Short Short stories

[Pyrotex]

Okay, boyz und girlz, I have a surprize for you! Another SF story! One that I wrote back in 1999. It takes place in the same solar system as the story "Child of Privilege".

Enjoy!

 

 

Bogart Reprise

 

by Nelson Thompson

 

 

Maggie Robearson was working in commissary 38 of the Windowbox o’neill, changing filters in the food vats, when she received a message that a package had arrived, one that demanded ID verification. At the end of her work shift, and after arranging with her surrogate to meet near the postal center, she hopped the nearest slideway.

In a barren room dominated by the ‘wreath and eagle’ logo of the Daltravian Postal Service, she waited in line to thumb her ID. She was given a small package that had come first class from another star system. Extremely unusual. But even more inexplicably, it turned out to contain merely a cheap pair of earrings wrapped in foil. There was no message, nor indication of sender.

Having little interest in accumulating trivials, she stuffed it all back in the box, and tossed it into a trasher.

Thirty meters from the mail center, two men approached her on the public slideway. As they drew abreast, they jumped her, and forced her into a deserted side chamber. When she struggled, they hit her with powerful blows that betrayed their training in illegal martial arts.

They said, “Give us the package or die!”, accompanied by a blow from fist or foot. They threw her across the floor, which afforded her a few seconds of relative peace, enough for her to drop in on Onyx, her surrogate, and mentally scream for help.

They searched her thoroughly, and when they didn’t find the package, they backed away from her. Maggie looked up to see one nod his head. The other drew out a weapon and pointed it at her just as the door burst open.

Onyx had arrived with a postal datacop.

In the confusion that followed, the two strangers burst past Onyx and the datacop and fled down the slideway. Onyx helped Maggie to her feet. She was bleeding, and swayed unsteadily on bruised legs.

The datacop looked up from his instrument and spoke with perplexity, “Are you Maggie Robearson and her surrogate Onyx Robearson?”

The two women nodded.

“Most strange! I show no trace of anyone but the three of us having been in this room! Most strange, indeed!”

Maggie found her voice. “I will want to file a charge of assault against those two, whoever they are!”

The datacop shook his head, lines of astonishment engraved deeply into his face. “The evidence of a calibrated chipscanner is final, mam, and this one indicates quite clearly that there was no one in this room but you, when I and your surrogate entered. Even though I witnessed your two assailants with my own eyes, it will do you no good. I’m sorry, mam Robearson, but according to this chipscanner, and the law, your assault never happened!

 

- - = = - -

 

“But is it newsworthy?”

“Hunh?” Malarka Swade, looked up from his holoscreens and turned towards Editor-in-chief Rana Smythentropp. “Is it what?”

“I said,” she drawled, doing an excruciating job of affecting an old Terran accent, “is it newsworthy? Are the readers going to care? If they won’t care, then we don’t print it.”

“Rana! An entire planet was wiped out! Nearly two billion people. Dead. Dissolved down to their amino acids. That’s news – isn’t it?” His eyebrows arched up in that peculiar, pleading way they did when he anticipated he would be overruled. As he usually was.

“Come now, mister Swade, they just died of a runaway smartvirus. Industrial accidents like that happen every week. ‘It’s A Big Galaxy,’ you know.” Rana made it a point to quote the masthead motto of the Daltravian Gazette at least once a day in mundane conversation.

“It’s not as if the planet blew up,” she continued, with a flourish of hand gestures, “or that the inhabitants were anybody special. Besides, puddles of amino acid do not make good pix, and XenoCol will have its ecosystem rebuilt before you know it, and stocked with another billion eager puppies who think that elbow-room is the key to happiness.”

Malarka stared at his holoscreens and said nothing. In the center was the write-up he had done on the demise of Bernadette-258’s population. In the upper right screen was the standard five sentence planetary obituary sans pix. In the upper left screen was a pix of the planet itself in all its verdant glory. Of course, Malarka thought to himself, when you’ve seen one Terran class planet, you’ve pretty much seen them all. And there were billions of them in the Milky Way. Why, there were over three hundred alone named ‘Bernadette’!

His right screen was tied to an infonet channel. Currently it showed a detailed map of the upper northwest hexadecant of radial zone seven of the Milky Way (McNally MegaStar Softmap, version Omicron/835). A trio of gossamer red lines intersected at the position of Bernadette-258. With a twitch of his hand, the view zoomed in, going through a scale factor of two every second, until there were fewer than a dozen stars in the screen. With tiny squints of his face muscles and subtle finger gestures, he overlaid commerce routes, defense zones, rad barriers, energy grids, and arcana (which included gravity spikes, WR-eddies, Herbigs, Hawkings, gamma storms, exogradients and all other navigational hazards).

He called up symbols for inhabited planets. A twiddle of his left thumb caused the entire display to rotate deftly so that Bernadette-258 could be seen through the dense network of lines, dots and symbols he had created.

There it was, a tiny blue dot touching the larger yellow dot that represented its sun. The ‘late’ Bernadette-258. Malarka leaned forward to read the text under it.

And in that instant, the tiny blue dot disappeared.

That’s odd, he thought, wondering if perhaps it was a software glitch.

“Swade!” The voice had lost all pretense of genteel (if phony) Terran charm. “Are you surfing again? You know we have a deadline to meet! Bern gets a standard obit, and nothing else!” The only gesture she was using now was a raised fist. “I need a sidebar story for page delta-three, two meters, and I want some blood and mud in it! Now!! Use that Krishnamurti item!”

Malarka let out a slow, silent sigh. With due haste, he saved his Bernadette-258 story, and called up the Krishnamurti-15 story.

He hated novas. They happened so often, and killed or injured over a hundred million people every year. Nova prevention technology was still centuries away (if ever). And the rad barriers were often ineffective, even when they were in the right place and charged up at the right time. Sometimes, as in this case, they made a bad situation horribly worse.

Nova 4994-BX had flared two standard years ago in the upper northwest hexadecant of radial zone six. There had been plenty of warning. Nearly a square parsec of rad barriers had been energized to protect the fifty or so planets that were within range of the nova’s gamma storm. But one rad barrier failed. (Officially, the failure was due to ‘hideochronic fluctuations in an energy hypershunt refractor.’) Rather than reflecting and absorbing the gamma wave front, the barrier actually focused much of it on Krishnamurti.

Of course, the ‘official’ story from Vitriox-1 was that no one knew of the hypershunt failure until the following day, when Krishnamurti’s sky suddenly blazed with radiation-induced auroras that had probably been bright enough to blind. Malarka looked at the holos taken from low orbit by the first ship to arrive on the scene. The bodies were piled three deep in the streets of Californ, the capital city, and they looked... melted. Ah! Here was a mag view – you could see the half-charred and bubbled bodies of a mother with child in arm. Perfect!

“This ought to be enough blood and mud for you,” he thought grimly.

He flexed his right index finger – the holo was dumped into his central screen layout. With subtle movements of his hands, he directed his display to shorten the dead woman’s skirt, enhance her cleavage, add more char and ooze to her exposed flesh, and insert a pool of blood under her head. With a furrow of his brow, the changes were added to all frames of the ten second clip. He zoomed in and out, running the pan forward and backward, checking the view from all angles, deleting non-essential details from the background. A green icon flashed in the corner to confirm that the altered image was still legally “authentic” for journalistic purposes. Malarka grinned sardonically.

He added six more carefully edited vid clips and a simplified Milky Way regional map. With hands extended, he began to mentate the text of the Krishnamurti-15 disaster for the evening edition:

“VITRIOX RAD GUARD BUTCHERS 1.7 BILLION! Krishnamurti-15 Subject of Vicious Attack by Space Tyrants! The gentle and peace-loving folk of Krishnamurti-15, an Edenic paradise 270 parsecs from the Vitriox Cluster, and the last bastion of democracy in the tyrannical ‘Vitriox Exclusion Zone,’ had no warning yesterday as a wave front of deadly gamma from the 4994-BX nova was intentionally focused on their planet, nuking millions in their tracks, and dooming another billion to a protracted and agonizing death. This is just the latest incident in a pattern of malevolent ‘accidents’ that can be laid at the feet of the Vitriox Radiation Corps, the so-called ‘defenders’ of the... ”

 

- - = = - -

 

Malarka squeezed his walker handles as tightly as he dared. Traffic was heavy on the concourse this time of day, and if he went any faster, he was likely to hit someone. He didn’t need another 5-Daygild fine. Skillfully, he dashed ahead of a couple in matching plaid shiorts, executed a tight turn and jockeyed into the queue just ahead of a large Badorian, who gave him a dirty look. The Badorian’s walker lightly tapped into the rear of his own, an intentional signal of the other’s displeasure at being beaten into line.

Malarka ignored him. “Tough tarpoons,” he thought as he reached into his pocket for his thalstimmer, “If you can’t surf a walker, then stay the hell out of my way, skeezer – ’cause I can.” He pressed the chrome thalstimmer into his right nostril and pressed the thumbstud. His tension and anxiety ebbed away.

A buzz in the walker’s handle let Malarka know that it was now under automatic control. Smoothly, the line of walkers passed through the blue faux-marble portal under the watchful eyes of surrogate datacops, and lined up in a neat row behind other rows of walkers in front of a pale blue wall emblazoned with the ‘wreath and rocket’ symbol of the Daltravian Shuttle System. Through the translucent departure decks, he could vaguely see other arrays of walkers above and below him. There was a muted klaxon, a short pause, then all three thousand walkers simultaneously folded down to become seaters. The wall shimmered and disappeared. As a single unit, the packed formation of seaters moved into the cavernous interior of the shuttlecraft.

The commute to Windowbox was uneventful. Malarka usually slept or strapped on his reader. Some of the commuters (mostly males) had on readers and lappers, a sure sign they were simsexing. Malarka couldn’t get into simsex, even with the advanced interactive features. The same biolectronic actuators implanted in his face and fingers that allowed him to compose his columns every day, surf the infonets, or alter a pix with focused mentation could also control the actions of a simulated sex partner.

Malarka sighed. He used that technology every day to get paid. He refused to use it to get laid.

For a while, he looked at the shuttle’s windows, but the ubiquitous flurry of holographic navigation aids against the starry backdrop of space was quickly boring. The only views he really enjoyed were those of planets, with their glistening continents, variegated blue oceans, and that white, swirly stuff in their atmospheres. But views of Daltrave-6 could only be had on the morning shuttle, when he went to work dirtside.

Malarka pulled out his reader and slipped it on. He twitched his brow several times, paging through the index of storycubes, until he came to a bogart called, ‘Sam Spade and the Treasure of Sierra Watergate.’ The story dated to the early twenty-second century, though the cube itself was nowhere near that old. His roommate, Brilson, who liked to rummage through antique and curio shops, had found it for him. With relish, Malarka started the cube, and a scene opened in a dingy office with a single window overlooking a bleak city. The hand-lettered sign on the door read, “Sam Spade, Investigative Reporter.” Music swelled.

It was his second viewing of this storycube. He loved historical novels, especially those relating to crime, a social phenomenon which eventually disappeared after the invention of the thumbchip. Of all the historical novels, bogarts were his favorite.

Twenty minutes later, he slipped off the reader and picked out Windowbox, one of the low cost o’neills in the 4500-kilometer residential orbit. It was painted a cheery green, with its name monogrammed in a jauntily scripted font around its immense circumference. Low cost, but not cheap, he rued. His two-room flat with metered water and open commissary cost him 3520 Daygilds! Nearly ten Yeargilds for a two-year contract! Just so he could live near a planet!

With dizzying speed, the shuttle yawed to the left and aimed directly for a small circular opening at the axis of the o’neill. For an instant, Malarka was visually blitzed by the interior of Windowbox flashing by. In the next instant, the shuttle was at rest in its docking cradle. The windows turned off. The forewall of the shuttle swung silently up, and as a unit, the formation of seaters slid out onto the arrival decks.

 

- - = = - -

 

“Yo! Lark! Over here!” The yell was just loud enough to be heard at the entrance of Windowbox commissary 22 over the din of a thousand diners.

Malarka turned toward the voice without breaking stride, and headed for a small round table next to a window showing a slow panning view of the gardens of the Daltravian Planetary Park and Arboretum. His roommate Brilson and a woman, dressed in matching striped shiorts, each had an arm up to catch his attention. They were already working on their meal.

The two men had met on Brilson’s home world, Palastine-88 (actually, on an o’neill around it), some thirty standard years ago, and had been best friends ever since, traveling together when they could afford it, and working when they had to. They were currently rooming together until Brilson could find employment.

The woman, Onyx, was a surrogate pleasure-pet, and Brilson had been hanging out with her for a couple of weeks. As with all surrogates, she wore a tiny silver crescent icon inlaid in her forehead. She was legally a ‘sentient,’ even when not mentally occupied by her prime, or owner. At such times, surrogates expressed their own capacity for independent thought, which might or might not be substantial. Most pets were really vapid on auto, although he had to admit Onyx was pretty sharp as surrogates went.

Malarka had kept company with any number of them over the years. They were all right as long as you forgot that someone else was looking through their eyes and speaking through their mouths – if they spoke at all.

He sat down hard on the pedestal, uttering a small grunt. Onyx giggled politely. She always giggled politely.

“Joy, Lark!” Brilson reached out and slapped Malarka on the shoulder, a common greeting on Palastine-88. Malarka returned the slap.

“Joy, Bril. What’s to eat?”

“Well... you got your choice of coneapples and yeast,” he held up a damp, pink cube delicately poised between his chopstix, “or congealt and rice.” He nodded at the plate in front of Onyx.

“Noooo... contest,” drawled Malarka, mocking one of Rana’s more absurd accents. He poked the stud in the center of the table, and crisply spoke two words, “coneapples, beer.” Onyx giggled around a large stixful of rice.

Malarka smiled at the attractive, dark-skinned surrogate, noticing that the crescent on her brow was dark. She caught Malarka’s gaze and smiled back, putting down her stix.

“I gotta hit the fresher, Lark, but I want to hear all about your day when I get back!” She departed.

Malarka leaned over to Brilson. “She still checked out?”

Brilson’s grin turned down a bit at the corners. “Yeah. She’s been on auto for three days now. The last time her prime dropped in, I took her to Orbital Park 14. Wow, did we have some fun. But I guess it’s over. I wonder if I did something wrong.” He looked quizzically at Malarka then lapsed into silence until he had consumed another bite of food.

“I really thought it was true love this time, Lark. When she was primed, I was never so happy in my whole life. Man, the talks we had. What fun.” A reminiscent pause. “She’s still a lot of fun, even checked out, but it’s not quite the same. Nothing’s as good as the real thing, you know?”

“Yeah, I know, Bril. I know.” A food tray descended to the table, and Malarka reached for his chopstix. “What did Onyx set you back – if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Thirty Daygilds,” came the glum reply.

Malarka’s first bite of coneapple halted in midair. “Thirty!? For the Blessed Pain of Fornax, Bril, you don’t have a job and you’re running short. What are you doing wasting that kind of Time on a pet?”

Brilson leaned forward on his elbows, hunched his shoulders and smiled wanly. “I really love her.”

“But still... ” Malarka put the cube of coneapple back on his tray. “At this rate, you’re going to do the ‘Final Flush’ yourself, and pretty soon.” Brilson said nothing in reply.

The bite of coneapple made it all the way to Malarka’s mouth. He chewed for a moment while his friend stared morosely at the table. Malarka took a swig of beer.

“Bril, my best friend, how much do you have in your account? No lie.”

His voice was flat and low. “Forty-eight Daygilds. And some change.” Brilson rubbed his hands over his face as if he were suddenly exhausted. “But it’s okay, Lark, you know what they say, ‘see a dozen planets and die’.” Brilson grinned but Malarka wasn’t amused.

“So, maybe it’s time for me to check in to one of the rimprojects. I have eighteen days before I have to make the decision to move, or... or stay here and take the Final Flush. And Onyx is paid up through the month, so I won’t be lonely.”

Bril glanced up as Onyx returned and took her place at the table. He admired her soft brown curves as she cheerfully picked up her stix and attacked the last of her congealt and rice. He reached out and put his arm around her, pulling her towards him affectionately. She nuzzled his neck.

The sadness in Brilson’s eyes broke Malarka’s heart. No mention was made of Malarka loaning Brilson some more Time. His own account wasn’t in much better shape. He was just managing to stay out of Final Bankruptcy with the job at the Gazette, and that was none too secure. He had really done all he could and they both knew it.

“Really, Lark, I’m fine. Listen,” Brilson leaned over the table and spoke in a whisper, “I’ll check in to the rimproject and you keep slugging it out at the Gazette. You’re a damn good journalist. The economy will pick up, you can bail me out in a year or so, okay? And until then, I don’t want you going bust trying to help me out. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid. Okay?”

Malarka cleared his throat. “Okay, Bril. I understand. I’m just sorry, that’s all.” He took a really big pull at his beer.

 

- - = = - -

 

Malarka closed the door between the rooms of his flat, wanting some privacy and time to think. The possibility of losing his best friend was something he had never thought of, not that is, until two local years ago. That was when they arrived in the Daltrave-6 system with just enough Time for a pair of hostel bunks and some local travel vouchers. The planetary economy was booming and they both landed good jobs, and bought contracts in Windowbox, as close to planetside as they could afford. Then the economy went sour.

Brilson was laid off, and then a few months later, the news bureau that Malarka worked for suddenly folded. They hustled as they never had before. Malarka eventually landed a job at the Gazette, which was hardly more than an interactive vid tabloid for ‘skeezers,’ a commonly used term referring to rimproject residents. And the pay was half what he was used to. But it was enough to save his flat.

Brilson’s luck went from bad to worse. His technical specialty was microbial programming, a fledgling industry on Daltrave-6, and one of several that went belly up after the crash. He sold his contract back to Windowbox Corp at a loss and moved in with Malarka.

And now he had forty-eight Daygilds left. And counting. You could move in to a rimproject if you had thirty Daygilds for the welfare fee. Getting out was another matter entirely. But if you allowed your account to fall to zero...

Malarka caught himself staring at his right thumb. Inside was the ticking time bomb that all humans carried: the thumbchip. The only thing that stood between the individual and immortality. It was identification, credit card and policeman all rolled into one. Coded into its silicon and protein interior was his name, ID number, retina scans, fingerprints, every address he had ever lived at, his education and work experience, a list of his implants and skill levels, his military and medical history, DNA genome summary, legal records, ten-generation family tree, location trace, medical monitor, smartvirus generator, and most important, his account balance.

Many humans worked because they wanted to. Most worked because they had to. And in all of human society across the Milky Way, the standard unit of currency had become the ‘Daygild.’ You were paid in Daygilds of life. You exchanged Daygilds for luxuries, and sometimes for necessities. And every 24 standard hours (unless you lived in a rimproject), your account was automatically debited one Daygild.

If it ever dropped to zero for more than 24 standard hours, the thumbchip released an enzyme that blocked the creation of pheronomine transferase in the brain – quick and painless death. It had become the most common cause of death in the Milky Way for two thousand standard years. In fact, barring acts of passion and unusual accidents (such as novas and renegade viruses), it was nearly the only cause of human death anymore.

He was tired. He set his window to rooster at 0600 and went to bed. Darkness washed over his mind like heavy surf on a lonely beach.

 

Malarka arose and switched his bedroom window from a simulated view of the morning sun rising over majestic mountains to mirror mode and inspected his reflection. There were no obvious signs of aging. No wrinkles, no skin splotches, no hair loss. He had stopped changing at about the age of thirty, and that had been over two hundred standard years ago. Nor did he really expect any. The smartviruses that infected every cell of his body saw to that. Disease and old age only happened in historical dramas.

But he still habitually examined himself in the mirror every morning. Smartviruses did mutate on rare occasions, and go awry. Sometimes horribly awry. He remembered with a shudder the billions on Bernadette-258. Smartviruses were often used for industrial processes, like fabricating nano-structures from animal proteins. If one of those cybernetically ‘intelligent’ molecules ever escaped confinement, and hybridized with normal prophylactic smartviruses, the result could be a plague that would sweep a planet and all its satellites in a matter of days. He shuddered again at the mental image of human beings ‘melting’ into pools of amino acid ooze.

Shaking himself clear of the dreadful vision, he picked up his shiort. Malarka slipped his legs and arms into the garment, fastened the control-buckle at his waist, and touched its top button. As if by magic, the seam that ran from crotch to neck pulled together and closed. He touched the middle one, and the shiort began losing its bagginess, until it was just the firm fit that he preferred. He adjusted the shiort’s color with the bottom buttons and inspected his image in the mirror. Pearl gray suited him fine, and the vermilion trim matched his hair and eyes. He opened the door and stepped into the other room.

“Joy, Lark.” Brilson was already up and dressed, presumably searching the infonets for suitable offers of employment. Onyx was dialing through a variety of vids on the window. She stopped at one showing people engaged in gravity sports against spectacular planetary scenery.

“Joy, Bril.” He nodded his head quickly in Onyx’ direction, and raised his eyebrows in a question.

“Well,” began Brilson, who seemed as puzzled as Malarka, “she never got a comeback call, and I guess I...”

“But you know the visitor’s clause in the contract,” Malarka said. “Limit of three persons for ten hours during any twenty-six hour period.”

“I know, Lark. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. It’s just that I kept expecting her prime to call her away, like usual, and – ” He gave an apologetic shrug, “she never did.”

Onyx turned around and smiled. “Good morning, Lark. Look at what I found. I think this one is ‘valleyball,’ isn’t it? Don’t you play valleyball?”

“Hmmm... that’s ‘volleyball.’ Yes, I’ve played it. Bril and I both have. Uhh, Onyx, I see you spent the night.” The statement left a question in its wake.

“Yeah.” She stood up and stretched. “Maggie told me to stay. She said something was going on and I should stay with Bril until she got here.”

Malarka was slipping on his backpack. “Did Maggie say – hunh?” The backpack fell to the floor. “She’s coming here?!”

Brilson jumped to his feet. “What? Onyx, you didn’t say anything about this last night. What’s happening?”

She gave the sweetest and most charming little smile. “I’m not sure. But Maggie has been very upset all week. I just know that she said... ”

The change that came over Onyx was subtle, but unmistakable. A slight straightening of the spine. Her forehead icon lit up. Maggie had dropped in. Onyx was primed.

“Bril. And you, too, Malarka. Please don’t leave yet. I’m on my way there right now. Wait for me. Please.”

The icon dimmed and the sweet smile returned. “See? I told you. Maggie’s coming.”

 

- - = = - -

 

Maggie Robearson would not be mistaken for Onyx’ identical twin. The surrogate had slightly darker, almost maroon-black skin, a larger bust, and brilliant blue eyes as opposed to Maggie’s brown eyes. Primes often ordered cosmetic changes in their clones.

“I hope this is important enough to make me late for work.” Malarka was distressed at the intrusion into his schedule, but curious at the same time. This was altogether unusual behavior for a prime.

“I think it is.” She leaned her back against the wall, shut her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and blurted out, “someone is trying to kill me.”

She had come to Daltrave-6 twelve local years ago after reading about the impending boom in the local economy. The planet was being moved closer to its primary, which would vastly improve its climate, and more than double the legal population limit. She saw this as her big chance to actually live on a planet. She almost made it.

Just before the crash, she owned a suite at the Fontainebleu, in the 400-kilometer financial and recreational orbit, and ten percent of a one room time-share, dirtside. She owned two small businesses and twenty employees. In another two local years, she would have had the hundred thousand Daygilds for a probationary planetary residence certificate.

And now she was facing Final Bankruptcy. After the crash, she sold her businesses, defaulted on her loans and moved into Windowbox. Her family helped out at first, sending her Time when they could, but about six months ago, all communication from them suddenly ceased. Her messages went unanswered.

Without financial aid, she had to endure the indignity of retraining Onyx as a pleasure-pet. And yesterday, Maggie’s contract on her flat expired, and she had been kicked out – that was why she had told Onyx to stay the night with Brilson. Her account was under sixty Daygilds.

Silence filled the room like ten kilos of congealt in a five kilo sack. Maggie and Onyx were sitting on the floor holding hands, their faces damp.

Brilson whispered into the gloom, “Do you know what happened to your parents?”

She shook her head, then nodded, then broke into sobs. An instant later, Onyx did too. “Last ... night,” she managed to blurt between the sobs, “I... I found out... they... they're dead. My whole... my whole family... my... whole world... they’re gone... all gone.” She and Onyx hid their faces in their hands, and sobbed in unison.

Malarka had to bite his lip to maintain his composure. He could feel his own tears welling up.

When the sound of crying had subsided, he spoke as gently as he could, “Maggie. I’m afraid we’re in much the same boat as you. I’ve got a job dirtside, but it’s all I can do to support me and Bril.” The two men locked glances for a long moment. “In fact, we’re losing ground. You’ve listened through Onyx. You must know that we can’t help you.”

Maggie sniffed loudly. “Yes. I know. It’s just that I don’t have any friends left, and Bril is the only client I’ve got. Onyx isn’t exactly in hot demand, you know. She wasn’t designed to be a pet. She has hardly any sex implants.”

Malarka offered his hand to Maggie, and helped her to her feet. Brilson gave a hand up to Onyx, and asked, “Is this why you’ve been checked out? Or was it something I did wrong?”

Maggie gave a ragged smile and shook her head. “No, no, Bril. You’re sweet. You really are. And you don’t know how much you’ve helped me.” She touched her palm to his cheek. “After all I’ve been through this week, I just lost it, that’s all. I couldn’t drop in. I’ve been a basket case for days.”

