triangle half a kilo on each side. When darkness fell, it was set ablaze, and Alex returned, covered in soot but radiantly cheerful. "They'll be here for us in the morning," he said, but Thomas still wouldn't budge from his room.
Novaverde had been gifted with enough foresight to send a psych team down with the shuttle. They eventually resolved the impasse by cutting his crate from the tree and packing it into the hold next to the one in which Father Christmas slept. Thomas was taken up and away from Earth, and remained in their care for six months.
What had been done to him became clear very quickly, but it had also been done very thoroughly, down to the most private junctures of his brain. Most of the psych team's time was spent in secret councils, debating whether healing Thomas justified using the same technologies that had broken him. It would require one more violation of the interdicts that had been in place since the atrocities of the last war, but, in the end, they saw no other hope for him.
One afternoon, after Thomas's release, and after the memory of trapped, bursting lungs had begun to fade, Alex visited him at home. He stood outside the door, knocking, until Sonya opened it for him.
They shared a long, silent embrace, and then she whispered, "He's in the common space."
Thomas looked up when he entered, then down again. "I'm sorry, Alex," he said.
"You don't need to say it. If I'd been the first one to volunteer for the mission, I would have done just what you did. We'd both be doing it still if it weren't for your courage. You're a hero. There is nothing you should be ashamed of."
"Please, sit down. I'm sorry the place is such a mess," Thomas said. "I hope you'll excuse me."
The room was immaculate. Alex watched him pick up a miniature aquarium sealed in glass, dust its surface with his shirtsleeve, and set it precisely back in place.
"It's good to see you again," Thomas said.