Brilson relaxed just a bit. “Good. I mean... I’m glad I didn’t offend you or hurt you. Uh... if you don’t mind me asking, how did your family die?”

She wiped the last of the tears off her face and said, “Some kind of smartvirus disaster. Apparently, it wiped out the whole planet. I couldn’t find out any details. There was just an obit in the Gazette.”

In a strained voice, Malarka blurted out, “Maggie! What’s the name of your home planet?” But as the hair stood up on the back of his neck, he knew that he already knew the answer.

“Bernadette,” she said. “Two fifty-eight.”

Six pair of eyes focused on Malarka in the uneasy silence. He could feel the blood draining from his face.

“So,” he said, clearing his throat, “is that your story? Is that it?”

“Well, not quite,” she offered timidly. “I know you’ll think I’m just being crazy, but... I swear, last week someone tried to kill me.”

Malarka nudged his backpack to the side and sat down, cross legged, to hear the rest of Maggie’s story, of being attacked outside the postal center.

When she had finished, Brilson piped up, “What about the package?”

Maggie shrugged, “I went back to the mailroom with Onyx and the guard to get some first aid. I fetched the box out of the trasher, and I… well, I remailed it.”

“To where?” asked Malarka.

“I didn’t want it coming back to me here at Windowbox. I’ve lost touch with my old friends in the Fontainebleu. And Bril had told me about your job dirtside. I didn’t know who else to trust, so I sent it to you, care of the Daltravian Gazette. I hope you don’t mind.”

Malarka picked up his backpack. “No prob. But I have to go now, or I won’t have a job at the Gazette. Bril, keep an eye on these two. Get out of the apartment for a while. See you all at twenty-four hundred.”

 

- - = = - -

 

The commute to Daltrave seemed oppressively unending. Even the view of the approaching planet’s dayside couldn’t distract Malarka from his thoughts. Maggie’s story had hit him hard. He couldn’t put his finger on why he believed her, but he knew he did.

Maybe it was the tie-in to Bernadette-258. From the moment he read the story on the newspipe, he felt there was more to it than just an industrial accident. For instance, there should have been at least one o’neill out of hundreds to survive the plague. Or a shuttle in transit that had enough warning to quarantine itself. And there were plenty of warnings. Paris-699 monitored several translight emergency broadcasts, pleas for help, warnings not to land planetside until the virus was contained, etc. Then silence. The newspipe mentioned no survivors.

Or maybe it was just because he wanted to believe her.

He even believed the part where someone tried to kill her, which was a flying tarpoon in these days and times! With a thumbchip in every human, it was possible to monitor the whereabouts of everyone. To think that someone could attempt murder and not be automatically caught in the act (or soon thereafter) was ludicrous. And no one, not even the mighty Sam Spade could wander around an o’neill, or even a planet, for an hour without a thumbchip, before his lack of ID would alert the ubiquitous datacops.

No, it had been quite impossible to commit serious crimes for over two millennia. Oh, there were the occasional acts of passion, impulse and stupidity, all right. But murder? Only in old historical novels.

Like the bogart in his reader.

Malarka, pulled it out, slipped it on, and restarted the Sam Spade storycube. Perhaps it was only the distraction he wanted, but there seemed to be something calling to him. Something in the story. He watched it with an intensity that startled him. It began with a dingy office and a window overlooking a bleak city. On the door was a hand-lettered sign...

 

- - = = - -

 

“Rana, sit down! This is not just another tall tabloid tale for skeezers!”

The editor-in-chief of the Daltravian Gazette turned away from her largest layout window where she had been half minding, half ignoring his insistent overture. Finally, at the note of anger in his voice, she turned, gave him a grimace, and walked toward her chair.

“Okay, Swade, you’ve got ten minutes. And if I’m not on the edge of my seat by that time, I’m docking your wages.” The autochair swiveled around automatically at her approach. Without breaking her eye-contact with Malarka, she casually propelled her lithe frame backwards. The well-trained chair caught her with a soft ‘plop.’

Malarka stared silently at the floor for a long moment, then back up at Rana. His track record at persuading her of anything was pretty slim. And yet, his face broke into a smile for no apparent reason. “Rana, have you ever heard the phrase ‘Investigative Reporter?’“ Her quizzical expression gave him the answer he expected.

The words spilled from him in a rush. The odd touches in the Bernadette plague, including the apparent total lack of survivors, Maggie’s parents going incommunicado six months prior, the mysterious package, the apparent attempt on her life, and the meaning of those two words hand-lettered on a fictitious door in an ancient bogart.

“And then there’s this, Rana.” With a sweep of his hand, he called up his McNally Softmap in his largest holoscreen. A flourish of gestures, and the map zoomed in on Bernadette 258’s primary. “Yesterday, Bernadette-258 was on this map right here. Today, nothing. Something very weird is going on, and I intend to find out what it is.”

“And you want me to do what?!” The phony Terran accent had vanished.

“You heard me.” Malarka was still standing in front of her, his shiort getting hot and damp from his exertions. His hand went to his buckle and dialed some slack. “I want to ‘investigate’ this Bernadette-258 story. And I want you to back me. I got this hunch that there’s something big going on, something that someone wants to keep secret. Enough to commit murder for. And I mean really investigate it, Rana, not just tap into the newspipe and hype blood and mud.” He paused, raising his hand to keep Rana from speaking into the silence. “And for that, I’ll need access to your private translight channel and your pass codes.”

This was the point of no return. Malarka kept his eye-contact and gritted his teeth. Rana stared blankly at him for so long that he would have given up in the next instant. But suddenly her mouth opened and she was asking for details, asking how he was going to ‘investigate’ this story, how he was going to use her channel.

She was sitting on the edge of her seat.

 

Rana left the room to get the equipment he needed. Rather than work in her private office, they decided it was easier to move the channel into his work area. It was a four-person room, but with three writers laid off, Malarka had it to himself.

He was busy at his everyday work screens, composing the queries that would go out over the local infonets. Of course, he was still limited to commercial transactions with established (and restricted) ‘public’ data management services, but it was the best he could do until he could get on Rana’s personal channel.

And besides, it was necessary groundwork, he told himself. An ‘investigative reporter’ couldn’t know ahead of time what was valuable and what was trivial. He had to cast a wide net, and trusts his instinct that he would find what he needed. And so, he had to determine all available sources of data on Bernadette's recent history, data traffic, economic trends, etc. and any personnel directories, industrial indices, planetary libraries, cultural infonets, and the like that might be accessible and useful.

He didn’t know what he was doing, but he knew that it was what an ‘investigative reporter’ ought to do. That is to say, it was what the fictional Sam Spade would do. Now if he only had some secret ‘contacts’ like Sam Spade did, folks with connections to the ‘slimy underbelly’ of Bernadette’s (now deceased) population.

His hands paused for a moment over the interface deck. Maggie was all he had.

 

- - = = - -

 

Daltrave’s sun was setting redly in the window that dominated his office when he and Rana decided to call it quits. The spectacular view was being shot from some height, perhaps from the top of one of the planet’s arcologies. Perhaps from the top of this one.

The speculation only made a fleeting distraction in his fatigue and disappointment. He and Rana had issued hundreds of queries and counter-queries over the past three days, with no results. From the local infonets, anyway. They would have to wait till tomorrow for answers to the queries placed on Rana’s translight channel. But locally, all they got was zilch and tarpoons:

‘Queries pertaining to prior-residents of Bernadette-258 now on Daltrave-6 are being delayed until notification of next of kin... ’

‘The names of survivors of Bernadette-258 cannot be released at this time. Please redirect your query to... ’

‘XenoCol cannot make public the future disposition of ecological cleanups without Theta level clearance from planetary security and authorization... ’

And so on, ad infinitum. Perhaps they would have better luck with the queries made on Rana’s private channel, but he was beginning to doubt it. With a tired thanks and goodnight, he took his leave of Rana, left the office, stepped into a lift, and descended to the arcology’s public access level.

As he departed the lift, he stuck to the green carpeted thoroughfare, which was the only one that permitted him, an off-resident, to travel freely on his own feet. As on most planets, certain small privileges were reserved to certified planetside residents – privileges like unrestricted travel, communication, shopping, recreation and going ‘outside.’

At the end of the green concourse was a rack of walkers - small, self-powered, contragrav strollers.

He hopped aboard the nearest one, and grabbed the handles. The access gate fastened behind him with a reassuring click, and a cushioned pad came up against his butt. A hum wafted from the engine housing under his feet, and he was lifted a centimeter off the floor. A squeeze of the handles and the walker moved out onto the pink concourse. With a twiddle of his fingers, he put the machine on automatic, and directed it to the Daltravian Shuttle System.

He was within sight of the Shuttle concourse, when his eye was caught by a familiar logo on a spacious office front: The XenoCol Corp – “Terraforming, Colonization, Custom Ecologies, and Planetary Detox.” Though he was bone tired, it occurred to him that Sam Spade wouldn’t pass up this opportunity. He squeezed the walker handles, and aimed for the ornate doorway.

“Hello, may I help you?” She was very attractive, very professional and a surrogate. Her hairdo and cosmetics were lightyears beyond anything Malarka could afford. The neckline of her tight white shiort was dialed about as low as it would go and still maintain the illusion that she was clothed. Her breasts were awesome. Her voice was molten honey.

Malarka brought his walker to a graceful stop at the receptionist’s counter. “Yes, I’m investigating the Bernadette-258 disaster, and would like to interview someone who knows something about... that.” He intended to emulate Sam Spade’s tough, no-nonsense delivery, but the receptionist’s charming smile and impressive cleavage flustered him. She smelled wonderful – almost intoxicating. She had him stammering like a school boy with a crush.

“Yes, certainly. Will you hold?” It was a non-question. She moved her hand subtly over her datadeck, paused, her crescent glowed softly, and then she looked up with an entirely new expression.

“My name is Wanda. What may I do for you, mister, ah... ”

“Malarka. Malarka Swade, off-resident, and journalist... I mean I’m an investigative reporter for the Daltravian Gazette.” He recomposed himself, hoping to presence an intimidating professional bearing. “I’m writing an in-depth article on Bernadette-258. Can you give me any leads on the nature and origin of the killer smartvirus, and how XenoCol is going to clean it up?”

“Uh, mister Swade, I’m sorry, but that information is rather confidential right now. What authorization do you have?” Her fingers glided discretely over the datadeck.

“I’m an investigative reporter, doll. That’s all the authorization I need. I’m working on a really big story that’s going to blow the top off this case. If you can give me some solid answers, I’ll see to it that you get your pix in the Gazette.” He smiled his most winning smile, and took another quick glance down at her voluptuous ‘public relations.’

“Well, mister Swade, that sounds fascinating.” Her finger waggled over the datadeck, and she poured on the charm. “If you put it that way, maybe I can get some little answers for you. Would you mind coming into my private office over there?” She pointed demurely, and a doorway opened.

“Sure, doll. Do you mind if I park the walker here?” He took her adoring smile to be a yes, gave her a wink, and did his best Sam Spade saunter into the next room.

The door whispered shut behind him as he saw Wanda (with her neckline dialed all the way up) turn around in an overstuffed autochair behind a very expensive desk showing more polished brass than he had ever seen in his life. She made eye contact and smiled broadly. “So, mister Swade. You’re the one asking all those very annoying questions on the infonets.” Her smile disappeared. “I don’t like being annoyed!” she spat.

There was a soft ‘pththft’ from his left and a small sting in his arm. A man in a maroon shiort with a small, police-style airgun stepped out from behind a display case.

Malarka’s knees turned into soft putty, and his tongue into a bag of marbles. “Wha? Wha’z diz?”

“This is just a precaution, mister Swade. Until we find out who you are and how much you really know.” The stranger in the maroon shiort was helping him sit down on the couch. “If you don’t know anything, you’ll wake up from this as good as new. And if you do know something... well... ”

The voice became a meaningless buzz in his ears. The room disassociated into unrelated planes of color and texture, and his consciousness took a much-needed vacation far, far away.

 

- - = = - -

 

“Lark!” The sound was barked by an insect, muffled by infinite echoes, yet possibly meaningful. If only he could concentrate on where it had come from, and what it had to do with the fuzzy swirls of light that were trying to attract his attention.

A slab of cold congealt traveling at near lightspeed collided with his right cheek, detonating beautiful multi-colored starbursts. He traced the impact with some interest as the shock wave slowly traversed his head, causing his cheeks to wobble and his eyes to open wider. As the shock wave reached his left ear, the fuzzy swirls coalesced into something he recognized: a face.

“Lark! Wake up or I’ll slap you again.” Sure enough, there next to the noisy face was an open palm, presumably attached to the face in some important way.

“Bruh? Ril?” His own noise-making capabilities needed adjustment.

“Lark! Are you okay? Speak to me!”

“Bril? Ah... what’s going on? Where am I? Ah... no, cancel that. I see where I am. Where have I been?” He looked around the arrival deck platform of Windowbox, at Bril and a dozen others whom he did not recognize. He was still strapped into a seater.

The big man in the chartreuse shiort with the ‘wreath and rocket’ logo on his chest leaned in closer. “Mister Swade, I’m a datacop. You just arrived on the 1080 shuttle from York Platz, in an illegal state of intoxication from – ” he glanced down at the chipscanner in his hand, “beta-numbital. Medically, you appear to be okay. I’m turning you over to the care of your primary contact, a mister – ” he glanced down again, “Brilson Trout. You will be notified of your day in court, and fined twelve Daygilds.” He turned and stepped out of sight.

Brilson helped Malarka out of the seater, and led him to the public slideway.

“Where have you been, Lark?”

Malarka shook the remaining dizziness from his head. “I think I asked you first. How long have I been gone?”

“Thirty-two hours. You didn’t answer your beeper. Did you go on a crocker or something?”

Malarka told him everything he remembered up to the point where he was headed for the shuttle station and decided to take a quick side trip into... into... and that’s where his memory ended.

“Somebody did this to me, Bril. I was coming straight home. Then I saw something, and I... I went into a place. There was somebody there, maybe more than one. I remember being surprised. Afraid. That’s all. Somebody did this to me, and I don’t have a clue!”

 

They entered Malarka’s apartment. Maggie and Onyx looked up, saw Malarka and smiled. After hugs were passed around, and everyone was assured that Malarka was okay, if a bit famished, they adjourned to the commissary.

“Wow! It must be a planetary holiday!” There were three available meals posted at the table, not the usual two. Onyx continued in a cheerful voice, “We can have spam croquette with bluebeans, meatcake number four with potatoes and greens, and congealt with potatoes and bluebeans. Yum! I’m having the congealt.”

Three groans went up as they took their seats. Maggie said, “Onyx, how can you eat that stuff? It smells like sweaty socks.” Onyx just smiled and said, “I must have a more enlightened palette than you do.” This started another round of teasing. Onyx put up with their jokes good naturedly.

Their food descended to the table. Two spams, a meatcake, and a slimy, writhing jelly.

“What the tarpoon is that?!” blurted Malarka.

“It’s supposed to be congealt!” cried Onyx.

“It’s moving off the plate,” said Bril with obvious fascination.

“What it is, is uncooked fiberscillium,” answered Maggie. “It looks like the food proc is on the fritz again.”

“Fiberwhat?” asked Bril without taking his eyes off the gray-green translucent jelly that had crawled onto the tabletop.

“Fiberscillium. It’s the main ingredient in congealt.” Maggie picked up her chopstix and attacked her croquette. “It’s a naturally occurring slime mold down on Daltrave. They say it usta grow wild by the megatons before they drained the ice-swamps. Now it’s cultivated in all the local o’neills as a source of protein. The ‘Dirt’ – ” she pronounced the word with a capital D, making it clear that she meant the planetside residents of Daltrave-6, “won’t touch the stuff, of course.”

Bril was quite excited, and had been poking his finger into the slowly flowing flank of the critter while Maggie was talking. “This is great! An autolocomoting, ectomorphic species of slime mold. Do you know its PI?” He looked up at Maggie.

“PI?” A stixful of bluebeans disappeared into her mouth.

Malarka broke in, “Bril, what are you talking about? ‘Ectomorphic?’ ‘PI?’ Whatsit?”

“This,” said a beaming Bril, “is not merely the raw material of congealt, but also the raw material of my profession. I am, or at least was before I arrived here, a microbial programmer. Lark, you know that. Well, this is the stuff I usta work with. Come here little buddy.” Bril gently scooped up the quivering blob, and placed it carefully in a pocket. “Onyx, you better order something else.”

 

- - = = - -

 

They returned to the apartment. Malarka called Rana and tried to explain his unexcused absence. Rana wasn’t buying much of it, but he could keep his job if he hustled down to the Gazette immediately. Hundreds of responses from their queries had arrived, and she couldn’t read them all. The next edition was due out in nine hours. After some negotiation, he agreed to leave for Daltrave in one hour.

Meanwhile, Bril had gone burrowing into his travel trunk and pulled out a small, well-used case filled with high-tech. He slipped one device over his eyes. The next was an oversized datadeck, marked with a ‘For Professional Use Only’ icon. The largest device sat on the table, and from its side, a transparent tray slid out. Into this tray, Bril carefully placed his blob of slime mold.

The tray retracted behind a small window. Through it, one could see tiny probes and needles inserted into the blob. Strange colors of light bathed the slime mold. Galaxies of tiny blinking lights on the front of the control box generated whirling patterns. Maggie and Onyx – watching intently – thought it was the strangest thing they had ever seen anyone do. All this fuss over uncooked congealt!

Malarka turned from the comm and joined the silent and curious crew huddled over the table. For all the years that he had known Bril, he had never fully understood what Bril did for a living. Sure, it had to do with microbes, and it had to do with programming. But it certainly had never been a hot topic of conversation between them. They talked about their travels, the things they had seen, and what they dreamed of doing. Mostly, they talked about gravity sports. And when they weren’t talking about gravity sports, they were doing them: volleyball, soccer, phrendo, tennis, trak tao and running, chiefly.

That was unusual in itself. Planets where gravity sports were popular were few and far between. Palastine-88 was one of them. Sure, lots of people like to watch sports, that’s why you could still find volleyball vids playing on windows nearly anywhere. (Of course, the fact that the vids showed the game played in the nude probably had something to do with their popularity.)

But Malarka and Bril shared a rare obsession: they loved to actually play volleyball and all the other games. With or without an audience. The game itself was the joy. And it was the bond at the core of their friendship.

So it was with a certain sense of surprise and awe that he watched Bril doing something so novel, and apparently doing it well. Bril was totally absorbed in whatever images were coming through his headband. His hands rested lightly on the datadeck, his fingers and several of his facial muscles twitched feverishly. The control box gave a single beep.

The needles retracted from the blob, the tray extended from the control box, and Bril took off his headset.

“Incredible! This stuff has a PI of seven! It’s no GERM, but it’s smokin’ goo!”

Bril instantly saw the three puzzled expressions, and began to explain before they could ask. “PI means programmability index. Any microbe with a PI over one point oh can theoretically be programmed to do anything you want, but practically speaking, MPs... ah, microbial programmers, aren’t interested in anything under a five or six. Back on Palastine-88, we use Genetically Enhanced Reprogrammable Microbes, or GERMs, the industrial version of this stuff. It has a PI of twelve.” Carefully, he scooped up the blob and held it in his hand. It nestled down into a flattened egg shape.

“Now watch this.” Bril flexed his free hand briefly over the blob and twiddled his fingers. Apparently, he had programmed the blob to receive standard micro-affector signals from his tech implants just as a datadeck did. A small bubble formed on the top of the blob.

“Okay, Lark. Now say something.”

“What do you want me to say? That I’m totally confused by all this?” He gave a puzzled look.

Bril smiled. “That’s enough. Hold on... ” His free hand twiddled again.

“Okay, Lark. Now say something. What do you want me to say? That I’m totally confused by all this? That’s enough. Hold on... ” The sound was tiny, of poor clarity, but clearly recognizable as Malarka’s and Brilson’s voices.

They all started talking at once, asking question on top of question, until Brilson waved them quiet.

“Hey, this is nothing – a parlor trick. On Palastine-88, we have a few hundred blobs this size managing an entire factory. Give me a few hours, and I’ll have our gluppy little friend here running for senate.”

“Bril,” asked Malarka, “how did you manage to program it so quickly?”

“Well,” replied Bril, sheepishly, “that wasn’t really programming. After I determined its PI, I injected some micro-sensor plasma into it and downloaded one of the standard test engrams stored in the datadeck. I got lots more,” he grinned.

The women begged for more. And Bril was more than pleased to comply. But Malarka excused himself and headed for the fresher.

 

In the shower, Malarka’s thoughts flashed back to his recent mishap. Why had he been blacked out for 32 hours? And by whom? Would they do it again? What had he done to trigger such a reaction? The only answer that came to him was Bernadette-258. Maybe he had asked the wrong question. Or the right one! Either way, somebody now knew who he was and what he knew about Bernadette-258 – which was next to nothing. Surely, he had no facts, no evidence, nothing ‘they’ would want.

When he climbed into bed for a short nap, he felt a tiny sting in his left arm. He got up and went to the window, waving it to mirror mode. Sure enough, there was a tiny red welt just above the elbow. It wasn’t there yesterday morning. He was sure that the welt had something to do with his disappearance.

He returned to bed. A derm, or perhaps an airgun. Yes! That seemed to be it. Not that he could remember anything, but there was a certain certainty that settled over the issue even as he thought it. He had been shot with an airgun. For some reason connected with Bernadette-258. And that thought smoothly morphed into a dreamscape filled with sinister figures in ancient trench coats trying to sell him vaccines to protect him from monster viruses with phony Terran accents.

 

- - = = - -

 

When he awoke, he became aware of two things. He had fourteen minutes to catch the shuttle to Daltrave, and there was gleeful giggling coming from the next room. He jumped into a clean shiort and stepped into the next room.

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, Lark! You gotta see this!” Onyx was ecstatic. She held out a hand in the direction of the blob and wiggled her fingers ever so slightly. The blob crawled away from her at a speed that surprised him. Then she uttered, “Come on back,” her fingers wiggled again and the blob stopped and immediately reversed its gelatinous movement. She sent it to the left and then to the right, each time accompanied by peals of laughter from Maggie, and a big, self-satisfied grin from Bril.

“Isn’t that just frantic?” Onyx squealed.

Malarka was impressed. “Wow, that’s real thunder,” he answered, using a phrase he had picked up dirtside. “What else can it do?”

“Lots,” replied Bril. “I’ve downloaded engrams that let you enter up to a megabyte of mentation text, that give it light sensitivity and a primitive vision – there’s the voice recorder, of course, I’ve enhanced its motility, and after I feed it, I’m going to see if I can squeeze in some tactiles. Pretty slick, hunh?”

“By the Blessed Pain of Fornax! I had no idea you could teach a mold to do tricks! Is this new technology?”

“Nah.” Bril watched the blob as Onyx made it spin like a slow-motion top. “It’s ancient stuff, actually. But still useful. Most planets dropped GERM-tech in favor of faster, but much more expensive bioplastic over three centuries ago. Last time I checked, fewer than five million planets had economies based on GERM-tech.” He sighed. “I was hoping that Daltrave would be one of them. Oh, well.”

Unwilling to pursue that conversation, Malarka said some quick good-byes, accepted hugs from Onyx and Maggie, dialed some extra thickness on his footware, gave himself a quick shot from his thalstimmer, and raced out to catch his shuttle.

He had no sooner entered the door to the Gazette, when the receptionist looked up and caught his attention. “Mister Swade! Rana Smythentropp is wanting you most urgent! Please to find her in office!”

“Thanks, Trinka.” He detoured past his office, and poked his head into Rana’s. “Rana? You home?”

The autochair spun around revealing his editor with a very disturbed look. “We’ve had a visitor, Swade. And I’m scared.”

Malarka paused, then took a seat, giving Rana his full attention.

“A man showed up an hour ago, a third level datacop from Daltravian Planetary Security carrying a proper holobadge. He said that we were to cease and desist our investigation into Bernadette-258, or there would be... unpleasant consequences.”

“Is he still here?” Malarka asked. Rana shook her head.

“He didn’t stay long. And he was all smiles and politeness and euphemisms. He wasn’t specific about why we had to stop. Said something about our interfering with an InterPlanetLaw investigation. Nor was he specific about the consequences, except that they would be severe and... unpleasant.” She looked up into his face. “What do we do now, Swade? I guess we have to drop it, hunh?”

After a moment’s silence, he answered, “Rana, this is a news rag. Casting the news is our biz, even if we have to dig to find out what the news is. At least, that’s how I feel about it. And I never heard of InterPlanetLaw shutting down any newspaper for any reason. Not on this world, not on a million. This ever happen to you before?”

She shook her head again. “But he was so convincing, Swade. He talked like someone who has power and is comfortable using it. He seemed... evil.”

He stared at the floor for a moment. “Do you have his name and ID?”

“Yes. Rodriguez Hasaleem. Here’s his holobadge.” She turned slightly and twitched a finger at her datadeck. The previous holo was replaced with a close-up of a holobadge against a jet black shiort with white piping. It bore the ‘wreath and daggers’ logo of Daltravian Planetary Security, the name Hasaleem, and the number 214-alpha-trid-3.

“Wow!” Malarka exclaimed, “Alpha-trid. I think that’s the enforcement arm of extreme security. Those guys play really rough, I hear.” Malarka stood up. “Rana, did he say we couldn’t broadcast this story, or that we couldn’t even research it?”

“The latter,” she said without emotion. “We can’t even make inquiries.”

“Tarpoon! That makes no sense at all. I can see not casting a story to avoid panic or something, but there’s no reason to keep us from sending mail to folks!” He walked over to Rana’s comm window. “I’m gonna get some answers to this.” He activated the window and began scrolling through the York Platz chart of organizations.

“What are you doing, Swade? Don’t make trouble!”

“I’m doing what Sam Spade woulda done. The best defense is a strong off... ”

A man’s face had appeared in the window. “Daltravian Planetary Security, InterPlanetLaw. May I help you?”

Malarka heard Rana gasp behind his back. “Yes. This is the Daltravian Gazette. We just had a visitor from Alpha-trid, one Rodriguez Hasaleem, who ordered us to back off a story that we are in our journalistic rights to investigate. I want to speak to mister Hasaleem’s supervisor.” Malarka’s voice was full of restrained anger. “And I want to speak to him now!”

The face in the window was unperturbed. “There must be some mistake, sir. Alpha-trid is an ad-hoc enforcement wing of the Emergency Corps of Daltravian Planetary Security. Daltrave-6 is not currently in a declared state of emergency. The last Alpha-trid wing was disbanded twenty local years ago.”

 

- - = = - -

 

There were over two thousand replies to the queries that he and Rana had sent out. Eighty percent were flat negative. Some were requests for authorization, others demanded his reasons and/or motives for inquiring about Bernadette-258, some promised him information if only he would transfer a large number of Daygilds to such-and-such an account, and a few appeared to contain real information. In fact, several of the latter were huge datasets that he had no time to peruse.

The replies that looked even remotely useful he downloaded into a cube and slipped it into his pocket.

Then it was hard to work writing and laying out his twelve column-meters of news, pix and commentary for the next edition of the Gazette.

 

“There!” Malarka snapped his fingers, and all but his primary holoscreen went dark. “That’s it Rana! The tarpoon is in the flusher! It’s short on length, but the quality is lousy!”

From the next room, a female voice said, “Great! I got it on the sponder. It looks good! We got the green, and... there! It’s on the net! We got a paper!”

A moment later, Rana entered Malarka’s office, grabbed one of the surplus chairs and sat down heavily. “Godfrey Daniel, Sweet Mother of Pearl, that was close! Another two minutes, and we woulda missed our infonet slot.” They were both exhausted but smiling. “Swade, you’re good. You drive me batty sometimes, but you. are. good! You write, doctor pix, and pump mud as good’n fast as any three journalists I’ve ever had.”

He grinned back. “As good’n fast as any ten, you mean. So, when do I get a raise?”

Her smile faded. “You know I can’t pay any more, Swade. Ever since the crash, this paper has just barely survived. I’ve laid off half my staff, lowered the price for subscriptions, put ads in all the windows, worked everybody like slaves, and I’m still losing Time. Fact is, if I want to keep the Gazette going for more than another year, I’ll have to move off planet. And if I don’t, I’ll lose the Gazette anyway and wind up in a rimproject.” There was not a hint of phony accent in her voice. She was telling the truth.

After an uncomfortable silence, Malarka said, “Is there anything I can do to help? Work more hours, or... ” He shrugged and raised his eyebrows in a question.

“Thanks, Swade. You’re one of a kind. You’re... responsible. That’s pretty damned rare these days.” She pulled out a custom, opal-inlaid thalstimmer and took a quick shot in each nostril. Her lips pursed, and her breath rushed out in a single woosh. She held out the thalstimmer to him. “Wanna taste?”

He accepted, took a single shot, and nearly fell out of his chair. “Wow! That’s real thunder! What the hell is it?” His eyes felt lit up like flares.

She retrieved the thalstimmer. “Edoxy-endorphin-17, with spearmint and clove. It’s my private blend. If I have to leave dirtside, I’m gonna miss this stuff.”

Her expression changed, an exaggerated smile appeared, and when she spoke, it was in one of her god-awful Terran accents. “Reminds me of the time I spent a year in the Hot Kwizine (naming the purportedly best, and certainly the most expensive, restaurant in the entire system). All I had to live on for a month was food and water. It was terrible.”

As usual with one of Rana’s jokes, Malarka was not sure he understood it. He smiled politely, then asked, “Rana, where do you get your silly accents. You weren’t born on Old Earth, were you?”

“Hunh? Oh! Of course, not. I was born on Jefferson-1, though, which is only sixty parsecs from Old Earth. And I mean born planetside. My parents were residents.” She trailed off, staring wistfully at nothing for a moment.

“No, I get my silly accents from fieldies. Ever see one?”

“W. C. Fields storycubes? Yeah, I’ve seen one or two long ago. They’re funny as homemade tarpoons,” he chuckled. “But they’re awfully rare now. Haven’t seen one in a hundred years. I really get into bogarts – have ever since I was a kid. Where do you find your fieldies?”

“I don’t. I really wouldn’t know where to go look for stuff that old. But my great-grandfather does. He’s been around a long time. He collects them, and every now and then he mails me one. I must have nearly a hundred by now.”

They talked on for an hour, passing her thalstimmer back and forth. They talked a lot about how they got to Daltrave-6. They talked about old stories, old heroes, and how grand Old Earth must have been. Then, she slapped her hands on the arm of her chair and stood up, tipsily.

“Tell you what, Swade. We survive this economy, and I’ll invite you down for a week dirtside. You can watch all the fieldies you want.”

Malarka had never seen her so friendly and so... vulnerable. It suddenly occurred to him that without all the accents and professional role-playing, Rana was actually quite likable.

“Good night, Swade. And good luck with that Bernadette mail. I expect a summary of it by ten hundred tomorrow, and a preliminary outline of your story.” She took three steps toward the door, then turned around. “Here.” She tossed a small brown object to him. “This came in the ground mail yesterday while you were... uh... indisposed.”

Malarka said his final good-byes and shut his door. He looked down at the box wrapped in flimsy. There was his name, the words, ‘Daltravian Gazette office, York Platz,’ and a fourth class stamp. When he removed the top wrapper, he saw another one underneath. It bore the name Maggie Robearson.

Off came the box lid. Inside was a wad of fuzzy, white stuff and a crumpled piece of iridescent foil. As he picked it out of the box, it gave off dazzling rainbow reflections of the ceiling lamps. He unfolded it to reveal a pair of earrings with large, transparent pendants, each containing an embedded flower about the size of a fingernail. Tossing the packaging aside, he laid an earring on his desk scanner and tried to wave it on. When his first attempt failed, he realized that he was crocked. With a grin, he waved again a bit more deliberately, and the scanner came to life.

He turned on a holoscreen and selected the scan and magnification icons. Floating serenely over his desk was the flower, nearly a meter across. As hard as he looked, he couldn’t see anything but the flower in those earrings. And yet, someone was willing to kill Maggie for them. He examined them from every angle but found nothing. He concluded that whatever the killers were looking for, it was too small or too subtle to show up on his desk equipment.

With a grunt of disappointment, he tossed the earrings into his pocket, and started to shut off his desk. On second thought, he called up his McNally MegaStar. Bernadette-258 was still missing, both from the map itself, and from the master index. Very strange, he thought. Of course the map itself was automatically updated over the infonets – that wasn’t so strange. But having a planet entirely disappear was inexplicable.

On impulse, he called up the table of contents and jumped to product information. He scrolled through copyright dates, the usual legalese, and found... ’McNally is a wholly owned subsidiary of The XenoCol Corp.’ The hair stood up on the back of his neck. A memory scratched frantically at the wall of his mind.

He shut off the desk and left the office.

 

- - = = - -

 

Traffic at the shuttle station was unusually heavy, and Malarka found himself waiting in a long line that extended to the wall of the concourse. He wished he had his reader with him. In fact, he didn’t even have his backpack. He must have left it at the Gazette. Damn! Rana’s thalstimmer packed one hell of a punch!

Angrily, he squeezed the walker handles and whirled around. And collided solidly with a person just leaving one of the office fronts on foot. His walker steadied itself automatically, but the other person was knocked to the floor. Double damn, he cursed silently. This was sure to be a 5-Daygild fine!

He shook his head clear, and turned to the person on the floor, who had slowly propped herself up on her elbows, and was just now looking up at him.

Malarka’s heart froze and his throat seized up. There was something about her that hammered at the wall of his mind. Their eyes locked, and she snarled, “You bastard!”

With those words, the mental wall cracked and collapsed – the memory flooded in. He snarled back, “You again!”

Her tight white shiort was still dialed down past her navel.

Had Malarka been clear headed, he would have bolted as soon as he recognized the woman he had knocked down. But he impulsively started blurting out questions and accusations. Before he realized it, other hands had gripped him from behind, and he and his walker were firmly led back into the XenoCol office.

“It was lucky for you that we found you in such a spectacularly public way, mister Swade. Instead of dealing with you immediately, we’ll have to wait.” Wanda, her well-endowed surrogate, and the man in the maroon shiort were all in attendance in Wanda’s swank office. Only this time, it was Wanda holding the airgun.

“Deal with me? What do you mean!?” Malarka had difficulty swallowing. “I mean, why?!” Some tiny, objective part of his mind calmly informed him that he was panicking.

Wanda grinned and made a snorting noise. “Because I want you out of my way, that’s why. Or maybe because you’ve become an even bigger annoyance, mister Swade. Does the name, Maggie Robearson, ring a bell?”

“Maggie?” He gulped again.

“Yes. The twit you’re hiding up there in Windowbox. She got something in the mail – a pair of earrings I believe. We eventually determined that she remailed them. Since her circle of friends has become quite small, there’s a good chance she mailed them to you. Have you seen them?” The pleasant smile on Wanda’s face did nothing to alleviate his fear.

“Uh, earrings?!” He grabbed his walker handles and lurched to the left, but not as fast as the man in maroon grabbed him and twisted his arm. “Ow! That hurts!”

“Behave yourself, mister Swade. Jasper. Search him.”

The man in maroon went through his pockets and quickly handed the earrings over to Wanda.

“Ahh, here they are.” She smiled up at Malarka, “You have no idea, you worthless skeezer, what trouble we have gone through to get these.” She held them up to the light as if to admire them, then handed them to her surrogate. “Stickybear, get these analyzed, pronto. Jasper, what about the package they came in? Does he have anything else?”

“No package, boss. Nothing else but this datacube.” He tossed it to Wanda.

“Okay, Jasper, take him outside. The plan is to get him to Punkt Zieban without drawing any attention to ourselves. So don’t use any unnecessary violence on him before you get there.”

Her emphasis of the word ‘unnecessary’ did not reassure him.

Malarka panicked. He blurted out, “Wanda, wait! What are you going to do to me?! I have to know!”

She took several steps closer, appraising him with icy indifference. Then she turned to Jasper.

“As soon as you get to Punkt Zieban, eliminate him.”

 

- - = = - -

 

They were traveling on a beige concourse in two walkers, with Jasper in the lead by two meters. Malarka’s walker was slaved to the other’s with a small device that he was not familiar with. When Jasper’s walker turned or sped up, so did Malarka’s. The access gate wouldn’t unlatch and his handles would take no control commands.

They had traveled deep into an area of York Platz arcology that Malarka had never seen before. He suddenly realized that soon he would be so lost, there would be little chance of him finding his way back again without assistance.

They entered an area where the concourse expanded to become a mall. Fifty meters to his right, Malarka saw a large arcology map, and... a green concourse! If he could get to it, then he could make an escape without setting off alarms.

Malarka glanced ahead at Jasper’s back. The guy was strong – nearly broke his arm – but he’d never make it at volleyball or trak tao. Like most people, Jasper obviously was not into sweat sports.

Sports! The outline of an idea formed in his mind. His own sports training and experience might be just the edge he needed. He dialed his footware for maximum rubber and flexibility.

Silently, Malarka pressed down on his walker handles. Harder still, until his feet left the walker base. Balanced on his hands, he raised his body as much as possible, until the restraining strap slid below his hips.

Adroitly, he bent forward so that he could leverage more of his body out of the strap. The people in the mall took little notice of him. The few who did seemed to dismiss him as a show-off.

His upper body was nearly horizontal, and threatening to overbalance the walker. He could hear the whining of some mechanism deep inside attempting to keep it upright.

He nodded his head violently down, thrusting his buttocks up as high as he could. There! His knees lifted a half meter and were clear of the access gate. He bent his legs up, and pushed his center of balance back over the walker. The whining ceased. He straightened his legs, and rocked backwards from his handstand. With hardly a sound, his feet contacted the floor.

He turned around and broke into a run towards the arcology map. He was within ten meters of it, when an alarm sounded. A thousand pair of eyes focused upon him. He glanced over his shoulder. Jasper was doing a fast U-turn and heading back at top speed.

Malarka glanced at the huge map, easily finding the “You Are Here” icon and the green concourse. It was headed in the wrong direction, but there was no helping that. Malarka jumped a row of waist-high benches that separated the beige carpeted mall from the green concourse, and started the breathing rhythm that gave him his best speed for the two hundred meter dash.

He didn’t look back. He had seen that Jasper would have to go forty meters out of his way to get around the benches, and he reckoned that Jasper, a typical arcology dweller, would never think to get out of his walker and run. It wouldn’t matter if he did. On foot, he would be no match for Malarka.

However, his troubles were only beginning. He was a non-resident in a huge planetside arcology. There was no guarantee that he could find green concourses that would return him to the tiny area of York Platz that he knew. There was a killer on his tail. And he was lost.

 

Half an hour later, he was still lost.

Malarka leaned against a palm tree and took deep ragged breaths. Sweat dripped from his chin onto the soil. His legs screamed, his heart was a trip-hammer. He had a sudden thought, “I’ll be two hundred and forty-two on my next birthday – I’m getting too old for this sort of thing!” His face broke out in a big grin even as he fought for breath.

He was deep in the upper floors of a low-security industrial area. He knew it was low-security because the carpet was green. Though he had encountered few people in the back passways, one of them had shouted at him. He took turns walking and running. Listening for footsteps. Ducking out of sight. Changing levels at random. Sprinting for cover. Chewing up distance as fast as possible.

He was hidden in a small atrium on a level that appeared deserted. He sat down in the dirt between the palm tree and a flowering shrub. Ten minutes later, his metabolism near normal, he went exploring for a public fresher.

 

- - = = - -

 

He approached the main office of the Daltravian Gazette on tiptoes. Even though it was night on this part of Daltrave, he knew there was likely to be several people working the shift. A quick glance through the door revealed no one in sight. He slipped in and headed for his office.

Somebody had been here. Equipment cabinets and desk drawers were ajar. Numerous personal articles were scattered about. He checked his desk for damage, but there seemed to be none. The main holoscreen came on with a list showing the last twenty things he had done. The last item on the list was downloading datasets to a datacube.

In sudden panic, he checked the status of his files. With a sigh of relief, he saw they were undamaged. Whoever it was that had been here hadn’t tried to delete his files, or couldn’t. They were searching for something physical. The package! Wanda had wanted the packaging the earrings had come in.

He remembered tossing the box onto his desk, but a thorough search turned up not a trace of it. They must have found what they had come for. Wait! What was that? He saw a pale rainbow shimmer on the floor behind a leg of his desk. He reached down and pulled out a wadded piece of iridescent foil. The one the earrings had been wrapped in.

Malarka tossed the foil on his desk and took off the gray laboratory coat he had stolen from the public fresher. It would have been worthless had he encountered anybody with a chipscanner, or if an all-points thumbchip scan had been made. But he felt better knowing that his clothing couldn’t visually identify him from a distance. He slipped off his shiort and threw it on the coat. He really needed a shower, but there wasn’t time for that now. First, find his spare shiort he kept in one of the cabinets, then download another copy of the responses to his inquiries on the Bernadette-258 disaster.

“Swade, there you are! I was hoping you... you... ”

Rana was standing in the doorway staring at his naked figure with speechless wonder. Malarka froze for a moment, then figured, what the tarpoon -- he had bigger problems just now. He turned, opened a cabinet and pulled out a bright blue and black striped shiort, and slipped it on.

“Hello, Rana. What has you here so late this evening?”

“I, uh... that is... I’m sorry I... burst in like that. I didn’t know you were... ” She still hadn’t moved from the doorway. “Swade, I came back to the office tonight, because... my house has been broken into and searched. Hell, it’s been wrecked! I tried to reach you at Windowbox. Then I called the datacops, and when they went to examine my security chipscanners... ”

Malarka interrupted, “there was no trace on them.”

“Er,... ” she froze for an instant, “uh... how did you know?”

“An educated guess,” he sighed. “Come in and shut the door. We have something urgent to discuss.” He sat at his desk, activated his scriber and told her of his encounter with the agents of XenoCol, his escape, his return to the office, and the disappearance of the earring package. As he spoke, the text of his story built up in his holoscreen.

“There.” He waved a finger, turning off the scriber. “If I disappear, at least there will be a record of what happened.”

“Disappear? Do you really think that might happen? How could they possibly kill you and get away with it? That’s just not possible!”

Malarka turned in his seat and met her gaze. “Rana, I have a theory about that. Do you remember Maggie’s story of being jumped in Windowbox? And the datacop from the mail room that showed up just in time? His chipscanner caught no trace of those two guys. I believe... ” he paused and stared at his right hand for a moment, “I believe the two that jumped Maggie didn’t have thumbchips. Or at the very least had a way of shielding thumbchips.”

Her mouth flew open and shaped the word ‘what?’ but no sound came out.

“That’s right. No thumbchips. And that’s why Wanda and Jasper seemed so confident they could dispose of me. I’ll bet Jasper has no ordinary thumbchip. Maybe Wanda, too.”

Rana’s voice return. “That’s crazy, Swade. Everybody has one! There’s an automatic chipscanner every hundred meters in every direction on every level. How could they... and... how could they have them removed? Tampering with a thumbchip is automatic instant death. It’s just not... no... it’s crazy, that’s all.” She stood up and began pacing.

“I don’t know how they could have no thumbchips! I haven’t figured that out yet. There’s a lot going on I don’t understand!”

“Lark, there was a message on my private datachannel. It’s from my half-sister on Paris-699, which is just seven parsecs from Bernadette-258.” Her voice got as soft as a whisper. “She says that I’m in danger. There are people who don’t like inquiries being made about certain... industrial accidents. And I... we... have made a lot of inquiries.”

Malarka sat up a little straighter. “How does she know this?”

A long pause. “She’s a dataflow theorist at the University of Veritas. She monitors and studies the large scale flow of data all over this sector of the galaxy.” Rana pulled a datacube out of her pocket. “I sent an inquiry to her because she has access to so much industrial and business data in the region around Bernadette. She says her AI has seen strange patterns in the nets just before certain industrial accidents.” She looked up at Malarka and offered him the datacube.

Malarka took it. “Does she know who these people are that don’t like inquiries?”

Rana shook her head. “The text of her message is on there, along with some data from her library. I’ve decrypted it. Lark... we’re in danger, aren’t we?”

He nodded his head. “Yes, and they know who we are, and where we work and where we live and who our friends are. I think we are all in real danger. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t know why. But here’s what I think we should do... ”

 

- - = = - -

 

“Anybody home?” The lights in the apartment were off, an indication that there were no moving bodies about. Maybe they were asleep. Malarka took half a step into the room when he saw the piece of paper stuck to the wall next to the door frame. He pulled the paper down and stepped back into the passway, letting the door close. ‘Lark – we’ll be in canteen 32 until 2500 then in canteen 17 – Bril.’ It was written in the curly, right-to-left script common on Palastine-88.

He had jogged about ten meters when a noiseless concussion threw him violently to the floor. Harsh, metallic odors assaulted his nose. He struggled to his knees. Alarms were going off, and yet he could barely hear them – something was wrong with his ears. He looked back over his shoulder. Where his apartment had been was now a gaping and surgically precise hole in the passway wall. He staggered to his feet and ran as fast as he could.

Canteen 32 was a good six kilometers from his apartment, and on the diametrically opposite side of Windowbox. It took him half an hour to get there, even using the slideway. He found Brilson, Onyx and Maggie in a booth in a back corner.

“Lark, what happened to you? You’re bleeding! Here, sit down!”

He waved away their attentive hands and sat down. “I’ll be okay. The bleeding is stopped already, it doesn’t hurt anymore. Really, I look worse than I am. Order me a beer.” Then he told them about the explosion.

Their faces were stunned at the news.

Maggie said, “Then somebody really is trying to kill us.”

“Right.” Malarka’s glum answer needed no commentary. “And speaking of which, why are you guys so far from home?”

“It was your editor,” replied Brilson. “She called and said her place had been broken into and trashed, and asked me to warn you to watch yourself. We decided it was safer to be evasive. I left you a note that I figured no one on Daltrave could read.”

“Your note saved my life! I think the explosion was triggered by the motion sensor lights. They would have come on a few seconds after the door opened.”

After a moment of silence, a small voice with a fearful tremor spoke up, “Where do we go from here? How do we keep from being killed?”

“I don’t know, Onyx,” Malarka replied. “But Bril’s idea of evasive tactics is a good start. I think we should stay on the move as much as possible. Don’t visit the same place twice.”

“Damn! All my clothes are gone!” interjected Maggie.

Brilson moaned, “My MP gear! I’ll have to go back to Palastine-88 to replace it!”

“But we still have Gluppy!” Onyx placed a gray-green blob on the table. With a pass of her hand, the blob pulled itself into a perfect sphere. Slowly at first, and then quickly taking on altitude, it began to bounce in place on the table – pok, pok, pok, pok... The four silently watched it pretend to be a rubber ball for a long moment, and then the beer arrived.

“Ahh, give that here.” Malarka took a big pull. “So what do we have left friends? We have to assume that everything in the apartment was destroyed. Except for my backpack which is still in my office.”

Brilson had his notepad and a small pouch containing yeast powder for Gluppy. Maggie and Onyx each had a cosmetics kit, and Maggie had a wallet of holos. Malarka searched his pockets and pulled out a thalstimmer, two datacubes and a crumpled square of iridescent foil. That and the clothes on their backs was all they had left.

Brilson reached out and picked up the foil. “Where did you get this? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this stuff.”

“Hunh? That? It was part of the packaging in that box that Maggie got.” Malarka’s brows furrowed. “What do you mean? You know what it is?”

Brilson nodded. “Sure, it’s holofoil. What do you think is inside a datacube?” He held the foil up to the light, causing rainbow fire to spark between his fingers. “This is a thirty centimeter square – you find ‘em in hundred terabyte datapacks. Those you got there,” indicating the tiny dominos in front of Malarka, “have a sheet of the same material inside, only one centimeter square. The cases are nearly indestructible so most people never see this stuff.”

The pok, pok, pok of Gluppy’s bouncing stopped. The blob was resuming its normal gelatinous appearance on the table. Onyx looked quizzically at Brilson. “Does that mean there could be a message on that foil?”

It took them ten minutes to reach the nearest library, but their excitement was squashed when it became obvious that the readers only took intact datacubes. There was no way to scan a naked piece of holofoil.

“We could break open the datacube on one of these, and slip our foil in,” offered Onyx, holding up a thin pane of bioplastic with the Daltravian Gazette logo.

“No – on two counts,” replied Brilson, holding up a finger. “You can’t open a datacube without special tools.” He held up two fingers. “Those Gazettes take a one centimeter foil, just like a standard datacube – this one wouldn’t fit.”

Four glum faces sat around the table.

Maggie spoke up, “Hey, Lark. What about those datacubes you got? Anything on them?”

He picked them up. “Yeah, I think so. They have all the responses to the queries I sent out on Bernadette-258. Some of the files are pretty large. It’ll take weeks to plow through them.”

Maggie reached over and took the cubes from his fingers. “Nah. It won’t take Onyx and me that long.”

Malarka’s eyebrows shot up. “What do you mean?”

Maggie smiled. “Because that was how I made a living at Fontainebleu before the economy tanked. Data reduction and analysis. Onyx here,” she put her arm around the surrogate, “is just about the best math intuiter you’ve ever seen. Plus, she can read sixty thousand words a minute. Unless you guys got something better to do, let’s pop these little jewels in a reader and see what we can find.”

Brilson stood up. “Great idea. And I’ve got another one. Let me have this.” He picked up the crumpled foil. “I’ll be back here in a coupla hours. Wish me luck!” He turned around and dashed from the library.

 

- - = = - -

 

Four hours later. Onyx pushed herself back from the reader and turned around to face Malarka. Maggie paused her examination of some readouts and faced the other two. “Well?”

Onyx cleared her throat. “These cubes have a lot of unrelated data on them. Most of it doesn’t mean much – rumors, opinions, random facts, anecdotal information and the like. But some of the files contain records of large-scale planetary industrial smartvirus accidents over the last hundred years. There have been some sixteen thousand or so, resulting in nearly six trillion casualties. Normally, these accidents claim from two to twenty percent of a planet’s population, but fifty-five accidents were near total extermination events. They killed everybody on the planets and nearly everybody in the o’neills around them.”

“That’s incredible,” exploded Maggie. “How could this happen and nobody notice?”

“‘It’s a Big Galaxy,’“ drolled Malarka. “Six trillion would be... ” he screwed up his eyes, “about fifteen millionths of one percent of the galaxy’s population. That’s nothing.”

Onyx continued, “There are some odd things about these total-extermination events. There was a sudden rise in certain formats of interstellar communication to those planets prior to the accidents. Fifty-three events occurred to planets in star systems having only one populated planet. Fifty-one events occurred to planets that were economically depressed. And all of them had recently been renovated, terraformed, or moved by XenoCol.”

“What are the chances of those conditions being happenstance – ” asked Maggie, “unrelated to the smartvirus accidents?”

Onyx smiled sadly. “Given the population size, I would say about one chance in ten power twelve.”

Malarka gave a long, low whistle. “So those fifty-five planets weren’t really accidents, were they? Is that what you’re saying?”

Onyx nodded gravely.

“Wow,” Malarka said, “Except for that rise in communication, your description fits Daltrave-6 pretty good.”

“I’m sorry, Lark,” Onyx said in a faint, little girl voice, “but one of the files from Paris-699 shows a distinct rise in just those formats of interstellar traffic to Daltrave-6. It began about two months ago.”

Not a sound was uttered for a slow count of ten. Then Malarka whispered, “Tarpoon!”

A pause and then, “What’s so special about that message traffic?”

“Well for one thing, the messages are very large. They have a non-standard encryption scheme. And they all come from the Vitriox Cluster.”

“For the Blessed Pain of Fornax! We’re gonna be number fifty-six!”

 

- - = = - -

 

Another hour went by. Malarka and the two women searched for anything they could find in the library, which wasn’t a whole lot, since o’neills typically didn’t have the sophisticated data access to be found planetside. But they did find something in one of the cyclopedias on XenoCol. The Corp had been around in one form or another since 2930 AD, over two thousand standard years! And for nearly two hundred of those years, its galactic administrative headquarters had been on John Wayne-16. Five hundred years later, John Wayne-16 changed its name to Vitriox-1... the heart of the Vitriox Cluster!

XenoCol owned partly or outright over a billion companies galaxy-wide, including the Daltravian Shuttle System, two of the three commercial infonets that serviced Daltrave-6, and several o’neills. In fact, there were nearly a hundred companies based on or servicing Daltrave-6 that were subsidiaries of XenoCol.

“Hmmm,” mused Malarka, “is Windowbox on that list?”

“No,” said Maggie, “why?”

“Well, that would explain why they haven’t done an all-points chipscan and picked us up already. Even then, I suspect our hours are numbered.”

Both women gave Malarka a nervous glance, then returned to their displays. Maggie gasped and pointed to one of the company names listed on her data window: MINI, Morgant Intelligent Nano Industries, a large interstellar company which had a branch on the outskirts of York Platz.

“My parents worked for them on Bernadette-258.”

“Oh?” asked Malarka. “What did they do there?”

She shrugged, “My parents specialized in factory turnover and retooling. Production start-up planning. That sort of stuff.”

Onyx spoke up from where she sat over another window, “I have here a reference to the MINI branch on Daltrave-6. They were established here eleven local years ago, employ 300 people, have an annual commerce of forty million Daygilds, and their chief product is... hybrid industrial smartviruses.”

Conversation ground to a halt.

 

“I’m hungry.” It was the third time Onyx had spoken those words into the otherwise palpable silence that surrounded the three. And then, “If we don’t get some food soon, I’m gonna cook Gluppy, and eat him. I love congealt, you know!”

Malarka lightly squinted his left eye and read the time that briefly seemed to appear about two meters in front of his face. “Bril has been gone nearly seven hours. Where the tarpoon is that skeezer?” He stretched and yawned and turned toward Onyx and Maggie who sat morosely at the next table. “What did you say about Gluppy?”

Onyx had her head propped up on her hands. “I said I’m gonna eat him.”

“No, that wouldn’t be nice. Besides, that reminds me – I think I may need him for something. Where is he?”

“It’s a she, and she’s sleeping right here,” she said, gently patting her stomach. “She likes the warmth and the salt.” Onyx discretely dialed open her shiort, reached in and peeled a thick, greenish sheet off her skin. She lay it on the table where it sluggishly pulled itself together into its normal blob shape.

“What are you gonna do with Gluppy?” asked Maggie.

“Well, for starters, I want you two to show me everything it, uh, she can do – all her tricks. And show me how to feed her.”

In half an hour, Malarka put Gluppy through all its paces. They had just put it back to sleep when Brilson entered the library. He was accompanied by two men in maroon shiorts. One of them was Jasper.

 

- - = = - -

 

The four were alone in the shuttle craft. The two thugs in maroon shiorts had bound them securely to seaters, ensconced them in a small 400-place craft, turned off all the windows and sent them off without visible escort.

“Where are we going?” said Maggie.

“I dunno,” replied Malarka, but it’s probably not planetside. I’m guessing that we’re outbound.” He gave another useless tug at his fastenings. “How’s Bril?”

Maggie leaned as far to the left as she could, where she could get a glimpse of Brilson’s eyes. “He still looks to be a little tranked, but he’s coming down.” She straightened up and screamed, “Bril!!”

“Hunh?” His head turned a bit. There was a brief pause, and then a light seemed to come on in his glazed eyes.

“Hunh? Wha? Whas... am I? Lark?”

“Yeah! It’s me, Bril! Wake up!”

“Ouch! I have such a headache. Wait a minute. What are these cuffs... ” He struggled with his fastenings for a long second, and then his eyes flashed wide open. “Lark! They were chasing me! Those guys from XenoCol you told us about, they... ”

“Yes, Bril,” Onyx interrupted him. “We know. They brought you back to the library and got all of us. You were tranked.”

Malarka asked, “Can you remember anything at all?”

Brilson closed his eyes and shook his head to clear it. “I... I’m not sure. Wait. I was leaving Spud’s Fixit Shack over on the Dragonwing... no, I had gotten aboard a shuttle and was arriving back at the Windowbox! Yeah, that was when they tried to snag me – as I was getting off the shuttle. I ran for it, then everything went murky.”

“Tarpoon!” muttered Malarka. “That’s how they tracked you down. You rode one of the shuttles – they all have chipscanners, and XenoCol owns the shuttle system. What were you doing over on the Dragonwing?”

“Spud’s Fixit Shack. Spudlum Hirosawa. Great guy. Best biotronic repair shop in the entire orbit. I took the holofoil to him, and he was able to read it! There was a message on it!”

Three voices rang out at the same time, “What did it say?”

Brilson turned to Maggie, “It was from your parents. They’re still alive. They’re in hiding and wanted you to leave Daltrave-6 as fast as possible. They said you might be in grave danger because of their ‘business relationships.’ And there was mention of some Time deposited in an account, a deep space travel voucher, and a cyber-key. That was all. The message was repeated on the holofoil over and over, trillions of times.”

Without making a sound, Maggie began weeping.

 

- - = = - -

 

“Well, well, what have we here. If it isn’t our lovely miss Robearson. You’ve been so hard to track down, sweetpants. But not as hard as your foolish parents. Be a dear and tell me where they are.” The lovely voice gave Malarka the impression of silk over rusty razor blades.

“I have no idea, and I wouldn’t tell you even if I did.” Maggie’s defiance was as authentic as it was self-controlled. “I don’t even know where we are.”

Wanda arose from her seat, smiling down upon her prisoners. “Well, miss Robearson, I’m feeling generous. You’re in the Garden Estates rimproject, about six billion kilometers from Daltrave, in one of our laboratories. There! Feel better?”

Garden Estates, the outermost, the biggest, the most austere of Daltrave’s constellation of wellfare rimprojects. Population: ninety million. It was said that a ticket to the ‘gray garden’ was always one way.

“What are you going to do with us?” asked Maggie, calmly.

Wanda looked upward and made a face. “I really don’t know just now. Perhaps I’ll ship you someplace where you can’t possibly get in my way. That would be the simplest solution. Or, maybe I’ll keep you here a while and then let you go. We’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

“But why?” Malarka spoke up. “What have we done to you?”

“Not much, actually.” Wanda sat back down. “It’s just that we were arranging... well, a surprise. Blabbermouth writers have a way of spoiling surprises.” She turned her chair to face Maggie. “The real problem is miss sweetpants, here, or I should say, her two doting parents. They have something of ours and we intend to get it back. And you’re going to help us, aren’t you, sweetpants?”

“My name is Maggie, and if you want anything from me, you had better not harm my friends. Or my parents.”

“Ooohhh! Such a toughie. Okay... Maggie. I won’t hurt your friends or your parents. Promise! But if I don’t get full cooperation from you, they,” she jerked a thumb at Malarka, Brilson and Onyx, “get recycled, understand?” She stood up again, and headed for the door.

Maggie stopped her. “You can’t kill us. The chipscanners would know immediately. They would catch you.”

Wanda’s smile only increased. “My dear, I have a premonition that the chipscanners will be much too busy to notice the demise of your friends.”

Onyx chimed in, “Is that because of... that ‘surprise’ you spoke of... are you really going to kill everyone on Daltrave-6 with a smartvirus?”

Malarka, Brilson and Maggie turned to stone, the blood draining from their faces. Wanda turned around slowly, her hands on her hips, a huge grin on her face. It wasn’t a nice grin.

“My, my, my, aren’t you the smart one,” she chuckled. “You just had to go and figure out my little ‘surprise.’ Well, I guess we can stop pretending that any of you will ever get out of this alive, can’t we?”

“When are you going to release the smartvirus?” asked Malarka.

Wanda looked as if she were surprised to find Malarka there. “I don’t suppose it’ll hurt to let you know. It’s already been released. Weeks ago. You’re already infected. Everybody is. Another few days and pffft, Daltrave-6 is ours.”

She turned to Maggie, and with unconcealed venom spat, “And you will cooperate in finding your parents, sweetpants – and maybe I’ll let you and your friends have the antidote. Or you can refuse – and you all will die more horribly than you can possibly imagine!”

Wanda spun on her heel as if to leave. On second thought, she reached over to a control panel next to the work station and slapped it. The room dimmed as all illumination but the emergency light over the door faded away. She stormed out, the heavy door thudding shut behind her, leaving them alone with their shock and fear.

 

- - = = - -

 

For the seventh time, Malarka tested his constraints. For the seventh time, they allowed no weakness of design or function. His limbs were snugly bound with sheets of transparent bioplastic to the lightly padded arms and legs of his chair, and it felt to be solidly attached to the floor.

He took another look at the chair – it was strangely lacking any interactivity or automation that he could detect. It ignored his attempts to command it to adapt for his comfort. He was sorely tempted to conclude that it contained no interface, no sensors, no actuators, no adjustments of even the crudest mechanical variety. Who, in their right mind, would design such a useless monstrosity?

He cursed Wanda. He cursed the chair. He cursed his own stupidity.

“That won’t do any good,” offered Bril.

“Yeah. I know. But it makes me feel better. Damn, I wish I had my thalstimmer.”

Bril chuckled. “Me – I wish I had a glowgun and a ticket out of here.”

Onyx was sobbing and sniffling. Her crescent glowed as Maggie dropped in, perhaps to comfort her as only a prime can comfort a surrogate. A few seconds later, Onyx relaxed and closed her eyes. Her breathing became regular and slowed. The crescent faded.

Malarka tugged against the bioplastic, knowing that it was futile. “Can you believe these flushin’ chairs?” he spat angrily.

Bril nodded. “Sure. This is the furniture you get in rimprojects. You don’t waste tech on skeezers. I was in a rimproject once, back before we met.”

“Yeah, I remember you telling me.” Malarka said morosely.

Maggie spoke up, “How did you get out? Did someone bail you?”

Bril shook his head. “Nah. I got out the old-fashioned way. I spent nineteen local years in their sorry excuse for a library – taught myself microbial programming – found a position in life support maintenance where they let me practice my budding skills – kissed a lot of *** – eventually got a salaried position – earned enough Daygilds to buy some priority on my ID and a travel voucher. And they let me go.”

Maggie looked impressed. “Gosh, Bril, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who climbed out of a rimcan, before. That’s awesome!”

Indeed it was, thought Malarka. He had seen statistics that nearly one fifth of Humanity was classified as ‘economically challenged' and forced to live in the huge rimprojects, or ‘rimcans,’ that circled the outskirts of every inhabited star system in the galaxy. Of course, the alternative was to let them die when their Time ran out. (And many chose to do just that.) But in a universe of virtual immortality, it was considered humane and compassionate to allow the misfits, the uneducated, the lazy, the obsolete, the incurably irresponsible and the tragically unlucky to continue their lives, albeit at a primitively reduced state.

Their incarceration was euphemistically called ‘the eternal second chance,’ but the fact was, life in a rimcan was effectively permanent for all but the most determined, or those with wealthy contacts on the outside.

Malarka chuckled. “Can you appreciate the irony of it? At the beginning of the age of space travel, only the wealthiest could get into space at all. In fact, space travel could only be financed by wealthy governments. The desperately poor were forever condemned to live on the same planet surface they were born on. Today, you have to be dirty rich to afford even a planetary timeshare. Even the word ‘Dirt’ has become synonymous with wealth and those who have it. And the poor live in deep space where they can be housed and fed as cheaply as possible.”

Bril and Maggie stared at him blankly.

Bril cast a glance at Onyx who appeared to be sleeping, then queried softly, “Why do you suppose they sent us out here? Why didn’t they just confine us in Windowbox, or at their headquarters in York Platz?”

Maggie responded, “You remember that data we scanned? York Platz is just one of their branch locations. Their system HQ is here in Garden Estates.”

Malarka screwed up his face. “By the Blessed Pain of Fornax, why would a galactic corp put their head office in a rimcan?!”

“Cheap labor, cheap real estate,” answered Bril. “Skeezers rarely get the chance to work for Daygilds, but they do work for benefits – better food, cleaner air, larger apartments, beer, windows, implants, you name it. The common belief that skeezers are non-productive is a myth. It’s just that the jobs they can get in a rimproject are usually menial, tedious, unpleasant or dangerous.”

“Like what?” asked Maggie.

“Like low-tech manufacturing, chemical processing, detox, waste recycling, chip milling, that sort of thing.”

“Hunh?” interjected Malarka, “thumbchip mills?”

Bril nodded. “Sure. Where do you think thumbchips, chip phages and smart viruses are made? Those are dangerous industries. The ‘Dirt’ don’t want that stuff on their sweet smelling planets. They just want the final product.”

“Thumbchips... ” mused Malarka.

With a loud clang that made them flinch, the door opened and in stepped Wanda’s surrogate, Stickybear, barely constrained bosoms bouncing, with an armload of boxes and an airgun. Onyx woke up.

“Okay, skeezers, it’s food time! One down and eleven to go! And then we clean you off the floor with mops!”

One at a time, she twiddled her fingers over their bioplastic restraints, and released them, escorted them to the tiny fresher at the rear of the room, then escorted them back to their chairs. The bonds were adjusted to permit their hands to reach their faces. Then each was handed a green bioplastic box that opened on command to reveal... congealt cubes with yeast sauce!

Three voices moaned simultaneous echoes of disgust.

“Shut up and eat, skeezers! It makes no difference to me if you starve!”

They ate.

Stickybear was collecting the boxes and tightening their restraints when her crescent icon faded. Wanda had checked out. The surrogate paused for a moment, sighed, looked around, then continued her chores in a noticeably less antagonistic manner.

Malarka coughed. “Uh, Stickybear? Could you tell us what’s going on? What’s going to happen to us?”

In a tired voice she said, “I’m not supposed to say anything to you. Unless,” and she nodded at Maggie, “she tells us how to find her parents.”

“I see,” he said. “Stickybear, we’re not going anywhere. Can’t you tell us why XenoCol wants to kill us? Why they want to wipe out Daltrave-6?”

She ignored him and turned to the door. A trick that Sam Spade used in one of his bogarts came to mind. Malarka had nothing to lose.

“Well, I guess you wouldn’t know – you being just a pleasure-pet and all.”

She whirled around and slapped him. There was murder in her eyes.

“You think I chose to look like this?! You think I want to be a walking pheromone factory?! You think I enjoy... ” she struggled to find just the right invective, “... thumbslaves like you ogling my body?!”

Her eyes were damp. “I’ll have you know I’m a level two comm-psych, and I’m good at it! I just... I just can’t work around men. They get one whiff of me, look at my chest, and all they can think about is... is... ”

Words failed her.

“Yeah. I know what they think about. Is ‘Stickybear’ your real name?”

She sniffed back a tear. “No. Well, yes, that’s what Wanda named me. I wouldn’t have chosen that either. When I have friends, I have them call me ‘Stereo’.”

He proceeded cautiously. “Well... Stereo, that’s a pretty name. Does it mean anything?”

She wiped her nose. “I’m not sure. I got it from an old storycube. I think it has something to do with music. I like music.”

“Stereo, I’m sorry I offended you. When you’re on auto, you seem like a very nice person. Too bad we don’t have time to really get to know you. You sound like you could use some friends.”

She retrieved the food boxes from the floor where she had dropped them. “I’m gonna lose most of friends in a few days. That’s what hurts. It’s not easy for a ‘gate like me to make friends. Either the women get jealous and resentful, or the men get... you know.”

Malarka was thinking furiously. There had to be some way to keep her talking. Some key. Perhaps...

“Are any of your other friends thumbslaves, too?”

She nodded, then did a tiny double-take. “You know about ‘thumbslaves’?”

He did his best Sam Spade casual.

“Well, we’re not totally ignorant. How about you? Are you... one, too?”

“No, of course not. Wanda had me cloned a ‘freethumb’ back at ‘the Duke.’ Otherwise, I couldn’t help her convert planets. My job is make sure the local male gendarmes and politicos don’t interfere with the conversion. Trouble is, a few of them are really nice, and sometimes I get to like them a lot. Then I... ”

Her voice faded and the waxing glow in the middle of her forehead declared that Wanda was returning. Stereo’s body glared at them, gathered the trash and left.

The room was dim and quiet again. No one uttered a sound for about a minute.

“Good try, Lark,” proffered Brilson, “you got her talking, but we didn’t learn much.”

“Yes, we did, Bril. We learned that we are thumbslaves and she is not. My guess is, a ‘thumbslave’ is someone with an ordinary thumbchip, like us and everyone we know. And that Wanda, Jasper, Stereo, and maybe all of XenoCol, have modified thumbchips. They're 'freethumbs'. That’s why they don’t show up on police chipscanners.

We learned that killing off an entire planet is called ‘conversion.’

And finally, we know where they’re from. The name ‘the Duke’ was a nickname for a storycube hero from the twentieth century called John Wayne. Dukes are some of the most popular storycubes around. They eventually named a couple dozen planets for him, but only on one of them did the residents commonly refer to themselves as ‘the Duke.’ That was John Wayne-16. Today, we know it as Vitriox-1”

Maggie gasped. “The Vitreox Cluster?! They’re behind all this?”

Brilson let out a long, low whistle. “We’re flushed for sure, now.”

Silence settled back upon the fettered foursome until it was broken by Onyx giggling.

Three pairs of eyes turned to her, their faces questioning masks of wonderment at the surrogate’s obvious amusement. She was twiddling her fingers purposefully, and yet, what could she possibly be commanding?

She let out another burst of laughter, writhing in her seat. “Gluppy! That tickles!”

A gray-green jelly slowly oozed out of one leg of her shiort and crawled up to a waist pocket, which it filled.

“Wow,” muttered Malarka, “for a minute there, I thought you’d lost your mind, Onyx. I guess they didn’t search you very well, hunh?”

She tossed him an imperious grin. “They searched me the same as they did you! But I wasn’t going to give up Gluppy! She was easy to hide. But now she’s hungry.”

Brilson chimed in, “What are you feeding her? They took the yeast powder.”

Onyx grinned again. “What do you think they gave us to eat? I figured that cooked slime mold might make good food for a live slime mold. So I put a couple of cubes with lots of yeast sauce in my pocket when Stickybear wasn’t looking.”

Brilson nodded, “That was good thinking, and you’re right. Gluppy probably enjoys it more than we did,” he said, making a disgusted face.

Maggie rolled her eyes. “We might die soon, but at least we’ll have a toy to play with while we’re waiting.”

Brilson added, “Yeah, we can play with slime until we become slime.”

That provoked a few wry grimaces but no laughter. The conversation ground to an uncomfortable halt.

 

Malarka watched idly as Onyx resumed her twiddling, sending Gluppy on a journey down to her left ankle, where it halted, and then began quivering. Onyx sighed contentedly.

“What’re you doing, Onyx?” Malarka asked curiously.

“I’m making Gluppy scratch my ankle. I got an itch.”

Malarka’s eyebrows rose. He turned to Brilson. “Can she do that?”

Brilson shrugged as best he could. “No problem. I gave Gluppy some tactile engrams.”

When he saw that Malarka didn’t understand, he continued. “That’s how I could teach her to bounce like a ball. Basically, it’s a primitive sense of touch and a modification to its normal autolocomotion capability that enables it to... well, it now has the equivalent of finger muscles.”

Malarka was thinking furiously. “Is there anything else you taught Gluppy that you didn’t tell us about?”

Brilson pursed his lips. “I don’t think so. There’s the sensor/actuator plasmas, of course, the audio record/playback, text storage, a timer, a variety of directional commands, enhanced motility... what else,” he mused, “... no, that’s about it. I didn’t do the voice recog. PI wasn’t high enough.”

Malarka countered, “But those are general capabilities. Bouncing and scratching are specific skills. Are those all, or can we command Gluppy to do... other things?”

“Sure. Anything within the bounds of those general capabilities and its physical limitations... ”

“Did you say actuator plasmas?” Malarka interrupted.

“Sure. Without it, the slimemold wouldn’t be able to operate machinery or control...”

Malarka tensed in his chair. “Aha!”

 

- - = = - -

 

“Okay. Gluppy is in position. Try again,” said Brilson tensely.

Maggie had her back to the wall, but she was nearest Gluppy. A meter behind her head, the blob of jelly was fastened to the face of the master power panel. She twiddled her fingers. A wet sounding ‘plok!’ issued from Gluppy and the lights came on. Unlike appliance controls, power panels required physical contact to operate. It had taken Brilson half an hour to train the slime mold to exercise the precise mechanical force required to flip the power switch.

Four ecstatically happy faces beamed at one another.

“Okay,” interjected Malarka, “now send her over to me.”

Gluppy began its gelatinous journey down the wall.

“What are you going to do, Lark?” asked Onyx.

“I’m going to activate the work station and try to contact Rana at the Daltravian Gazette. But first, I’m going to wave the lights off. We don’t want Wanda to realize something’s wrong if she surprises us.”

He twiddled and the lights dimmed to their original level.

In the near dark, Malarka explained that as a registered journalist, he had access to certain restricted comm paths. Even from a rimproject, he should be able to send encrypted messages to his newspaper and charge them to a business account. As soon as Gluppy got close enough, he would transcribe his message and download his chip ID.

Then they would send Gluppy over to Bril where he would program it to interface with the workstation deck. It would be slow, but theoretically, it should work.

Gluppy was halfway across the floor, when the door opened with a metallic ‘clang.’ Wanda stormed in furiously.

Illuminated only by the light pouring in from the passway, she grabbed Maggie’s hair and pulled her head back.

“Okay, sweetpants! That account and cyber-key your dear parents sent you are phony! What gives!”

Maggie could barely speak in a hoarse whisper.

“How the tarpoon should I know! They sent the message! Go ask them!”

Wanda turned loose of Maggie, then slapped her.

Gluppy oozed across the floor with geologic torpidity towards Malarka.

“We got confirmation of the account and the travel voucher on Ming Tsao-2! But the flushing key from that flushing holofoil is invalid! What’s the real key! Now! Or I’ll break every bone in your face, and you’ll never see the inside of a cyberdoc!”

Maggie began to cry uncontrollably. Wanda took a step backward toward the middle of the room, her shoe landing centimeters from a greenish shadow on the floor, and aimed another broadhand across Maggie’s face.

Maggie screamed, then choked on her sobs. “I don’t know, I tell you! Perhaps they sent the real key in another message. Maybe it’s waiting for me at the Windowbox post! I don’t know!”

Wanda stood there breathing heavily. Then she whirled around, took two steps and slapped Malarka. He saw stars.

“That’s for getting Stickybear talking! You stupid thumbslaves already know too flushing much!”

Malarka composed himself. He prayed that Wanda wouldn’t notice his twiddling fingers. The slime mold came to a stop mere centimeters from her left foot. A small bubble formed on top.

He sent his mind back to the only resource he had, the memory of his bogarts. He had watched them so many times, he had most of them memorized. If only he could do a perfect Sam Spade. If only he could do it now.

“Listen, doll-face, you’ll never get away with this. If you think we’re the only ones that know what you’re trying to pull, then you’re as stupid as you are beautiful. You can’t just blow off four billion folks and not expect it to raise some eyebrows. How did a gorgeous dame like you get involved in this in the first place? Somebody got you by the short hairs, sister?” He allowed a hint of smile to curl up one corner of his mouth.

There must have been something in his calm, smooth demeanor, or his noticeably archaic use of standard galactic english. She wavered.

“No. Nobody is forcing me to do this, skeezer. You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never believed in anything in all your short, pathetic life, I bet. You have no idea what Humanity has given up. Sacrificed – for these!”

She stabbed her right thumb under his nose.

“Humanity gave up Freedom and Liberty so that we could live forever! Ha! Like rats in cages! You’re a helpless slave, Malarka Swade! A slave to a demonic technological tyranny that tracks you wherever you go, whatever you do! And relegates the Common Man to live out immortality far away from the home environment that gave us birth! And we surrendered our birthright, the planets, to the lazy ‘Dirt’ who were rich enough to buy them out from under us!

“We sold our birthright! And for what! Endless years of artificial air and artificial food in artificial cans! Well, no flushing thank you!

“Some of us are taking back our birthright any way we can!

“We’ve gotten away with it before, and Daltrave-6 will be no different! And after you’re all retched puddles of decomposing body fluids, the survivors here in Garden Estates will go down and take our rightful place on our own world!”

She was backing toward the door. He was going to lose her.

“Sure, sweetheart, anybody can kill twenty percent of a system with a smart virus. But how do you propose to kill everybody at the same time? Or didn’t your bosses figure you were smart enough to be told that?”

She sneered at him with a contempt born of innate superiority.

“Fool! I told you once before, everybody is already infected. Weeks ago. System wide. But the virus attaches itself to your precious thumbchips – which all have clocks! At precisely 2600 on Stalvember six, everybody dies!”

Malarka nodded coolly, just the way Sam Spade would have.

“Now, that’s a clever plan, doll face. And I suppose you and the rest of XenoCol are immune because you’re... freethumbs, right? And then after you impose a system-wide quarantine, your Vitriox buddies step in and take over. Neat plan. Sounds like you got all the angles covered. Except for one. What about the residents who get infected, then leave Daltrave before Stalvember six? Having millions of people all dying at precisely the same time on a hundred different planets would give away your little secret.”

Wanda chuckled malevolently. “We’re not nearly as half-witted as all that, Swade. And you’re still going to be dead in three days. Oh! And don’t expect any help from your girlfriend Rana Smythentropp. We have her sequestered where she can do no harm.”

Wanda whirled and grabbed Maggie by the hair again.

“You’re real fond of your ‘gate, aren’t you? How would you like to see her dissolve right before your eyes. It takes about twenty minutes and it’s very painful. I can arrange that. I will arrange that, if you don’t come clean with that key by supper!”

Wanda stormed out. The heavy door clanged shut.

Malarka began twiddling with ferocious intensity. The bubble on top of Gluppy shrank and disappeared.

Much later, the little blob of jelly mounted the workstation deck.

 

- - = = - -

 

“Tarpoons!” exclaimed Maggie angrily. She was twisted in her seat so that she could read the holodisplay over her right shoulder.

“The Daltravian Gazette datapath is locked! And we can’t get at your company account!”

Onyx whimpered, “What’re we going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” said Malarka. “Rana and I arranged the master account to be accessible remotely by either of us. We figured we might not be allowed to physically return to the office. This way, we could send and receive data through the Gazette, and even put out a paper without having to be there. We also set the Gazette up to automatically monitor her private translight channel, but to use that, I need Daygilds, lots of ‘em. Private interstellar channels don’t come cheap.”

A long silence ensued. Then Maggie brightened up.

“I know where we can get some Daygilds!” She twiddled. Gluppy’s pseudopods quivered over the deck.

A few minutes later, the display changed. Maggie leaned to her right.

“It worked! I got into the account my parents set up! Thunder! It’s over fifty thousand Daygilds! Will that be enough?”

Malarka nodded eagerly. “Yes! How did you do it?”

She smiled. “Dad taught us years ago to doubly encrypt our cyber-keys to each other. It’s simple. I just used the nines-complement of the key in the holofoil.”

“Hunh?” retorted Brilson.

“I just subtracted each digit of the key from nine. So a one becomes an eight. Six becomes three. And so on. Wait a sec, I’m transferring the Daygilds now to a temporary local account. There! Done!”

Malarka’s heart was pounding so loudly, he was afraid the others could hear it.

“Quickly! It’s almost time for supper! We’ll have to use Rana’s private translight channel.” He gave her the pathname and key.

“Transmit! We don’t have much time!”

Maggie twiddled.

Gluppy quivered.

The display flickered.

 

Wanda and Stereo entered the room. Jasper was not far behind. He was holding a medical derm. He casually walked over to Onyx and put the derm against her shoulder.

“Okay! Time’s up, my little sweetpants! We have our agents crawling all over Ming Tsao-2. Nothing. Your parents aren’t there. So, give me the correct key or you get a preview of how we eliminate unwanted populations. Well?”

Maggie swallowed hard. All eyes were on her.

“And you’ll promise to let my parents live? And the four of us?”

Wanda smiled sweetly and shook her head. “Maggie, Maggie. This is a big organization you’re dealing with. We didn’t get to where we are today by being sadistic or unappreciative. Your parents have something we want. And we have something you want. Let’s trade. Granted, you, your parents and your friends would have to be confined until we felt you were no longer a threat to us. Perhaps here on Daltrave-6. We could even arrange for permanent planetary residence for all of you, pending your good behavior, of course.”

Malarka sucked air through his teeth. Bribes didn’t get any bigger than that.

“You promise? You won’t hurt us?”

“Yes, Maggie Robearson. I promise.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you... if you tell us what my parents have that’s so important.”

Wanda pondered that for a moment.

“Okay. Your parents were entrusted with retooling a smartvirus factory around Bernadette, and then making some new arrangements for distribution. Their payment was to have been quite substantial – enough to buy a full planetary residence certificate. Just as the retooling was complete, your parents disappeared with copies of the smartvirus template, and the ‘freechip’ that we use to avoid detection by local datacops. We want those items back. At any cost.”

“But,” Maggie sniffed, “why did you have to destroy my whole world?”

Wanda appeared to be losing patience.

“I’ve given you your answer. Now give me mine.”

Malarka said, “Isn’t it clear, Maggie? They were using a non-Vitriox planet for covert operations. Highly illegal operations. They had to assume that your parents would soon blow their cover. They had to wipe out Bernadette-258 to destroy the evidence, probably hoping that it would kill your parents, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that XenoCol has mastered the ability to trigger their own novas.”

Wanda looked him up and down as a carnivore in a zoo might appraise a slab of synthomeat.

“You continue to surprise me, Swade. If I were you, I’d be extremely careful not to overdo that.” She turned back to Maggie.

“Last chance.” She raised a hand to Jasper.

Maggie nodded, and in a small, tired voice, rattled off the correct string of digits.

Wanda smiled and lowered her hand. Jasper pocketed the derm.

“Good girl. I hope you all enjoy your supper. Stickybear, take care of our guests.”

 

 

- - = = - -

 

They sat expectantly in the ruddy glow of the emergency light. All was silent. That is, until Onyx began to giggle. “Okay, Bril, let’s see if our little buddy did her job,” she said.

Bril grinned and twiddled. His sleeve slowly writhed. Out came Gluppy, who proceeded to the spot on the bioplastic sheath that contained the microsensors. Gluppy quivered. The bioplastic sagged and released him.

“Yea, Gluppy!” squealed Onyx, “I knew you could do it!”

Malarka grinned at her. “Pretty sharp idea, Bril, having Gluppy hide under your wrist and record the bioplastic release command. Let’s just hope they used the same command for all of us.”

“The answer is yes, so far,” said Brilson, who shortly arose from his chair and set Gluppy down on Maggie’s arm. Gluppy quivered on command and Maggie’s arm constraint fell away. In moments, they were all free.

Correction. They were all free within the boundaries of a small suite of rooms. The only door to the passway remained immutably locked.

After two hours of brainstorming, they finally collapsed into resignation. Brilson sulked and kicked things. Maggie appeared catatonically reconciled to their fate. She held Onyx in her arms and stared at a small window showing a documentary on butterflies from Old Earth. Onyx wept quietly.

Malarka was thinking, what would Sam Spade do? In one of his bogarts, Spade turns to a sidekick and says, “C’mon Watson, let’s go find us some clues.” He got up and investigated the three small rooms for clues, but if he saw one, he didn’t recognize it.

That brought him back to the workstation. It was unreasonable to expect that it would hold any magic way out, and in fact it didn’t. Everything but its standard public functions were locked under heavy security. There was no point in trying to talk to the local gendarmes. Most of Garden Estate’s critical bureaucracies would be part of the conspiracy, or so Wanda had hinted.

He tried to call up the external comm directory. It was locked, too. Without a specific pathname, there was no way to contact anyone on Daltrave-6. And the only pathnames he knew by heart were the one to the Gazette, and the one Rana had given him.

There was nothing to do except see if Rana had responded to his first message. Imbedded in that message had been the audio recording that Gluppy had made of Wanda’s confession.

There was no response.

Malarka wished there was something he could do. Anything. But when he got right down to it, his only real talents were volleyball and tabloid journalism. It looked like he was a total bust at investigative reporting.

Out of boredom, he began a diary.

 

The next meal came and went. Everyone resumed their places, and Gluppy reinstated the constraints. After their captors left, Gluppy released them again.

Malarka stretched, then sat down at the workstation and got busy.

“Watcha doing, Lark?” asked Maggie.

“Hmmm,” he grunted, “I can’t just sit here and do nothing. So, I’m writing down everything that’s happened to us and everything we’ve found out and everything I suspect, and sending it over the translight channel that my editor gave me. Maybe somebody will find it there.”

She watched in silence for several minutes as Malarka’s hands flew, fluttered, twiddled and twitched over the featureless gray slab of the interface deck.

“Hey, you’re pretty good. And fast, too.”

“This is nothing. With a professional workstation, two decks, half a dozen displays and enough hyperRAM, I’m as fast as a New Jersal racerat. If it weren’t for all the advertisements and other crap that make up half the paper, I could probably publish the whole thing by myself.”

She gently rubbed his back as he worked.

“Well, why don’t you? You said it could be published remotely.”

His hands froze over the deck.

“Why didn’t I think of that? Yes! YES!” His voice raised to a shout.

Then his face sagged in. “No, the master account for the paper is locked. You can’t put a rag on the wire without payment through the corporate account. Tarpoon!”

It was with a certain amount of shock that they heard the preliminary scratches and clicks at the door that heralded Wanda’s return.

Brilson shouted, “Quick! Back to your chairs!” Malarka made a last stab at the deck – and missed, then leaped for his own chair. Two seconds later, the door opened. Wanda and Jasper stepped in. She palmed on the lights and closed the door.

“Well, it seems that we have another blind alley, sweetpants. The message from your parents doesn’t give away their location, or the final destination of your travel voucher. And something very funny – the credit account was emptied yesterday. Do you know anything about that?”

Wanda was about to say something else when her attention was caught by a display of text floating over the workstation.

“What?” She whirled back to Maggie and looked down at her arms. Then at the crumbled sheets of transparent bioplastic littering the floor.

“Jasper!” she screamed in the same instant that Brilson’s foot shot out and caught Jasper in the knee. The thug shrieked in pain and went down without a fight. Not so Wanda. It took three of them to subdue her and hold her down.

But this hardly left them any better off than they’d been before. After pleading with Wanda, and threatening her, and trying everything else within the limits of their moral compunctions, it was clear that Wanda would not open the door for them. They were still trapped.

Maggie pointed out that Wanda could drop in on Stereo and warn her – they might have unwanted company any minute.

Brilson ran to the door and manually activated the emergency safety latch.

“There! It’ll take them a couple of hours to get through now,” he said.

Wanda, pinned to the floor by the combined weight of Maggie and Onyx, growled, “You idiots! You’ve still lost! I never gave you the antidote. In less than twenty-six hours, you’ll be dead unless you let me go!”

After some deliberation, the foursome acknowledged that their predicament had not improved. But they were unwilling to trust Wanda. There seemed to be nothing they could do except wait for the game to play itself out. Jasper and Wanda were bound to two of the chairs with strips of cloth ripped from a bed in the next room. They couldn’t use the bioplastic because their captives both knew the release codes. A few minutes later, there was some scratching and banging on the heavy door, but whoever it was soon gave up.

 

Hours dragged by. Malarka returned to the workstation and continued writing and transmitting what he believed to be his final opus. He had already sent the facts as he knew them. Each transmission began with a statement of their predicament and a plea for rescue. Now he pondered his feelings about dying, about the value of giving one’s life for a purpose or cause, however remote it might be from his selfish day-to-day interests.

He waxed philosophic about death itself, as viewed from within the gestalt conversation of a society jaded by everlasting (or at least, indefinitely prolonged) life. No, scratch that. Not everlasting life, but merely everlasting breathing, eating, laboring, searching. He reflected on the universal ennui and resignation that pervaded the galaxy, as a direct consequence of the lack of resources, the lack of opportunity.

The lack of Death.

Meanwhile, Jasper moaned, his thumbchip having partially sedated him to prevent pain and shock. Wanda ranted. And threatened. And pleaded. Malarka had Gluppy record most of her articulations, especially the ones where she attempted to persuade him of the validity of the Vitriox way of thinking. She was seriously trying to convert him!

He debated with her, giving her just enough agreement to keep her talking. He included the conversations into his transmissions.

He deliberated on what he now knew about the core belief system that empowered the Vitriox Cluster, and how it could inspire half a trillion people to accept mass planetary murder as a solution to their (purported) needs, how it could animate them to blithely create a private society marked by crime and accidents and inevitable death by old age for themselves and their children as a reasonable price to pay for... a planetary Home.

What price to pay for a world?

What price to pay for immortality?

How it felt to know that he was going to die in ten hours.

In three.

He did not sleep or eat or pause except to relieve himself in the fresher. He had given up all hope of rescue. There was only the satisfaction of knowing he was exchanging the immortality of his flesh for the immortality of his ideas. There was nothing so important now than to pour himself into the translight channel. And he did it with a manic single-mindedness that he had never known before. Except perhaps for playing volleyball. Or making love.

He knew that... perversely... he had never felt so alive.

He got up and headed for the fresher – for the last time, he told himself. Brilson and Onyx had long since disappeared into the next room. They were facing death in their own private way. Maggie was laying on the floor, apparently dozing. At second glance, he recognized the fragile trance of priming her surrogate. Perhaps she was participating. Perhaps only watching or comforting.

Wanda was in the same trance, conversing with or through Stereo. As he past her, her eyes fluttered open and she snarled at him, “You have less than an hour to live, you stupid skeezer!”

On his way out of the fresher, a chime sounded from the workstation. He dashed over and punched the deck. The image of an officer of InterPlanetLaw appeared above the deck.

“I must speak to Malarka Swade! Put him on at once!”

Malarka trembled with relief. “I am he.”

 

- - = = - -

 

The petite woman with the flaming red hair was meticulously putting the finishing touches on the hand lettered sign on Malarka’s office door at the Daltravian Gazette. It read, “Malarka Swade – Investigative Reporter.” She put away her brush and briefly glanced at Malarka with an expression that was half awe, half adoration.

Rana Smythentropp nudged him and quipped, “Now are you happy? Now will you come with me?”

He smiled into her beaming face. “Sure. Anything you say. Are Bril, Maggie and Onyx coming, too?”

“Of course. Their shuttle should be landing soon. I’ve arranged an escort to protect them from the adulating throngs and take them directly to my place.”

Rana and Malarka descended to the public concourse and took a slideway. It was with some apprehension that he disembarked with her onto a beige concourse – for planetside residents only. He had just been granted an honorary residence certificate the day before, and he still wasn’t used to the idea that he could go anywhere he wanted. In fact, he truly had no idea where he should even want to go.

They acquired a sleek ground vehicle topped by a bubble of bioplastic. And then they were... outside! At Malarka’s request, Rana adjusted the bubble for maximum transparency.

He felt fear. He felt exhilaration. Sure, he had seen vids of planetary surfaces all his life, but that didn’t prepare him for the actual experience of being there. It took all his effort to keep from hyperventilating.

He had never experienced speed so intimately before. He was sure they would crash into something, but miraculously, they never did. He asked Rana how fast they were going. Her answer of two hundred kilometers per hour left him dumbfounded. That was nothing! And yet...

Huge arcologies drifted by on the left, the Daltravian Planetary Park and Arboretum on the right. Past that, they took a side road, and after ten minutes of winding through an exotic labyrinth of manicured forest and flowering shrubs, they came to a sequence of small structures. Rana pulled in at the third one and stopped.

“Here we are. This is where I live.”

They got out. Malarka was too excited just yet to enter the house. He was entranced by the natural beauty around him, the sound of wind rustling through living trees, the smell of ozone and wildness in the air, the unbelievable expanse of the sky over his head, the incredible chaotic loveliness of the shifting patterns and subtle colors set against the deep blue of that sky.

She offered him a seat in her front yard. He pointed up at the swirling white and gray drifting over their heads.

“Is that the same stuff you can see from orbit? The white swirls in the atmosphere?”

She grinned so extravagantly he thought her face would split.

“Yes, Lark. Only now you’re seeing them from below.”

“What are they called?”

“Clouds.”

“Ah,” he muttered. “Clouds. They’re beautiful beyond anything I ever imagined.”

They sat in rapt silence for a long time.

“Lark, perhaps you could answer a question for me. When I was being held prisoner by those XenoCol thugs, they told me about the smartvirus, and even told me the precise time that I and everyone else would die. But the deadline came and went and nothing happened. Then when the InterPlanetLaw agents rescued me, they seemed totally unconcerned about the smartvirus. So... what happened?”

“Well,” began Malarka, “It seems that Maggie’s parents were undercover agents for InterPlanetLaw. The trouble with stopping Vitriox was that InterPlanetLaw could never tell when another planet would be exterminated. Or which planet. Or how it was being done.

“Maggie’s parents supplied the how. When I broadcast my articles over the translight channel, I supplied the where and the when. InterPlanetLaw had been monitoring millions of interstellar infonets for just such a clue, and was prepared to jump at a moment’s notice.

“Their agents contacted me at Garden Estates shortly after they entered the system. And I told them what they had to do to stop the smartvirus. I had them send a command to the Daltrave-6 senate to change the name of the planet.”

She stared at him goggle-eyed. “What? Change the name of the planet?!”

He grinned, “Yeah, to Humphrey Bogart-1. You see, XenoCol didn’t want anybody catching the virus in one system, then dying later in another, or in transit, or spreading the virus elsewhere. It would raise suspicions, or even start an interplanetary epidemic. Furthermore, they didn’t want to leave any evidence behind.

“So, I figured out that the smartvirus had been designed to access the victim’s thumbchip location trace to determine whether it was still in the target system. Then, when the deadline arrived, the virus would either kill the victim if they were still in the target system, or self-destruct.

“But when the deadline came, the Daltrave senate had already broadcast the name change through every chipscanner in the system to every individual. Nobody was in the quote, Daltrave-6, unquote system anymore! They were on Humphrey Bogart-1. So the smartviruses simply went ‘poof!’ Gone!”

Rana sat stunned, then chuckled. “Now I’ve got another question for you, Lark. What are you going to do with the Pulitzer Prize award? Have you thought about that?”

He shook his head slowly. “I’m still in shock, Rana. I had no idea that your private channel was being piped into a main galactic trunk line. I had no idea that Old Earth and so many other planets offered prizes for journalism. I never heard of a Pulitzer before.”

“I imagine it doesn’t happen often, Lark. There are damned few pieces written like the one you wrote, or read by as many people. You moved quintillions of people on billions of planets to think about the value of life and the value of death. You even described the Vitriox belief-system with... well, with compassion.”

She paused. “Do you believe their ideology has any validity, Lark?”

Malarka slowly shook his head without ever taking his eyes off the rapidly gathering clouds.

“Mass murder? No. And yet... there’s something valid in their viewpoint about death itself. Maybe death should be a part of the natural order of things again. And I don’t think I’ll ever take for granted the idea that planet surfaces should be reserved only for those who can afford it.

“We humans, as always, create the very circumstances that torment us so intensely. We buy something we want – we pay a price we bitterly regret.”

He lapsed into thoughtful silence.

“So, my chief writer and official planetary hero is also a philosopher. Hey, you didn’t tell me, what you’re gonna do with your ‘nouveau-dirt.’

He took a deep breath and turned away from the weather’s enthralling dynamics.

“I dunno. I’ve never had more than a few thousand Daygilds in my account at one time. Now I have sixteen billion. Tarpoon! I don’t even know where to begin!”

“Well, you could get a permanent residence certificate here on Daltrave-6. Uh, I mean Humphrey Bogart-1. And you could become my partner on the Gazette. You’d make a damned good Investigative Reporter and Senior Editor.”

He gave her his best Sam Spade double-take. “Really, shweetheart?”

“Really. And you could buy a home down here. Or... if you’re not sure, yet, you could... you could stay with me. For as long as you like.”

He looked into her face and blinked. He blinked again and there was no trace in his face or voice of anything but Malarka Swade. “Really?”

There was no trace in her face or voice of anything but Rana Smythentropp. She nodded. “If you want to. I would really love it if you would.”

He was about to accept her offer when the massive cloud bank overhead was split by a jagged streak of blinding light. One second later, he was nearly bowled over by a crashing wall of angry, rumbling noise. His adrenaline levels shot through his skull.

“By the Blessed Pain of Fornax! What was that?!”

She took his hand and squeezed it.

“That was just thunder, Lark. That was real thunder. Oh, look! Here’s your friends! Let’s go meet them!”

As they walked hand-in-hand toward the newly arrived vehicle, Rana looked back over her shoulder at the sky.

“And then we should go inside. I think your first experience of a rainstorm would be far more pleasant from under a roof.”

 

--------------------------------------

[Moontanman]

Great story pyro

[Pyrotex]

Okay, boyz und girlz, I have yet another surprize for you! Another SF story! One that I started back in 1997, finished in 2002 (but I hated the ending), and then refinished with a new ending in 2009 (a few weeks ago -- in fact, the ending keeps getting tweaked every few days :rolleyes: ).

Enjoy!

 

Thistle

 

by Nelson Thompson

 

 

The entire crew had gathered in the galley module, the only chamber large enough to accommodate all six of them comfortably. They drifted about and around each other, subtly avoiding the small freefall collisions that often become sand in the social machinery of a starship crew. The commander's hair drifted like a shining halo of auburn fire around her head. A matching fire seemed to emanate from her eyes.

 

"Ladies and gentlemen, I have an important announcement." The murmuring hushed.

 

"First, the bad news. You were told, before we left Epsilon Leonis University, that this would be a standard four-week star shoot, with some remote planetary sensing. Well, that was a cover story. It’s not true." The faces of the four young men and women became wide and pale. Only the co-pilot, a man in his fifties, seemed to know what was coming.

 

"This mission will actually take seven months ... " Immediately there was a frenzied babble of expletives , questions and accusations. It took considerable effort to wave them silent.

 

"Everything is okay! Your families are being told the truth even as we speak so they won't worry about you. The changes in your academic schedules have been cleared with your deans. I'm sorry you were deceived, but it was important to maintain secrecy."

 

"And what could be so goddam important that it gives you the right to steal six months of our lives?" The young man's outburst was so energetic that he rose from the galley table and struck his head on a cabinet. The red-haired woman waited for him to regain his composure. The co-pilot grinned broadly.

 

"Mark's question is a valid one. I think it should be addressed." The voice from the other side of the table was calm and low, yet precisely delivered so that it drew all attention to the speaker.

 

"You're right, Stephen," said the red-haired woman, "and that brings us to the good news. This is going to be a detailed planetary survey mission -- including a possible landing. The planet has life ... " That caught their attention. Living planets were extremely rare. "In fact, there's reason to believe it may have intelligent life."

 

###

 

Sooran'Xe gazed intently at the evening sky. The cloud cover was thinning, but it still hid the stars from his view, especially the one he was looking for. He had scheduled his visit with the High Priests, so that when he left, he might catch a glimpse of the new star in the sky of Xell, the one that moved against the backdrop of fixed stars. But the visit had been short and disappointing. His walk from the Temple back to his palace was earlier than anticipated.

 

The Prince of the House of Xe loosened his outer robe and threw back his silken hood. Without turning his head, he skrayed his retinue, picking out his communicator, who was following ten paces behind. "Let the Palace know we will return early. Let Meelas'Xe know that I will receive her in my quarters."

 

A disembodied voice in the back of his mind responded, "It will be done, Lord Xe."

 

Sooran'Xe and his throng of guards and administrative servants continued slowly down the Lane of the Second God to his palace which was just visible through the sweltering haze in the distance. He skrayed a second message to his recorder. "Play back the entire visit to me, with images, starting from our entrance into the Temple."

 

Sooran'Xe's vision dimmed slightly. Overlaid on his view of the cobblestone path, was a coherent hallucination of the giant iron temple doors, slowly swinging inward ...

 

###

 

Anyone who has ever been interested in astronomy has seen it. It's one of the most alluring images to be found in Earth's night sky -- it was made by David Malin on the UK Schmidt Telescope on Earth in the last decade of the 20th century: the Horsehead Nebula, silhouetted against the ruby iridescence of the hydrogen gas cloud at the rim of IC-434, Alnitak, the left-most star in Orion's belt, and the Flame nebula. In the 24th Century, the three became stylized into the 'Horse, Orb and Thistle' logo of Epsilon Leonis University's Deep Space Research department ...

 

... The Thistle (known as the Flame nebula on Earth) is the ruddy emission-absorption nebula just a few arc-minutes west of Alnitak. It is a modest cluster of young stars deep inside the wall of opaque dust that makes up the entire IC-434/5 complex. The cluster is still heavily swathed in the dust which gave it birth, and appears as a roughly circular patch of cream and curds, brindled with the vein-like striations of obscuring dust that give the asterism its names.

 

... Thus it was, that in 2388, when the ELU found itself in possession of a used and obsolete over-C frame donated by the Wilkerson Shipyards, it was decided by the faculty to build an automatic probe and send it into the heart of the Thistle.

 

[Excerpts from the Introduction of "Initial Analysis of Data Obtained from over-C Probe 'Thistle Voyager' Within IC 435"; Mikal Alexif, PhD. AsD.; Terran Journal of Astronomy; Vol. 3185; April, 2403; pp 314.]

 

###

 

"Sara?!" Stephen looked up from his nav display in science cabin 2 and turned around. Not seeing anyone, he drifted to the doorway, and poked his head into the access shaft. "Sara!"

 

From two cabins down, "Yes? Have you found something?" A mane of red hair appeared in the doorway to the galley, followed by the commander's freckled face.

 

"Yes! I found the Thistle Voyager. It's in a high orbit about the second planet. Dead. Doesn't answer pings -- thermal signature is cold. But I have a positive ID from radar and UV. Come and see?"

 

Sara Bernhart floated comfortably in the access shaft in her dark green flight suit, the logo of the Epsilon Leonis University stitched above her left breast. "Can't right now, Stephen. Send copies to the galley tank. I'll convene a meeting in about two hours. Okay?"

 

"Will do."

 

She started to disappear back into the galley, then stopped short. "Stephen, see if you can get a new set of images of the planet in time for the meeting."

 

"Sure thing." He floated in the doorway, unmoving, even after the last of her red hair drifted back into the galley. He had hoped that the excitement of finally reaching planet Thistle-17, of getting on with the main purpose of their mission, would somehow blot out the growing attraction he felt for Sara Bernhart. "Stephen Asmar, you sure know how to make your life difficult," he muttered under his breath.

 

He was a third-year graduate fellow at ELU, majoring in xenobiology, and a wizard with remote sensing systems. She, on the other hand, was an accomplished over-C pilot, had a family back on Epsilon, and was six years older than he. Not exactly a recipe for romantic success. It seemed hopeless.

 

He sighed heavily as he allowed himself to drift backwards into the science cabin. "The story of my life," he thought, but then immediately corrected himself. Through experience and training, he knew that to follow that thread of thought would be to bring on emotional reactions which would undermine his concentration, to say nothing of his mood.

 

Stephen closed his eyes, stretched, and initiated a standard ontological exercise. He subvocalized the word "decathect" to disengage himself from the burgeoning emotions. When calm and centered, he subvocalized "identify." An old and familiar memory arose from an episode when he was seven years old. His parents had made him live with strangers while they spent a year traveling to Earth. The identification of the emotional engram that had been activated -- no surprise -- was fear of rejection. Naming the fear allowed him to disengage from it -- for the time being.

 

No more than ten seconds had elapsed. He opened his eyes, returned to his console, and directed the external telescope towards Thistle-17.

 

###

 

The vision unfolded. The giant iron temple doors slowly swung inward. Sooran'Xe and his retinue entered with bare feet, hands folded, eyes to the floor. Though he knew he was supposed to be centering his mind on the Seven Mystical Principals, he was distracted by the silent ease with which the iron doors, which must have weighed a thousand tons apiece, opened and closed.

 

"Electricity," he thought. The priests allowed themselves alone to use a few of the forbidden technologies, even if they didn't understand them. But his position as prince of one of the three Sentinel Houses gave him access to certain ancient scraps of knowledge passed down from prefather to son over many generations. He knew of electricity, and had an idea what might be accomplished with it. Of course, to reveal his knowledge would be certain death. But that didn't stop him from wanting to know more.

 

The royal group reached the first station within the temple. The majority of Sooran'Xe's followers would have to stay here, including his armed escort. Sooran'Xe washed his hands in the scented bowl, touched a wet finger to his tongue, and walked alone to the second station. Here he was most vulnerable. If the priests wanted him dead, this is where it would happen, with him separated from his fighters and his shielders.

 

He purged his mind of all extraneous thought, and focused on a recital of the Seven Mystical Principals, and, as he had rehearsed, he visualized the planet of Xell as verdant, prosperous, lush with abundant life. Over and over, as he repeated the litany, his mental images of lavender grain fields and orchards of plaenth trees weaved softly in rhythm to the ancient recitations.

 

There was the lightest of mental touches. He completed the current cycle of Principals and opened his eyes. Beside him was the one recorder and the one shielder he was permitted to take into the inner sanctum.

 

The great polished plaenthwood doors opened silently. He did not permit himself even the first hint of curiosity as to how it was done. He and his two servants entered into the holy presence of the High Priests of Xell.

 

###

 

Sara Bernhart looked at the latest image of Thistle-17, the seventeenth and last planet mapped by the Thistle Voyager, even as its internal systems finally failed in the eleventh year of its sojourn into IC-435. For a brief and sacred moment, her smile was all that needed to be said in the room, communicating the joy and excitement of six rapidly beating hearts.

 

The crew of the ELU Explorer II surrounded the galley table. They stared enraptured at the two-meter, high-definition tank at the end of the table. The image was breath-taking. Centered in the image, was a curious pattern of linear and circular shapes that screamed "civilization!"

 

Stephen Asmar sat nearest the screen, adjusting the controls.

 

Melissa Numambe, second-year graduate, sat on his right. Her majors were planetary and atmospheric studies, with shipboard training in life-support systems.

 

At the end of the table floated Sara, and her co-pilot, Sam Wilkerson III, grandson of the Sam Wilkerson who established the first commercial route between Earth and Epsilon. He had more over-C hours under his belt than any living human outside of the TEC, the Terran Exploration Corps.

 

On Sam's right was Alexander Dubois -- third-year graduate majoring in over-C frame technology and shipboard systems. He was universally considered an overbearing genius and jerk, but Stephen respected him.

 

To Alexander's right, directly across the table from Stephen sat Mark Rogers -- fourth-year graduate in stellar evolution and cosmology, and all-around repository of knowledge mathematical, physical and trivial.

 

The data tank showed a color-coded image of Thistle-17's night side, centered in the near-visual infrared. At a nod from Sara, Stephen began explaining what they were seeing.

 

"Normally, the day side of Seventeen is blanketed by clouds. But here, we confirm that they disappear over much of the night side. These red areas here and here are two mountain ranges with peaks around 7000 meters. These dark spots are inland seas. The haze you see is actually the accumulated light from zillions of micro-meteorites that constantly bombard Seventeen's atmosphere. And these bright spots appear to be towns, connected by roads. In the next shot ... we have a magnified view of the largest one with some of the haze filtered out. It is quite clear that we are dealing with a planet inhabited by intelligent beings.

 

Everybody was grinning from ear to ear. This is what they had come so far to find. There were some two dozen shots of Seventeen's night side, each shot competing with the last for the honor of providing the definitive proof of humanity's first contact with another sentient species.

 

Sara stood up. "Excellent job, all of you. Especially you, Stephen." He blushed. Sara turned to her co-pilot. "Sam, set us up for an orbit around Seventeen, and a rendezvous with Thistle Voyager."

 

###

 

Arrayed like jewels in a god's diadem, The High Priests of Xell sat richly on their crystal thrones. And though quite capable of skraying their thoughts, holy tradition demanded that the interview be performed with oral speaking.

 

"Your purpose here, Prince Sooran'Xe?" The voice was deep and resonant, betraying the constant use the priests made of their vocal chords.

 

"I pray humbly to be heard, Honored Ones." In contrast, Sooran'Xe's voice was thin and untrained. When speaking was necessary in his palace, there were servants to do that.

 

"I have thought long and hard on the new star that appeared in our skies eight cycles ago. It is my belief that this is an omen from the gods that we can now be trusted with the ancient sciences -- " There was an incoherent grumble from the thrones. " -- and that we should open the Crypt, and use the ancient knowledge to save our planet.

 

The Most High Priest rose from his crystal seat. "What you ask is wrong, Prince Sooran'Xe! You risk heresy! And death!"

 

"But Most Honored One, the new star is not an ordinary star. It flies around Xell like a nightflutter circling a candle flame. And the sword of light that came from it ... " He paused, uncertain whether he should continue and reveal a bit of forbidden knowledge.

 

"Yes, Prince Sooran'Xe? What about the sword of light?"

 

"It ... it occurred to me that the light might have been a plume of gas or flame. That it ... slowed the new star down so that it would circle Xell."

 

"And if this be true?"

 

"Then it most certainly is an artifact ... an artifact created by the gods," he whispered, "a sign that the ancient knowledge is no longer forbidden ... that we should use it to save our people. To save Xell."

 

The Most High Priest sat back down, and all the High Priests became motionless, their eyes locked on Sooran'Xe. He knew they were skraying among themselves, but so good were their shielders, presumably hidden behind the tapestries, that he skrayed not the first whisper of their thought. He stood in silence for a half a thousand heartbeats.

 

"Prince Sooran'Xe!" He lifted his eyes to the speaker. "Your desire to save Xell is laudable. But misdirected. The new star is an omen that the gods themselves will save Xell. They do not need our puny and arrogant aid. The Crypt will remain inviolate as it has for seventy thousand cycles. You are dismissed. And be warned, Prince Sooran'Xe! Your impudence has once again offended this court. Our mercy is greatly strained. You are dismissed."

 

###

 

Stephen grimaced as his pocket deck chimed. He was deeply absorbed in the multi-spectral scan he was building and he resented the intrusion. Begrudgingly, he finished the current overlay, extracted his databook from its terminal slot, and headed for his appointment in science lab 3.

 

Tucked away between the health maintenance equipment and the biological assay lab was the small AI instructor that served as the ship's classroom. Lessons took place even on field trips. Today was Technical Applied Ontology. The dictionary defined 'ontology' as the branch of philosophy that dealt with being. But TAO was far removed from mere philosophy. Rooted in the personal effectiveness movements of the twentieth century, TAO had become a powerful technology for understanding and managing the neuro-linguistic landscape of the mind. Despite the unfounded fear among the uneducated that it was 'brainwashing', TAO had become a popular tool for achieving emotional maturity.

 

The instructor was ready for him, the face on the screen (a simulacrum of his TAO coach at ELU) tracked his movements with cartoonish eyes as he slipped on the TMS cap and got comfortable.

 

"Ready."

 

His face and hands felt as if tiny needles were pricking him, and vague phantom emotions tugged his consciousness first one way, then another. These sensations didn't alarm him -- he knew the TMS system was being calibrated. The Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation cap was lined with hundreds of tiny, powerful magnets that could produce fields in the 0.5 to 5 Tesla range, at fluctuations up to several megahertz. These transient magnetic fields could in turn create small electrical flows within the the brain. Properly programmed software could use a TSR cap to map neural paths, suppress pain, ameliorate some brain disorders or reinforce the training of emotional reactions.

 

"Greetings, Stephen. Sara will be late -- we will proceed without her. Please begin by ..."

 

His pang of disappointment must have been evident, for the instructor interrupted itself with, "What was that, Stephen? That emotion?"

 

"Hunh? Oh. I was just disappointed that Sara was not here, that's all."

 

The instructor's voice was a far better facsimile than the face. "I detect disappointment. What else is present?"

 

"Well, I ... I like her a lot and ... "

 

"Stephen, you are explaining. I asked you what is present. Focus."

 

At the sound of the trigger word, he shut his eyes for an instant, executed the TAO process that relaxed his facial and neck muscles, and continued. "What’s present is anxiety, a class three cerebral discord with somatics, a fear engram ..."

 

Stephen knew the drill well by now. Identify the emotional reaction and break it apart into its physical and linguistic components. Identify any prior (typically childhood) event that associates itself with the reaction. Identify the neural link between event and reaction. Discount the link.

 

The lesson continued with Stephen giving off-the-cuff answers to thought provoking questions, such as, "what is deceit?" and "what do you hate?" When the instructor had calibrated his answers, the real training began.

 

It ended, Stephen breathing hard, but otherwise showing no external evidence of the rigor of the exercise. There was a short pause as the instructor assessed Stephen's words, cerebral activity, body language and eye movements. "Pass. Now review the eleven categories of truth."

 

Beginning with 'self-serving interpretation,' he started his recitation, giving a personal example of each. He was on number five, 'consensus' when Sara entered the module. She quietly allowed him to finish without interruption.

 

"Excellent, Stephen. Pass. We'll pause there and wait for Sara to don her cap."

 

After a moment of silence, Sara and Stephen nodded their readiness.

 

With increasing pace, the TAO instructor generated mental distractions through the TMS caps, spat out questions and monitored their reactions. Each sudden pang of guilt, flare of anger, surge of sadness or inappropriate twinge of humor was immediately brought under scrutiny -- each deviation from mature emotional logic made the subject of yet another spate of rapid-fire inquiry.

 

###

 

Sooran'Xe had reached the outskirts of the public courtyard of his own palace, just inside the high city wall. The last trace of the recorded vision vanished, leaving him fully present to the sadness around him in the evening twilight. The beggars. The clusters of exhausted servants around their meal fires. The ubiquitous dust that would clot the gardens, the irrigation canals, and practically everything were it not for the continuous labor of the servants. The grove of plaenth trees that his fourth prefather had planted -- they were once again turning gray at the edges. Many of them would not survive this season, in spite of the intensive irrigation. He fully believed the ancient teaching that the plaenth was the soul of Xell -- when the last one died, then so, too, would Xell itself.

 

He looked back momentarily at the clearing night sky. Sure enough, the visitor star glared down at him, as predicted by his calculators a sixnight before. It moved perceptibly, and glowed brightly through the evening sky fire, the continuous sleet of burning dust that descended upon Xell from the Great Vacuum. The sky fire that had for seventy thousand cycles plagued his planet, slowing it down in its great cycle around the Xellstar, bringing it closer and ever closer to the day when the last plaenth would perish.

 

As he continued his journey through the courtyard, his mind flashed rage, which was dutifully absorbed by his shielders, lest any other should skray his private heresy. Would that the stupid High Priests had listened to him! Would that he were unbound of their superstitious ignorance! Would that he could access the hidden secrets in the Crypt and save his world! He was prepared to do as much, but what if he tried and failed? Would that he were shown a sign!

 

A loud gasp behind him broke him from his reverie. He skrayed his retinue, to find an ember of alarm and fear in a lesser servant. Then another and another. Sooran'Xe skrayed a halt command and turned around to see what had so upset his followers. He saw it immediately. A writhing plume of incandescence in the sky, another celestial sword of light, but this one came from a new visitor star.

 

Now there were two.

 

###

 

"Okay, troops! What do we have?" Sara glided swiftly to the galley table where Stephen, Alex and Mark had gathered. She expertly jackknifed, bringing up a foot just in time to impact one of the yellow and green striped kickpads that framed the corners of the table. This instantly reduced her breakneck speed to near zero, while causing her breasts to wobble fluidly within her snug flight suit. Stephen hated it when she did that. It was so damned distracting.

 

Stephen loved it when she did that. He blushed. Instantly aware of it, he mechanically subvocalized a trigger word, bringing himself to calm attention, and began his presentation.

 

"Uh ... I have some deep infrared and radar imaging of the day side, and some disturbing interpretations." Sara pulled herself into her seat as the tank filled with the first image. "There are thousands of small towns or villages ... a web of well-engineered roads made from either stone or concrete ... a massive irrigation system covering all three continents ... more villages by the hundreds, only these are ruins ... "

 

The images flashed at twenty second intervals. Stephen didn't need to say much, as the entire crew was trained in multi-spectral image interpretation, and the pictures pretty much spoke for themselves. Besides, his detailed analyses would go in the databooks. "Here are several of the larger cities ... notice the complex of roads and villages between them and the seashores ... here's the biggest city on the planet. It's at least twice as large as any other ...

 

"Like all of the larger cities, it has a wall around it ... the street level is some ten meters lower than the land outside the wall ... here's evidence that they are still building the wall even higher. This city is also unique in that it has a perfect three-fold symmetry ... here's the massive stone structure at its center ... it's nearly three hundred meters across and over a hundred meters high ... "

 

"It could be a temple -- or the capital," interjected Sara.

 

Alex spoke up, "Yes, the capital. They probably have a tripartite government. Steef, go back a shot." Stephen did so. Alex drifted out of his seat and pointed into the tank with his laser stylus. "Notice these structures here and here and here. Each third of the capital city has a nearly identical palace or temple about half the size of the one in the center, and connected to the central dome by these wide, perfectly straight roadways. When we go down, I think we should land near one of these three smaller structures."

 

Sara smiled at his presumptuousness. Alex was often a bit radical in his opinions, but he had a well-earned reputation for being right. "Okay, I'll take that under consideration. Now, Stephen, what were these disturbing thoughts you had?" She caught Stephen's eye just as she asked the question, a Mona Lisa smile dimpling one side of her face. For an instant, he was caught in the ambiguity of the question, wondering if she had read his mind. He blushed with the realization that she meant his thoughts about the planet imaged in the tank.

 

Stephen cleared his throat . "Well, it appears that Seventeen is having a major and protracted ecological disaster. The shores of the seas have retreated anywhere from ten to twenty-five kilometers. About fifty percent of the villages I've found are ruins, some covered by meters of sand. The planet is incredibly arid to support such a varied ecology. And without exception, that ecology is being actively supported by irrigation on a massive scale."

 

Sara nodded and casually tugged at a lock of red hair above her right ear. "Any idea what's wrong? Pollution? Over-population? War?"

 

"I don't know yet," Stephen said.

 

"I know." It was Mark, who had been silent until this moment. Three pair of eyes turned to him.

 

"As you remember, Thistle Voyager's computer chose this star as its last target because of the star's unusually high velocity relative to the Thistle cluster, and the fact that it had only recently entered a Herbig-Haro object, containing one of the thickest knots of dust in the cluster. By recently, I mean within the last hundred thousand years or so." He opened his databook and tapped it with his stylus. Instantly, it filled with tiny, neat rows of numbers, equations and diagrams.

 

"I got interested in the amount of micro-meteorites we saw in images of Seventeen's night side. I estimate that Seventeen encounters about five hundred billion tons of interstellar dust every year, which is consistent with the local cloud densities we've measured. Compare that with forty thousand tons a year for Earth. That gives Seventeen the incredibly awesome meteor showers that we have seen, especially during this half of its year, when its orbital vector is nearly parallel to its primary's path through the dust.

 

"And that means," he paused and tapped his stylus for emphasis, "that Seventeen is suffering significant friction. Its orbit is decaying. It's now about fifty thousand kilometers closer to its primary than it was a hundred thousand years ago, and that rate is increasing. Plus, the infall is heating up Seventeen's atmosphere, and burying the surface at a rate of two or three millimeters per year, which is why the cities have such high walls. In another fifty thousand years, this will be a dead, sterile planet." Mark waved a hand at the image of the capital city in the tank. "And long before that, this civilization will be extinct."

 

###

 

Meelas'Xe lit the oil lamps and closed the draperies of the palace's master bed chamber. The sight of the sky fire only served to depress Sooran'Xe's normally melancholic mood even further. Tending to his moods, as well as his desires, was her chief duty in life. She sensed his approach and turned to open the intricately carved plaenthwood door.

 

Sooran'Xe was not at all surprised to have the door swing open the instant before he reached it. Such was the service and sensitivity that he had long become accustomed to from his first concubine. She was the mother of his firstborn, the best shielder to arise from the Xe House breeding program in a dozen generations, his most trusted interpreter of dreams and omens, and the only one of his concubines to whom he confided his deepest secrets. He swung off his cloak and hood, letting them drop to the floor.

 

"Did you see it?" She recoiled at the intensity of his thought. He turned around to face her. It was then she saw the heat in his eyes, and sensed the blood pounding through his veins.

 

"See what, my Lord?"

 

"The Second Omen!" His skray literally screamed in her mind, followed an instant later by his mental sketch of the second sword of light. Had he not clasped her shoulders tightly in his strong hands, she would have fallen. "The Second Omen, by the first fruit of the First Plaenth! The Verification spoken of in the Book of the Seed! Now, my beloved, tell me, is this not the permission of the gods that I and my prefathers have waited for all these thousands of cycles? Is it not?"

 

She recovered her balance, and read deeply within his mind for every nuance of the image that he held there. This sword was identical in every respect to the first, save for one difference: it was much larger. And another thing, something that Sooran'Xe had not seen. It was chasing after the First Omen.

 

She reached up and clasped her hands over his. "Yes, my Lord. The gods are not only telling you to seize the fate of Xell in your hands, but they are telling you when." He cocked his head in anticipation. "You must strike when the Second Omen embraces the First in its arms."

 

They stood in silent tableau for a dozen heartbeats, then Soolan'Xe skrayed for his servants on the floor below his bed chamber. When he had their attention, he gave each an order. The calculators were to determine when the Second Omen would catch the First. The communicators were to narrowcast cryptic messages to certain servants within the Last City of Xell. They confirmed their orders and disappeared from his mind.

 

Sooran'Xe turned his attention back to Meelas'Xe. "It is begun." Then, with no warning, he reached down, opened her robes, and thrust his hands inside, pulling her strongly against him, and roughly caressing the warm fur of her body. The suddenness of his need made her limbs tremble. She gasped for breath. "Ascend with me now, Meelas'Xe! Ascend high and fast with me," he murmured in the fur of her neck.

 

As their inner robes slipped to the floor, and their bodies fell to the bed, she echoed the flame of his passion back into his mind, and added the rapidly growing inferno of her own.

 

###

 

Steven knocked lightly on the open door to the Mission Commander's private quarters. "Sara? May I have a word with you?"

 

There was a rustle of clothing, the soft closing of a databook. "Sure, Stephen. What's on your mind?"

 

He slipped in the door and surveyed her room. It was smaller than he expected, though technically identical to the personal chamber he shared with Mark. There was just the one bunk here, but the remaining cubic was taken up with equipment, and rack after rack of databooks. It was packed and cluttered, but not messy.

 

"May I close the door, Sara?" She nodded her assent, and he pushed the appropriate button. A moment later, the sounds of other people talking and moving about the ship winked out.

 

"Commander, uh, Sara," his stammer returned in full force, "Mark and I have been talking, and we were wondering why this mission wasn't handled by the Terran Exploration Corps. Their ships are much larger. Hell, their smallest ship has a crew of sixteen. And we're bothered ... " He trailed off, not knowing how to finish.

 

She let the silence go on for a moment, then said, "As I see it, Stephen, there are three things on your mind." She smiled gently with just one corner of her mouth, and counted with thumb on fingers, "One, this mission turned out to be longer than advertised and you're still angry at the deception. Two, we are much too crowded for a seven month flight, and we're getting on each other's nerves in a bad way. And three, you're in love with me and it's driving you crazy. Which one do you want to talk about first?"

 

Her blunt directness caught him by surprise, though on second thought, it shouldn't have. Those who had mastered ontology training were known for their directness. It took everything he had to look up and meet her gaze. Silently, he rattled off several triggers to refocus his mind.

 

"We can do them in any order you want." He steadied himself by gripping the edge of a bookrack.

 

"Okay." She floated comfortably above her bunk. "One first. You know that Sam's father owns the Wilkerson Shipyards on Epsilon, but you may not know that my step-father is Mikal Alexif."

 

"The dean of the Deep Space Research department?"

 

"Yes, and the man who, in an academic sense, discovered Seventeen. He saw from Voyager's last few images that there might be intelligent life there, and instigated this expedition to confirm it. He wanted ELU to make the discovery and get the credit."

 

"But why keep it a secret? Why not publish and work with Earth on a bigger expedition?"

 

She laughed softly and began pulling a lock of her hair. "Oh, Stephen! You have so much to learn about academia. Earth has explored nearly a hundred planetary systems so far, and remotely mapped a dozen times that. Five planets had life, including Epsilon, which still has the only permanent human colony outside of the Solar System. We were famous for a while. The ELU was established. But now, all the big money is going to the space study groups in North America, Mars Paxis and Luna Farside. With the resources of the Terran Exploration Corps at their disposal, they have a near monopoly on deep space exploration. Had Doctor Alexif published those final Voyager images, ELU wouldn't have gotten so much as an honorable mention in any expedition."

 

"Okay, I can get that Alexif and Wilkerson wanted this discovery to themselves -- keep it in the ELU. But why tell us we were just going on a four week star shoot? Why lie to us? Didn't you trust us?"

 

She shrugged. "That was Wilkerson's idea. He wanted to make sure there were no leaks. Frankly, I don't think he trusts college students -- afraid you'll get drunk and blab, I guess. But it was his money that financed this operation, and his ship, so he got to make the rules. And college students were the only source of explorers that the ELU could acquire conveniently and not call attention upon itself."

 

She took a sip from a plastic pouch. "Which brings us to issue number two. We're crowded because this ship was as big as Sam's father could afford and still keep the mission a secret. Three hab modules, three science labs, a small winged lander, life support for six for one year, and a reconditioned over-C frame with an expired warranty. Had he tried to obtain anything bigger from Earth, it would have tipped off the TEC.

 

“And by the way, that was why you were chosen for this mission. Our psych sims indicated that it would take two TAO grads to maintain order and discipline aboard so small a ship. I chose you personally."

 

Stephen looked down. He could hold her gaze just so long. "Thanks. I appreciate your time." He turned and floated over to the door switch.

 

"Don't you want to talk about issue number three?"

 

He paused with his finger on the button. He shook his head almost imperceptibly, not looking at her, and gave a nervous laugh. "Not really. No matter what we say, I'll just wind up getting hurt. Let's let it ride, okay?"

 

"Stephen." She spoke quickly enough to interrupt him from pressing the button. "Don't be so hasty. That stuff about getting hurt is just a story you make up. The truth is, you don't know what'll happen. There's always a first time for everything, even romance. You're attractive and likeable, and we're going to be together for another four months. There's no telling what might happen if you try."

 

He looked up at her somberly, afraid to believe what she was saying.

 

Her voice lowered to hardly more than a whisper. "Of course, the best things in life don't come free, Stephen. You'll have to work for it. Persuade me. Enroll me. Impress me. And I honestly hope you succeed."

 

He was briefly on the verge of panic again. Then the panic gave way to a heady numbness. He could feel himself blushing, and hadn't the presence or the will to do anything about it. He nodded his acceptance, pushed the button, and departed.

 

###

 

It was the Night of Transition as predicted in ancient scripture. Somewhere on the other side of Xell, unseen, the two Omens had converged as one. Sooran'Xe looked over at Meelas'Xe. She closed her eyes, trembled slightly, then nodded. "It is time."

 

Sooran'Xe sat on a large embroidered cushion in the center of his great hall. The tables and the other cushions had been pushed to the walls to make room for his warriors.

 

He gestured to several servants and to the communicator at his elbow. Then he closed his eyes and patiently skrayed. He purged his mind of random thoughts and anxiety and opened his inner listening. There was a silent darkness at first, then the chittering of many minds around him, not heard so much as felt.

 

Minds, each like a glowing, vibrating ember in the darkness, each thrumming with its own personality and vitality. Minds arranged in geometrical arrays. Minds giving and taking energy, striving for spatial harmonies, adjusting phases and pitches, coming together in synchronization, until the individual embers were indistinguishable, and there was just a massed mental structure buzzing with disciplined anticipation.

 

There was a light physical touch on his arm. Sooran'Xe skrayed his communicator and was instantly in contact with the other teams of his warriors who had gathered surreptitiously in quiet dens and burrows of the Last City. Four regiments of skray-mutes, armed with steel and fire were in place about the other two Sentinel Palaces and the Temple. He confirmed that all was as planned. The remote bands sensed no alarm, no suspicion, no unusual activity.

 

He gave the signal.

 

The first flashing surge of energy lit up his mind like a lightning bolt. He felt as if he were breathing raw sky fire. His eye sockets itched and burned. And yet he knew that he felt only the tiniest fraction of the energy that leaked from the tight control of his servants.

 

Rank after rank of the warriors spilled their vast neural charge into the raging mental cataract, paused momentarily while their body chemistry generated yet another charge, and in rhythm fired again. Others focused the lethal maelstrom, and others aimed it at the minds of the sleeping princes and priests of the Last City.

 

No doubt the targets had their defenses as did he: shielders, diffusers, reflectors. But so great and sudden was Sooran'Xe's attack, that most were dead or crippled in the first few heartbeats. "Is it going to be this easy," he thought?

 

A mighty iron vice clamped around his skull. The air was snatched from his lungs. Red-hot daggers plunged into his eyes. He heard Meelas'Xe cry out, and felt her presence surround him, absorbing the greater share of the savage counter-attacks. A cacophony of screams assaulted his ears. He clenched his jaws and forced his eyes to open against the pain. Dozens of his warriors were down, some twitching violently, others dead still and bleeding from their eyes. But the ones standing had automatically regrouped, each member dancing in utterly precise choreography within its rank, each rank in turn skraying out its salvo of lethal power to the targets that Sooran'Xe chose.

 

With great effort, he turned his head to the defense sensitives. Fully a third were down. Meelas'Xe stood ramrod straight in front of them, assisting first one then another as their limits were reached, orchestrating their protection of Sooran'Xe and his warriors.

 

And so it went for three hundred heartbeats, the battle raging across Last City. More of his warriors dropped to the floor. Raw, bloody noises filled the air. Then the household of Peetro'Xof surrendered. Their master and most of his warriors were dead. But the counter-attack against Sooran'Xe continued unabated. Another two hundred heartbeats, and the assault from the household of Strea'Xin faltered, broke up and vanished. Sooran'Xe's skray-mutes had overrun the Xin Sentinel Palace, slashing and burning enough of the opposition to break their concentration.

 

A few heartbeats later, Strea'Xin himself capitulated, begging piteously for the lives of his children and servants.

 

That left just the Temple. Sooran'Xe could unclench his jaws now, as the assault against him was reduced by nearly half. But still, the avalanche of agony and the mental screams of the wounded ate through him like a molten river. As expected, the Priests had the greatest number of warriors. "But numbers do not matter," Sooran'Xe raged, "for I have the gods' holy purpose!"

 

There was another touch on his arm. In the next instant, he was skraying a High Priest through a communicator. "Halt! Halt this sacrilege! This madness! You have violated the Great Temple! Stop now and we will be lenient! We will let your children live and assume the House of Xe!"

 

"There will be no stopping me, Seetan'di'Xe, my brother," he responded. "The gods have given me Xell. They have called me to save our world. And to do that, you must die."

 

There was a wordless protest from the Priest, who, suddenly distracted, whirled around. Through his brother's mind, Sooran'Xe saw a blurred image of a fighter dressed in the livery of Xe House, bursting through a door. He was holding a sword in one hand and what appeared to be a large, ungainly oil lamp in the other. The lamp suddenly gushed a blinding wall of flame ... and the image, along with the Priest's mind, vanished.

 

###

 

"Aspirin, anybody?" Sam was holding a small bottle with one hand and his head with the other. Melissa and Alex both held out hands and groaned. Two others drifted listlessly about the galley. Sara entered with a handheld chromatograph, pain etched upon her face.

 

"How can six people all come down with headaches at the same time? I've run gas checks in every module. There's no trace of toxins. Same for the water. No sudden changes in air pressure. Does anybody have a clue?"

 

The others received her question with dark silence. Most had taken an injection of morphinol, or other pain killers. Mark had insisted he could handle the pain without drugs, but the agony in his face betrayed his bravado. He hugged his knees to his chest with white knuckles.

 

Stephen managed to uncross his eyes and look reasonably functional. "Well, if it's not food, water or air, then maybe it's psychological. We all just simultaneously got sick of each other."

 

Melissa giggled then groaned. "Please! Don't make me laugh."

 

"Sorry. Maybe it's something from outside the ship, you know, like a burst of radiation."

 

Alex shook his head slowly. "I don't think so," he groaned. "The rad meters don't show a thing. I can't see how particle or EM rad could give us headaches without other symptoms."

 

There was a long minute of silence. Sara gave herself an injection, then asked, "I want each of you to recollect exactly what you were doing, where you were, what was happening -- everything -- when the headaches started. Stephen, you first."

 

"Oh ... lessee." He moved to the galley table and grabbed a water pouch. "I was in science cabin 2 at the multi-spec scanner. I was gonna do a background gamma scan of the capital city as it came over the horizon. Sort of a profile shot. I started the scan about ten seconds before predicted event. I was watching the visual encoder, when the dome of the central temple became visible. A second later, somebody tried to open my skull with a crowbar."

 

Sara asked, "So we could get the exact time of your headache from the scanner track?"

 

Stephen nodded. "To within a second or two."

 

"Good. That may be important. Melissa, you next."

 

Melissa took her face out of her hands. Her eyes were very red. "I was in science cabin 1, working on Thistle Voyager. It had received some severe abrasion damage from the dust cloud that I wanted to document. I had just taken my first shot out the cupola when my head began hurting. That's about it."

 

"Hmm, was your picture ... uh ... time-stamped?" The drugs were making Sara groggy.

 

"Sure. They all are."

 

"Excellent. We may be able to pin down whether or not our headaches were simultaneous. That may be a clue. Alex, where were you?"

 

Alex had no time to speak, for at that moment, Mark began struggling from his stupor. He groaned, writhed wildly and shouted some incomprehensible words. His lips curled back. His eyes were wide open, bulging, but there was no intelligence behind them.

 

"He sees me!" He's coming after me!" His voiced raised to a shriek. "He's inside me!! Get away!! Get away!!" His entire body knotted in a paroxysm of pain as he babbled madly at the top of his lungs. Then with a staccato scream, he went limp.

 

###

 

Soolan'Xe stood up and looked around him. He had heard stories passed down from three thousand generations -- stories of skray warfare and its carnage. But he had never really understood the reality of it until now. He was receiving news of hundreds of skray-sensitive non-combatants within the city who had been caught in the murderous cross-fires. He had lost a third of his warriors in a thousand heartbeats. Four hundred lifeless bodies littered the floor of his great hall. Another hundred were carried away on litters, hopefully to recover. Most of his skray-mutes had fallen to sword and club. It was a small consolation that his enemies had lost fivefold as many as he.

 

He looked up into the eyes of Meelas'Xe. She was weak and pale. Two serving girls held her up, steadying her as she walked. But she was smiling.

 

"My Lord Xe, you have won. The gods have truly entrusted Xell into your hands for safekeeping. This night and your courage will be glorified in song for all eternity. In a few hours, the Crypt will be yours."

 

He touched her cheek. "Meelas, the victory is yours as well as mine. Seek after your well-being. Rest."

 

The serving girls led her away and he turned to the unpleasant duties of leadership, seeing after the dead and dying, debriefing the survivors. He past several apparently lifeless bodies, when one of them twitched and opened its eyes.

 

"Lord Xe!" The oral utterance, though hardly a whisper, caught his attention as no mental invocation could have in the surrounding confusion. He knelt beside the young female. He skrayed her gently, catching her name, Poorim, and her duty, aimer, one who located the position of distant minds with great precision, and directed the assault at them. She tugged at his sleeve and he bent closer.

 

"Lord Xe! There is something you must know," she whispered hoarsely. "In the midst of the fighting, I heard minds, strange and powerful minds from beyond Last City. At first, I thought they were your enemies, so momentarily, I took aim upon them. But, they were flying slowly above the Last City. Flying! Lord Xe, I know not what they are, but they are ... not of ... us ... " The whisper faded, and her fingers released his tunic. Her mind passed into oblivion.

 

He stood up abruptly, the fur at the back of his neck on end. "Flying above Last City?" He skrayed a general command, asking if anyone else had witnessed this phenomenon. Three other survivors had, and their testimony matched. "What could fly above Last City?" he wondered. What, indeed!

 

"Calculators!" his skrayed command thundered, causing a few of the wounded to flinch. In a hundred heartbeats, he had his answer. The two Omens had risen above the horizon just beyond the Temple in the final onslaught of the skray war. There were minds aboard the Omens! The gods, themselves!

 

Quickly, he set his calculators a new task, while he gathered together a rank of communicators and an aimer who were relatively unwounded. In fifty heartbeats, they were meshed and ready, and the calculators had a new position, about a fourth of the way up in the sky, and descending rapidly. The aimer found them with some effort.

 

"Lord Xe, it is difficult. They are distant and move so swiftly, and the contours of their minds are not well defined."

 

"Can you skray their names? Is it the First Three Gods?"

 

The aimer darted a swift glance at him, faltering for an instant. "I ... I cannot skray their names ... or their thinking. I am sorry, Lord Xe, I have failed."

 

"No, my child, continue! Pick the mind with the clearest definition, and I will send a greeting." His intensity was ameliorated with compassion for her and for what she had gone through this night. She closed her eyes and concentrated. His communicators readied their neural energy, dancing back and forth to keep their synchronized strength aimed at the ever-moving target.

 

Focus achieved. She nodded, and, drawing on their power, Sooran'Xe skrayed mightily, "Greetings, Lords of the Sky! Your humble servants acknowledge your holy presence! Your arrival is our salvation, and I, Sooran'Xe, Prince of the House of ... !" He could not finish, as a painful mental feedback began to heterodyne among the minds of his communicators. Sooran'Xe clasped his hands to his temples. The feedback was a wordless wail of terror and agony that set his teeth on edge. Then it winked out as if it had never been.

 

###

 

"That's it. He's dead." Alex's words fell like pebbles upon the surface of a quiet pond, the ripples of apprehension spreading outward, into and through the remaining five. He closed Mark's eyes.

 

Sara spoke, "Do you have any idea what happened? Was it the headache?"

 

He shook his head and sighed. "I dunno. I couldn't get a monitor on him in time. I could do an autopsy, I guess. We have post-mortem medical software on board, but I've never used it."

 

"Merde!" spat Melissa. "If we don't know what killed him, then it's the end of the mission, right? I mean, we can't stay here, can we?" She looked up at Sam and Sara.

 

"We didn't come this far to quit," muttered Sam as he turned and left the crowded med chamber.

 

Sara brushed a stray lock from her face. "Sam's right. If we left now, TEC would be back next year and do all the ground stuff, like anthropology and culture, and ELU would be locked out." She looked up at Alex. "Wrap Mark and put him in a cold locker. Report to the galley when you're done." She turned to Stephen and Melissa, "Come with me."

 

The three settled into the galley. Sara called up a ground track in the tank. It showed their path over a portion of Seventeen -- the tripartite city was in the center, surrounded by a large circle. "That circle defines the line-of-sight limit from that city to our ship at our altitude. I've marked the points in our orbit when the headaches started, and when Mark screamed and the second headaches occurred. They all fall within that circle. In fact, the first headaches fall almost exactly on that circle."

 

"Are you implying that somebody in that city did this to us?" queried Stephen.

 

Sara began pulling at a lock of hair. "I'm not implying anything. Just pointing out interesting facts. Stephen, you were closest to Mark. Tell me again what he said."

 

Stephen repeated the strings of incoherent syllables and words that he could remember, and the short phrases, "in me," "sees us" (or "seize us"), "get out," "go away" and "yellow eyes" that Mark had babbled repeatedly before he died. They made a futile attempt at brainstorming, but the drugs defeated their efforts.

 

The three sullenly stared at the tank in silence for a while, then Melissa suddenly spoke up, "When is our next pass through that circle?"

 

Sara pulled out her pocket deck, pushed some buttons, and spoke quietly into it. Lines representing the next dozen or so orbits appeared in the tank.

 

"Well," she said, peering at the new image, "we won't do it again for six more orbits. Our next acquisition will be in ... ," she spoke into the deck again, and time ticks appeared on the ground track lines, " ... in nine hours and forty minutes."

 

###

 

Sooran'Xe stood within the Innermost Sanctuary, where he had had his audience with the High Priests. A last-ditch defense had been fought and lost by the fighters of the priesthood in this very room. The bodies had been removed, but there were still blood and fire stains on the tiled floor. He gestured to several of his servants, and they pulled aside the great tapestries.

 

Just as his prefathers had spoken, there was the iron door leading to the Crypt. He approached it, and saw the three locks. With a mental signal, he had Strea'Xin and the Most High Priest brought in.

 

"Strea'Xin," he skrayed with all politeness, "I have spared your life and those of your household. I ask you to repay my mercy by opening the Crypt with me. As you know, it takes the rings of two living members of two Sentinel Houses and one from the priesthood." He gestured to the small openings in the door.

 

"You are mad, Sooran," Strea'Xin replied, dropping the House honorific as an insult. "You defy the gods, and they will punish you."

 

The Lord of the House of Xe smiled. "Quite the contrary! The Gods have given Xell to me. To save and protect." He gestured once again to the door. "Now, Strea'Xin. Or I may withdraw my mercy."

 

Sullenly, the other prince climbed the steps, approached the door and inserted his hand into a lock. Servants carried the semi-conscious body of the Most High Priest to the door, and inserted his hand. Sooran'Xe put his hand into the third lock.

 

The rings had been forged seventy-thousand cycles ago, at the same time that the door had been cast. They had been passed down from prefather to son for nearly three thousand generations, and in all that time, they had never been used. Until now.

 

A loud click punctuated the silence, and the door slowly opened. Sooran'Xe peered into the musty darkness, then ushered in a column of warriors and skray mutes bearing oil lamps.

 

A thousand heartbeats later, a verbal message was passed up that the Crypt had been reached without incident. Sooran'Xe entered at the head of yet another column. These were his best communicators, calculators, storagers, analyzers, recorders and searchers. He tried to skray ahead to the warriors below, but was astonished to find that he could not. The Crypt must be very deep, indeed, or else there must be something in the walls and floor that could absorb mental energy.

 

The hallway spiraled down and down. They passed through a final crystal door into a great cavern with crystal walls. At last he was standing among the great secrets of his race, the secrets that had almost taken them to the stars. The science that granted unlimited power and reach over the material realm. The knowledge that had allowed his ancient ancestors to manipulate the very cells of their flesh, to give themselves the ability to skray each other's thoughts.

 

He was surrounded by scores of glassy, spherical orbs, each reflecting the ruddy light of the oil lamps that provided the only illumination. He mentally gestured to his entourage. They fanned out within the room, approaching the orbs in which were frozen the stored thoughts of ancestors who had been so powerful, that they had nearly been gods, themselves.

 

He approached one of the lesser orbs that had been passed over by his servants and skrayed within it. The impression was almost as if there were a mind inside, a pale and distant wisp of a mind without will or personality, but one that answered his every question in great detail. As long as it was about history.

 

He learned of the Ultimate Xellan Empire. He saw strange ships carry his ancient ancestors to the moons of Xell and beyond. He saw the radical transformation of society that accompanied the power of mental communication, and the beginnings of the great breeding programs to create the most powerful skray sensitives. He saw the story of his planet's entry into the Great Dust Wall, and the beginning of the sky fire.

 

He was stunned to see the visual images of Xell itself, from those unthinkably long ago days. The unbroken blankets of green and lavender that seemed to cover the land. Plants and animals that he could not name. Buildings that mirrored the sun, and touched the sky. And the machines! Those that floated, rolled, flew and those that had functions he could not even fathom. The grandeur of it all! The magnificence! The power! His people would have that again! He would see to it!

 

He grimly watched the Final War unfold, as power gave way to distrust and greed. He saw in those last days of global madness, the rise of the Priesthood, and their growing exhortation to give up the weapons and tools of war, indeed, to give up the knowledge itself that made those weapons possible. He watched with tear-filled eyes as miniature suns blossomed on the face of Xell, and the grand cities were reduced to ash.

 

The final chapter told of the reconciliation of the survivors under the leadership of the Priesthood, and the laying of the foundation of Last City.

 

There was a gentle touch at his mind. He looked up to see his communicators standing around him, their hands wringing. He queried their presence. His chief communicator stepped forward.

 

"Lord Xe. We have skrayed all the orbs that are here. And ... " The servant was visibly upset, his distress heavy in his thoughts. "And ... we have failed."

 

An icy hand gripped Sooran'Xe's heart. "What do you mean? Failed? Explain!"

 

"Lord Xe. Some of the orbs have faded with time. Their makers did not intend for them to be idle for so long. Key knowledge may have been lost. And even those that are intact, their wisdom assumes an understanding of principals and mathematics that we do not comprehend. They describe mighty engines, power from reversed matter, the construction of machines that think, control of gravity, the secrets of life and matter and energy, and countless technologies -- but the explanations are beyond our grasp. Perhaps the missing knowledge was in orbs that have faded. We know not." The servant nearly writhed in grief. "We did our best, Lord Xe."

 

The icy hand squeezed down upon his heart with a vengeance. Were the gods laughing at him? Was this their idea of a cosmic jest? To show him his dream, to bring it so close that he could taste it, and then to dash it to pieces before his eyes?

 

How dare they!

 

###

 

Stephen was already awake in the dark, ten minutes before his alarm. He was thinking of Sara, of course. He could think of little else these days, except when he was busy working.

 

There was nothing about her that he didn't love. The memory of their first embrace two days before suddenly leapt unbidden into his mind. It had been their first really long, intimate conversation. She had shared with him the disappointment of her marriage, and the pain of the divorce. It had been messy. For several years, she wasn't sure she could ever trust a man again.

 

He shared with her his shyness, and his fear of rejection. At the end of their conversation, he realized how comfortable and secure he felt with her. He smiled and touched her face. She hugged him and kissed his lips.

 

In a way, it scared him to think that a real relationship with Sara was possible. That she was actually encouraging him. Life was less risky when love was an impossible dream.

 

'Life is inherently risky,' was a core tenet of ontological training. Risk was something to be confronted and managed, not avoided. He mulled that over in his mind, but of course it did nothing to alleviate his very real fear of the risk.

 

Stephen owed a lot to Technical Applied Ontology, the science and discipline of appropriate and effective 'being.' It had enabled him to make superior grades and to master his fear of public speaking. With any luck at all, it would enable him to overcome his fear of relationship. It really helped that Sara was taking TAO, too.

 

In fact, for the past year Stephen had considering changing majors and becoming an TAO coach. TAO was required for many professions, including education, the police, the military and government. Many others took it just to become more effective in life, as he and Sara had. But becoming a licensed TAO coach took ten years. Xenobiology was easier.

 

The alarm went off, and Stephen heard Alex stirring in the bunk below. It was time to get up and prepare for their next pass over Triple Town.

 

###

 

The sun rose into a rare gap between the daily cloud deck and the morning horizon. For a few moments, the underside of the clouds were painted with fire, pink and purple. It was traditionally considered a good omen for business deals, the birth of children and acts of justice. Or retribution.

 

And Sooran'Xe lusted for retribution.

 

How dare they, indeed. Perhaps they were the fabled gods or perhaps not. But their presence above Xell, their ominous presence, had led him to overthrow the social structure of his world, a structure that had maintained stability for three thousand generations. And for what?! Dashed dreams and disillusion?!

 

He stormed into his great hall, surrounded once again by his best sensitives. He also had at hand three ranks of warriors. Sooran'Xe was going to get to the top of this cosmic jest and have the last word. He would get justice for himself and his world. Or he would have his retribution.

 

The calculators nodded. The communicators weaved their dance, aligning to the indicated position above the horizon. The warriors brought their energy levels to maximum. The analyzers purged their minds and tapped into the storagers and communicators. The recorders gave themselves to the quill of the ever-vanishing present.

 

Contact achieved. Meelas'Xe laid her hand on his arm, and nodded her readiness to protect him, and if need be, to die with him.

 

"Gods! If ye be the gods, indeed! Your servant demands to be heard! I have been cruelly tricked, and I will have justice!"

 

###

 

"There's Triple Town coming over the horizon," said Stephen, his eyes glued to the visual encoder. "All scanners running. So far, so good." The other four floated behind him, packed into the cramped space, craning to see the various instruments. And waiting. For what, they did not know. But the anxiety was palpable.

 

Sara spoke into the silence. "Okay, I have the injectors here, just in case. And Sam, if we get the headaches again, I strongly recommend we change orbits, and put some distance between us and that planet, until we figure out what's going on."

 

Sam shook his head impatiently. "Hell, Sara, it takes twelve hours to warm up the torch, and she only has another three or four burns left in her. We'll need those to get home."

 

Sara frowned. "Are you questioning my authority, Sam?"

 

Sam shrugged nonchalantly and opened his mouth to answer. What came out was a piercing scream.

 

In unison, the five bodies jerked and spasmed like frog legs hooked to a battery. Feet lashed out and smashed control panels, arms flailed and hit faces, voices keened out quintessential agony. A bone snapped.

 

Strange and frightening sounds that were not sounds, echoed within their shattered minds. Merciless images burned their tightly shut eyes. Invisible and fiery fingers plucked the private strings of their nervous systems.

 

Voices. Almost like voices heard in the grinding of a killer earthquake. Like imaginary faces seen in the flicker of raging flames. Like plausible thoughts remembered from the delirium of some insane nightmare.

 

Like voices. The pain was like voices.

 

###

 

"Beloved! Wait! I sense something. Back away from your anger and observe." Meelas'Xe mentally gestured to the other skray sensitives, and directed them to what she had detected. The analyzers saw it immediately, and began their comparisons, symbolic representations, pattern recognition and decoding, laying out their hypotheses and logic in the minds of the storagers. When Sooran'Xe saw the structures forming, he grasped Meelas'Xe's insight.

 

A different language! Of course! When travelers from another continent arrived, often all that could be skrayed would be common emotions, common feelings, common intentions. Sensitives would be hired to build a translation, and impress it upon locals, who would then be able to freely discourse with the travelers.

 

The gods had a different language!

 

###

 

The frenetic babble of sensation slowly separated into sight, hearing and pain. Stephen blinked his eyes. The scrambled jigsaw puzzle before him settled into an upside-down view of science lab 2 and Sam's drifting legs. There were moans from all around him. There were voices from within him. He had a splitting headache. His foot hurt. There were drops of scarlet drifting slowly toward a spattered air vent. He spun himself around.

 

Sara was opening her eyes, tears welling up and casting loose from her eyelashes. "Oh, Stephen -- that was so bad -- so bad." Her voice was hardly more than a ragged whisper. She reached into a pocket and pulled out an injector, put it against her thigh, and thumbed the actuator.

 

"Sara, do you hear voices?" he croaked.

 

"What? Voices? Noises. I hear noises. They hurt ... " Her eyes closed.

 

In spite of his own pain, Stephen surveyed the others. Sam was unconscious -- his nose was smashed. Alex was writhing, so Stephen gave him a full dose of the injector. Melissa was alive but unconscious. He gave her and Sam a half dose each, and himself another.

 

He did hear voices. What would elephants sound like if they had vocal chords? The voices were deep, resonant, insistent. And each syllable burned. Maybe it was the delirium or the morphinol, but they were beginning to make sense. He closed his eyes and surrendered to them.

 

The voices were speaking to him. <Who are you? Declare yourself!>

 

"I am Stephen Asmar," he subvocalized, "I am from Epsilon Leonis." He visualized his home planet as seen from the geosynch labs of ELU.

 

<What are you, a god?>

 

"No. Not a god. Just a human being. Born on Epsilon."

 

<Why are you come here?>

 

"Study. We found a planet with intelligent life. We came here to study them. Here? You said 'here.' Are you from the world below us?"

 

<Yes. I am the prince of this world. I and my prefathers have worshiped you faithfully. And you have tricked me with your coming. I demand justice!>

 

"Justice? I told you, I am not a god. I cannot give justice. I am a student. We are all students, and we are in great pain. Your voice is like fire in my head. Don't speak any more. Please, be quiet."

 

<Speak I will, until I receive the justice I deserve. You must not let my world die. You must tell me how to save it! Give me the knowledge we lack, or I will unleash such pain upon ... >

 

The ship past out of the line-of-sight circle. The voices faded and ceased. Loss of signal. LOS. Stephen trembled. They would re-enter the line-of-sight circle on the next pass in eighty minutes. Helplessly, he drifted off into a feverish sleep.

 

###

 

Sooran'Xe looked at his analyzers. Their conclusion was bizarre, yet undeniable. These were not gods, at least not the gods of scripture. They were beings with very alien minds. They were skray sensitive, yet they could not skray, nor could they shield themselves from skraying. They were totally vulnerable as no skray-mute on Xell was. Certainly not gods!

 

And yet they had powerful minds! Minds filled with alien concepts, visions and knowledge. Mathematics! Space travel! Images of other worlds that bore striking resemblances to the visions in the orbs! Here was the missing knowledge that would save Xell!

 

Yes! He would pry that knowledge loose. Dig into their minds by force if need be. But he would have it!

 

###

 

He awoke to the fire and voices in his head. And to the moans from around him. He grabbed the injector out of mid-air and gave himself and the others another quarter dose. He began moving them down to the infirmary in science lab 3. As he grabbed Sara's arm, she awoke. She helped him with Melissa, who was still unconscious.

 

Sam was dead. He put the others on life support monitors, examining the readouts for any clue, but he wasn't trained in med tech. Besides, the strident voices in his head made concentration all but impossible. He gritted his teeth and ignored them.

 

There was one readout that did catch his attention, though. It showed extensive swelling within Sara's skull. The monitors showed the same for Alex and Melissa.

 

On impulse, Stephen guided Sara over to the MRI scanner. Maybe magnetic resonance imaging would show him what was going on in their heads. It was a very long shot, but he had no other idea.

 

He unfolded the thin but incredibly dense solid-state, room-temp superconducting magnetic ring from its protective housing, and guided Sara's upper torso into it. She held herself in place with white knuckles while he went to the control panel. But before he could flip a switch, her wan voice echoed from out of the ceramic tunnel.

 

"Thank god, it's over!"

 

He knew from his own pain, that they were still within line-of-sight of the city below. He asked her to withdraw from the ring momentarily. As soon as her head came out, the pain returned.

 

It couldn't be the residual magnetic field in the ring that was protecting her, for he knew it wasn't very strong with the power turned off. It had to be the ultra-dense superconducting ceramic, itself. Its crystalline structure was literally built up one atomic layer at a time, and then subjected to incredible pressures. Perhaps the material's superconducting property was equivalent in some way to the many kilometers of soil and rock that protected them when they were out of range of Triple Town.

 

Stephen put Sara back in the ring and she drifted off to sleep. He was considering what to do with the others when the voices suddenly surged within him, breaking down his resistance.

 

<Who are you! You must be gods! You travel between the stars! You understand the secrets of the universe! Tell me how to save my world!>

 

"No! Not so loud! You're killing me!" The voices subsided a bit. "We are not gods! We cannot save your world! We are only humans, only students! You're killing us!" He looked at Sara within the ring and began to weep. "You're killing her! Please stop! Please don't kill her! I will tell you everything I know, but please don't kill her!"

 

<Your lives mean nothing to me if you cannot save my world! I shall rip the knowledge out of your minds, if you do not tell me. I must know how to save my world! You must tell me! Or you will die! You... >

 

LOS.

 

###

 

"Beloved. The creature was speaking the truth. I am sure of it."

 

"Then they will all die. I will take what knowledge they have by force and they will die."

 

"No, beloved. You must not. Did you not hear his heart? There is love there. Great love. And passion." She took Sooran'Xe in her arms and held him. "Beloved, did you not sense his passion for the female? I did. They are not consummated, but they are soon to be. Do you remember our consummation night?" He paused in his anger.

 

"These beings are not evil, my Lord. They have great knowledge and also great compassion. The being even had compassion for us! If he knew how to save us, he would have done so. I know this. They are worthy to travel among the stars for they have compassion. If you would be worthy of the stars, if you would be worthy of Xell, then you must have compassion for them." They stared into each other's eyes for a while, then he turned to his recorder.

 

"Play back the entire contact to me."

 

###

 

"You're being very attentive." Sara lay in her cot, an icepack strapped to her head.

 

"Yeah. Well, I was afraid of losing you. We'll never get back home without you, you know." He adjusted the medication drip into her left arm. "We lost Sam -- and we might lose Melissa," he added. "The anti-inflammatories don't work well on her, and she's still out. But Alex is ninety percent, in spite of his broken arm."

 

She smiled a little smile. "And what about you?" she whispered.

 

"Oh, maybe seventy-five, eighty. I passed out a couple of times, but I seem to be resilient." He looked down at nothing in particular and a serious expression crawled onto his face.

 

"Sara, I have to ask you a silly question." Her eyebrow shot up. "During the pain, did you hear ... voices?" He held her gaze, waiting for her response.

 

"Voices? Like understandable voices?"

 

He nodded grimly.

 

"Wasn't it just an hallucination? Part of the dementia?"

 

He shook his head slowly. "No, I don't think so. There was no dementia that I or Alex could discern. Just pain. And the voices. But he couldn't remember what they were saying."

 

"And ... you do?"

 

He sighed heavily. "First, answer me. Did you hear them?"

 

She seemed to think it over, then nodded. "But I'm not sure they made sense. It was like a demand over and over again. Yelling. Angry. They ... they wanted to know how we traveled between the stars." Her brow furrowed. "Do you know what's going on?"

 

He pursed his lips for a long moment, then nodded. "Maybe. I believe the beings on the planet can talk straight into our minds. But the act of communicating with us causes the pain. Irritates our brains. They're in trouble down there. They think we can save them."

 

"From what?"

 

"They seem to know as we do that their planet is doomed. We come along, space farers, and they figure we've got the power to do something about this dust ball their planet's in."

 

"We can't, of course. The Herbig-Haro is a tenth-light-year in diameter. They'll be in it for tens of thousands of years."

 

"Right. But those beings think we can save them. And if we don't, they threaten to kill us."

 

Her eyes got wide. She took the icepack off her head. "Can they? How?"

 

He shrugged. "I got the impression that they can read our minds with a lot more ... 'force' ... if they want to. And two of the crew are dead already. But not to worry." He smiled and squeezed her hand.

 

"I think we're going to be okay. I'm cooking something up. We've got four hours 'till next contact, and I've got to get busy. In the meantime, you rest up."

 

###

 

"Lord Xe. The Ones That Travel The Stars are approaching the horizon now." The calculator bowed and stepped back. Sooran'Xe glanced at Meelas'Xe, then back at the warriors and other sensitives ranked before him. Whether the Travelers be gods or not, his commitment to his world was irrevocable. The Travelers would help him save Xell or they would feel his wrath. He waited for contact.

 

###

 

"We'll have contact in about four minutes." Stephen's voice was nervous and muffled as he anxiously reached up and touched the homemade helmet that (almost) covered his head. He was still worried about the gaps: the eyes, and the region where the neck connected to the skull. Underneath the ceramic and tape, he felt the TSR sensor/affecter cap grip his scalp in a snug embrace. He verified that the cables attached to his and Sara's caps were socketed to the TSR module, and triggered the calibration sequence.

 

"Are these things going to work?" Melissa felt her own helmet for gaps, her voice betraying her fear. She had just finished giving each of the others a quarter dose of narcotic -- her hand held the injector to her thigh and it emitted a faint click. She flinched.

 

Sara took a deep breath. "It's the best we can do. If the pain gets too bad, give yourselves another half-dose." She took Stephen's hand and waited for the green blip that represented their ship to contact the line-of-sight circle on the nav display.

 

###

 

The array of communicators fine tuned their positions. But the focuser and aimer looked worried. They glanced at the calculators and signaled their query, "Are you sure?"

 

Another ten heartbeats, and Sooran'Xe stood up. "What is wrong? Have they not arrived?"

 

The aimer gestured for patience, closed his eyes and concentrated fiercely. "Lord Xe, I can barely skray them. It is as if they are so distant that I cannot imagine how far. And then for moments they are only half as far. It is most strange. But I believe I can achieve contact. Wait ... " He gestured a hand, and on cue, the warriors began feeding neural power to the communicators.

 

Sara glanced nervously out the porthole, then back at the others in the galley. "Melissa! Alex! Quick! Align yourselves so that the forward horizon of Seventeen is above and behind your heads! That way, your helmets will give you maximum protection!" As if choreographed, they tucked her legs and spun, putting their backs to the porthole.

 

The aimer suddenly frowned. "They have disappeared, Lord Xe! I am losing them!" At another gesture, the communicators gracefully and in perfect synchronization, fanned out to increase their resolution.

 

Stephen looked at each of the others, raising his eyebrows. "Anything?"

 

Alex, "A buzzing -- no pain."

 

Melissa, "Just a tickle."

 

"I feel something -- but it's manageable," said Sara. She turned briefly to Alex and Melissa. "Whatever you do, don't remove those helmets!"

 

Stephen nodded his satisfaction. "Great! I definitely feel some discomfort but I can't make out any voices. Now, I'll try the next step." He tugged at the velcro strap at his left temple, and slowly pulled aside the section of the helmet that covered his face up to his eyes. He flinched at the pain, took a deep breath, closed his eyes and visualized the beings in the city below him.

 

He sub-vocalized a mental shout, "You! Can you hear me?!"

 

A pause, and then faintly but clearly, a squirming nodule of pain within his skull replied, <Yes, Traveler! I am Sooran Lord Xe!>

 

There was arrogance there, and confusion. <There is only one of you? Where are the others?>

 

"They are beyond your reach." Against his will, Stephen realized he was visualizing the helmets he had made by slicing up the MRI magnets into sections, then piecing them together with velcro straps. He was giving away his secret! "We are no longer at your mercy!"

 

<We shall see!>

 

Followed instantly by an image of an immense wall of flame traveling toward him at impossible speed. It struck with almost corporeal ferocity. Stephen screamed and recoiled against the bulkhead, not so much at the pain alone, but at the crippling assault of emotions -- rage, hatred, fear, panic -- and other transcendent agonies that had no name.

 

There was no consciousness of anything but pain. And not even that. He was the pain. He was the point of charring flesh touched by the white-hot iron, and nothing more.

 

But then there was something else. A deep, subsonic buzzing surrounded him -- like being at the center of a swarm of titanic bumblebees. The buzzing pierced his flesh. It entered into his agony and quenched it. As each new wave of incendiary pain lapped upon the shore of his besieged mind, the TSR sensed it, computed it, counteracted it.

 

The physical sensation of being pierced by tiny needles was a familiar one. He clung to it as the only thing in his mental universe that he could name, the only thing he could grasp that did not scald the hallucinated flesh from his imaginary body.

 

Awareness accumulated. He no longer was the pain. He was separate and distinct from it.

 

Against the background of pain/fire/blackness/agony was a voice, a calm computer voice that repeated the same word over and over again.

 

" ... decathect ... decathect ... decathect ... "

 

Before he even recognized the command as such, he reacted to it, automatically executing the mental visualization that separated the experience of "presence" from his emotional trauma.

 

" ... decathect ... shiva ... shiva ... parastate ... "

 

As a puppet might respond to pulled strings, Stephen obeyed the conditioning, rebuilding his consciousness. He could put names to some of the hurts that boiled within him. Fear was one. He muttered another trigger word subvocally and the tightness in his jaws slacked. He could feel other parts of himself. His hand was still griping Sara's, clenched like a vice. He relaxed it.

 

The pain was now merely a burning cyclonic wind. But he was like a cyclone fence he had once seen on Epsilon. He offered no resistance to the pain, and it howled through him, around him, but could not push him back down into black unconsciousness. He became exquisitely aware of the pricking sensation on his skin and the twitching of his muscles caused by the TSR. Its medical module was generating swarms of electrical micro-bursts in his brain, combating the pain transmitted from the planet below.

 

He forced his lungs into a semblance of a normal rhythm -- forced his eyes to open against the searing mind-fire. Images flung themselves upon his cerebral cortex, mingling and swirling with the hallucinated flames. He could identify Sara's face but he could not interpret her expression. The other blurred ... things ... would be Melissa, Alex. Their names dissolved into the maelstrom as quickly as he recalled them.

 

The maelstrom. He had to distinguish it from the pain. "Caldulate," he murmured, triggering another conditioning. " Caldulate!" He fought for and achieved full body-awareness. Closing his eyes again, he focused fiercely into the mind-fire, looking for any sign of pattern or image. The fire became a river of hot coals, and Stephen walked it as he had walked a real bed of coals in his early TAO training. A lump of flame extruded ahead of him and resolved into a face.

 

"You!" he subvocalized, pointing at the face with outstretched arm. "Sooran Lord Xe! I wish to speak with you!"

 

The alien face wore an expression that somehow Stephen knew was one of shock and confusion. The head emerged out of the seething coals followed by the remainder of Sooran's body. They faced each other on the illusory burning lake.

 

"Cease your attack against us, Sooran'Xe. Now." Stephen delivered the command without anger or threat. It was simply a forceful and fully intentioned request spoken as an TAO master would. There was nothing in the delivery but pure communication. "Cease the attack."

 

Sooran's image shivered and took a step backward. The roiling flames faded to black, the coals beneath their feet became dimly illuminated sand. Behind Sooran appeared a gigantic tree, tall and slender, bearing red fruit.

 

Stephen thought the question and knew the answer. It was a plaenth tree, the symbol of life, and indeed, of the planet Xell itself. Its appearance reflected Sooran's presentation of himself as the leader of all Xell.

 

Another image shimmered to Stephen's left. It was Sara. As they looked at each other, he knew from Sooran Xe's mind that the Xellan had been fighting the same battle with both of them, and that Stephen was only now seeing her because he was seeing Sooran Xe's visualization of her.

 

The prince broke the silence. "You do not wish me harm? I see anger but no retribution. What are you? How can you each be of two minds?"

 

Stephen took a deep breath, wondering momentarily if his real body was taking that breath in the ship. Sara nodded for to him to speak.

 

Stephen clearly distinguished his intention: to communicate without judgment. His anger was merely something he had, like an arm or a nose, rather than something that possessed him. Focusing on that, he addressed the frightened alien.

 

"Lord Xe. You have tried to hurt us and we are angry. Please don't do that again. We came in peace. If you hurt us again, we will leave you and not return. We came here to study your world and communicate with you. But we must protect ourselves from the pain of ... " He searched for a word and in an instant the word image 'skray' came into his mind -- to communicate with another's mind. "... the pain of being skrayed. We demand no vengeance for the death of our two comrades. But there must be no more killing -- no more pain."

 

<You must save my world from the sky fire and the dust. Xell must live!>

 

Stephen suddenly saw an image before him that filled the infinite space behind Lord Xe, an alien scene of purple and green jungles, steel and glass buildings that rose above them to the clouds, and hauntingly beautiful creatures with short gray fur and intelligent yellow eyes. <This must be again as it once was! Help us, or you will ... > There was a subtle state-change in his timbre. And the briefest of sensations, as of a ... woman ... touching Stephen's arm -- no ... it was Sooran Xe's arm.

 

A female with soft, gray fur appeared beside Sooran Xe. <Help us, Travelers, I ... I request this. Our world is dying and you are very powerful ... > There was an extended pause, as if searching for just the right words, trying to compel without threat, trying to persuade without begging.

 

Sara stepped into the pause. "Lord Xe. Meelas. We do not want your world to die. We will help if we can. Let us discuss the possibilities before us."

 

###

 

Sooran'Xe was angry and confused. The past sixday had been as maddening as any meeting with the Priests he had ever had. The Travelers were immensely powerful, and he could not order them about. They had traveled unimaginable distances to be here, yet they knew nothing of the Ancient Scripture and its prophecies. He was convinced that if he quadrupled his warriors, he could flay the Travelers to madness or death -- in spite of their protective helmets and their strange linguistic shields.

 

But what would that accomplish? The Ancient Scripture had spoken of the gods returning, and the ascendency of Xell to the stars, but he was totally unprepared for this turn of events. These Travelers were not the gods, and they could not save Xell. They were worse than useless! But he could not give them up and it would be suicide to kill them! By the Worm of Evil that invaded the First Fruit! -- what was he to do?!

 

He refused to allow them to return to their home. He knew he could accomplish that much. They had to pass over Last City at least every six orbits, and he could stop them, if he suspected they were trying to leave. And they knew it. There would be no hope at all for Xell if the Travelers disappeared! But was there any hope in their staying?

 

Talk? What good was there in that if the Travelers were not gods? They were willing to communicate and yet even that was confusing and maddening. The Travelers had an alien way of thinking that disturbed him. Strange concepts and stranger beliefs. When he would make one of them angry, they carried on fantastic internal dialogs that he could barely follow. And though he could sense their anger, they responded with a clarity and sanity that left Sooran'Xe bewildered. Even their innermost emotions were tended and pruned and weeded as Sooran'Xe might care for a cherished plaenth seedling. He did not know whether he should be in awe of them or laugh at them.

 

But for lack of anything better to do, he would continue to converse with them.

 

Sooran'Xe gripped the iron railing of the balcony that led off from his bed chamber. From this height he could see his entire estate. He could see out over the high city wall to the fields of grain that his servants tended. He raised his eyes to the darkening horizon, and to the first hint of the evening's skyfire.

 

He let out his breath in a soft, keening whistle. The Travelers would pass over in another five thousand heartbeats. Time enough for a meal with Meelas'Xe and a short rest.

 

A brief emotion flickered behind his thoughts, giving him pause.

 

What was that, he wondered. Slowly Sooran'Xe smiled as he identified the irony of the feeling: he was actually looking forward to his next contact with the Travelers.

 

###

 

"What do you mean, 'don't leave'?" Melissa's expression indicated that she thought Stephen had lost his mind. "Two of us have already died. And you want us to expose ourselves to even more risk?"

 

Stephen faced the other three crew in the galley.

 

"I believe the risk is minimal and will decrease the longer we stay. In fact, the greater risk is in leaving too soon, before the Xellans -- "

 

" -- have a chance to read every thought in our heads?" Alex exploded.

 

Stephen met Alex's glare calmly and nodded. "Exactly. Or to be more precise, every thought in Sara's head and mine."

 

It took a minute to calm the other two down sufficiently for him to be heard again. "Now, wait! I'm not crazy. Listen. Consider what it must be like to read minds."

 

They appeared to consider the proposition.

 

Stephen continued, "What I know about the Xellans is that only a few have this ability. It's an artificial talent created by Xellan genetic engineers long ago. And many of those with the ability are genetically bred to prevent mind reading. To block it. To shield this Lord Xe guy, so that not just anybody can peek into his thoughts.

 

"I think the old Penrose Theory is correct: mind originates out of quantum effects below the electrical or chemical levels of the brain. If that's so, then mind reading is by-and-large a two-way street. Yesterday, while communicating with Sooran, I wondered what their word was for mind-reading. It came to me, 'skray,' in the instant that I thought the question. Not two words. Not one for reading a mind and one for sending. Not 'receive' and 'transmit' but just 'skray.'

 

"You don't just hear what the other guy is thinking, you ... in a sense ... generate a common mind that both parties partake of. An analogy would be a Bose condensate of atoms, only this is a Bose condensate of minds. You actually think what the other guy is thinking and vice versa. And every stray thought, reaction, attitude and feeling gets shared. Two or more entities sharing one mind. This must be the danger of mind reading. This must be why so many of their skray sensitives are devoted to blocking and shielding."

 

Alex interrupted, "So how long are we going to stay and talk to the Xellans? I mean, is that bastard actually going to let us go home now? Shouldn't we be warming up the torch right now while we can?"

 

Stephen replied, "I recommend we stick around until our science survey of Seventeen and the Thistle Voyager is complete, but you're right. As of last night, we have a deal with Sooran and he has agreed to let us go. We can launch anytime Sara says the ship is ready. In the meantime, she and I will take every opportunity to skray with Lord Xe."

 

Melissa leaned forward, "You still haven't told us why. Why should you expose yourselves? What's in it for us? More scientific knowledge? It's not worth it!"

 

Stephen responded "Melissa, Lord Xe reads our minds, that is, Sara's and mine. What does he get? Our thoughts? Yes. Feelings? Yes. Even memories to some extent. But also something far more significant -- something we want him to have. Something that only Sara and I have."

 

Melissa's eyes flew wide open. She blurted out, "Oh! Of course!"

 

###

 

Sooran'Xe collapsed limply back into his silken cushion, still gently holding Meelas'Xe's hand. Communicating with the Travelers was exhausting work, and yet in some strange way, so very invigorating. He hadn't felt this good since his childhood. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the resignation and melancholy that had marked his world for seven sixes of cycles had been replaced with something else, something like joy, something the Travelers called 'possibility.' Including the possibility that Xell could be saved. Somehow, someday. If they all worked together.

 

Oh, how he had fought for that possibility! And yet, rather than take what he wanted by force, he had found himself 'negotiating.' What a ludicrous concept! He had no equal on Xell, so why should he ever negotiate? But with the Travelers, that is what he had learned to do. And when he got angry, when his wants were denied, he found himself thinking even stranger thoughts. Thoughts about feelings and emotions. Thoughts about thoughts. And yet, as he reflected on this, it was not so strange. That was how the Travelers called Steef'Xan and Sair'Xa thought. They called it TAO.

 

He squeezed Meelas' hand and smiled into her smile. The Travelers could not stay -- he realized that now. They must be permitted to leave. But he and Meelas had bargained for one of them to remain on Xell. Not as hostage -- no! (although that interpretation had been hotly debated), but as an honored guest and teacher. As an embodiment of the Travelers' promise to return. As a gesture of trust in his promise never to permit a Traveler to be skray-flayed again.

 

###

 

Sara snuggled warmly against him in the dark. "Do you really think you should do this, Stephen? It could be dangerous. You'll have less than eighteen months of supplies. What if I can't get back in time?"

 

He smiled in the dark. "You will. Knowing you, nothing will get in your way. You'll be back with a larger ship, more funding than you can spend, and exclusive rights to deal with the Xellans. Why, in ten years, I wouldn't be surprised if you were the president of ELU."

 

"We, darling." She gave him a hug and snuggled closer. "We will be presidents of ELU. And ELU will be the center of xenocultural studies in all of human space." She sobered. "I'll be back as soon as I can, maybe twelve to fourteen months. Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

 

Stephen nodded. "The Xellans actually have records of technologies that are as advanced, maybe more advanced, than ours. But they can't use them. They've lost the cultural infrastructure of learning, experimenting and incremental advancement. They have no feel for how to go about mastering a science. They don't know where to begin. They don't even have a firm grasp of the fundamentals -- say, Newton's laws of motion.

 

"Even their so-called calculators are able to predict our position in their sky by mere rote use of equations passed down over many generations. They don't really comprehend the concepts. Yet."

 

"And you intend to give them that comprehension? Can you do that in a year?"

 

"I don't know. But I can give them a step up in that direction. At the very least, I can invite them to observe how I learn, how I approach challenging situations. It's a good bet they can pick up on that. And I’m taking the training unit and the TMS caps with me. Every time they read my mind, they’ll be getting training in TAO, whether they like it or not."

 

"Oh, Stephen, I hope you're right. Leaving you behind on Xell is the hardest thing I ever hope to do. I'm going to miss you terribly. I so hope you're right."

 

"So do I."

 

They found themselves lost in each other’s silence. Stephen bent forward and kissed Sara. Her hand closed around his arm and pulled slightly.

 

A few minutes later, their bodies merged in the darkness.

 

###

 

Sooran'Xe stood on the shifting sands just outside the city wall. Behind him, the dome of his palace filled half the sky. Ahead were the endless irrigated fields that his servants managed. The nearest field had been mowed down as the Traveler Steef'Xan had requested a sixday before. Meelas'Xe stood beside him, holding his arm. They had stood together on this same spot the night before and watched the third great sword in the sky taking the Travelers back to their own world. All but one -- as per their agreement.

 

The sound of the wind was overtaken by a persistent and crackling roar that came from the clouded sky.

 

"There, Lord Xe!" An oral shout from a lesser servant. A hand pointed to a moving dot against the clouds. A dot that grew into a flying machine.

 

The machine circled the palace, coming ever lower. With grace and thunder, it slowed to a hover and lightly touched down on the plot of cut grain. A long wait later, the door opened and the human stepped out. His body was hidden in light, snug clothing. He was holding a silver box by a handle in one hand. Although his head was swaddled in slabs of the material that shielded his mind, several of the pieces in front were pulled back, exposing the creature's face.

 

On impulse, Sooran'Xe skrayed as gently as possible through the gap in the human's head dress. He made no effort to discern specific thoughts, but he faintly sensed the creature's emotions, the excitement, the curiosity, the strength of purpose. How did this creature remain so calm and centered, walking into the midst of strangers who could cripple or kill him with a thought?

 

Perhaps the Traveler was stupid and arrogant! Or dangerous! How dare this flimsy creature impose its will on him! The other Travelers, so far away in their starship, would never know if this pathetic Steef'Xan was cut down where he stood, his puny mind raped for the knowledge that...

 

Sooran'Xe felt a series of needle-like pricks to his skin, followed immediately by the word "decathect!" echoing within his mind. Whether it originated from his own mind or Steef'Xan’s mind, he could not tell.

 

"Decathect!" The flow of strong emotion stopped just that quickly.

 

"Parastate!" He begrudgingly stepped back from his thoughts, and identified the assumption that had generated his anger. It was merely a self-serving interpretation. He invalidated the hostile train of thought and withdrew himself from Steef'Xan's mind.

 

He let out an audible sigh. This linguistic shield, or 'Tao' as the Travelers called it, was going to take some time to get accustomed to.

 

The ruler of a planet settled himself into a new awareness, and patiently waited for the human to approach and be welcomed.