Going back to Altair felt like a very bad idea. Prudence did it anyway.
Garcia had filled the Ulysses with anise seeds. Zanzibar made fantastic spices but lousy packaging. The whole ship stunk of sickly-sweet licorice. Garcia had spent the entire four days in node-space trying to convince her to spread the rumor that Zanzibar had been bombed, and this would be the last shipment of anise Altair would ever get.
She told him to spread it himself. But of course no one would believe Garcia. He couldn’t spread butter on toast without people checking their pockets to see if they had been robbed.
There were hailed the instant they came out of the node. Normally it took a few minutes for the signal to travel out to the node from Altair. For the call to come so quickly, it had to be local. Somewhere out there in the dark hovered Fleet. Running silent, invisible to her sensors. Prudence muttered a futile prayer of commiseration for them. A terrible duty, sitting quietly in a ship full of anxious, edgy spacers, waiting for death to fall out of a hole and eat you. She wondered how much they had been told. Did spiders haunt their nightmares now?
The Ulysses answered automatically, identifying itself, keeping a twitchy gunner from firing—this time. It was only a matter of probability before some comm glitch got an innocent ship vaporized.
Her news was now two weeks old. Catching up on the political broadcasts, she was surprised at how calm things were. But independent verification still hadn’t come back. It would be another week before the first wave of free-traders from Altair could return, bringing with them pictures and eyewitnesses and casualty lists.
Altair spaceport gave her an entry vector and a landing berth assignment without any trouble. She’d been half-expecting a seizure order. On a whim, she typed in a news-search for the dreaded Lieutenant Kyle Daspar. Was he enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame as a heroic rescuer?
A single headline appeared.
League Officer Assassinated by Terrorists.
A picture of a smoking building. A vid interview with the ambulance tech, talking about how the body had been burned beyond recognition. An official statement from the League, lamenting the loss of a good man and darkly hinting that Something Must Be Done. She clicked off the monitor and looked away.
She told herself the numbness she felt was because of the danger. The League had killed Kyle because of the alien ship. And that meant they would kill her, too, if they knew what she knew. How could she trust that he had not given her up before he died? Why wouldn’t he?
She remembered his eyes, pleading with her to not reveal their secrets to the Phoenix.
The alien threat was the least of her worries. There wouldn’t be any arrest warrants waiting for her when she landed. The League was playing for keeps. They would send an assassin to come at her in the middle of the night, with a needle that would make it look like natural causes. Or maybe they’d let her load a cargo and leave, with a bomb planted in the shipment. A fiery bomb, like the one they had killed Kyle with.
In her nightmares the fire always followed her, consuming guilty and innocent alike, burning in her footsteps as fast as she ran.
A rational part of her mind tried to argue. One dead man out of thousands on Kassa, and you didn’t even like him. He was working for the enemy, anyway. One less League officer should be a cause for celebration.
But she could not escape the recollection of his voice, demanding justice for the Kassans he had never met.
“No. It’s not good enough,” he had said, and she had agreed with him.
Whatever twisted rationalizations had kept him in the League had not destroyed him completely as a man. So the League had finished the job. She was not fooled by the babble about terrorists. The only resistance to the League she had ever seen on Altair was talk.
Not that it mattered. If there was an anti-League, by the time it bombed its way to the top, it would be indistinguishable from the League. When the political process was carried out by daggers hidden under cloaks, it didn’t matter who won. The end was always the same.
A crematorium for the Other. The enemies of the state. The losers. The nightmare returned, all the worse for being a waking memory.
She concentrated on breathing. This was not Strattenburg. This planet was not choking in overpopulation. The only infection here was fascism, not eugenic madness. Power and empire were their goals, not a pogrom against those the State named undesirables. There was no reason to think otherwise.
But as she watched the green planet sparkle below, she could not shake the specter of death.
“Be careful.” She tried to warn her crew, but it was futile. Melvin was stoned into near-unconsciousness, Jorgun could not understand, and Garcia could not obey. He took risks automatically, like a fish breathes water. Her advice was wasted.
And hypocritical, given her intentions. If the League was at the stage where they simply killed the people that threatened them, then visiting Rama Jandi would put both their lives in danger. She was going to do it, anyway.
“Can I come with you?” Jorgun asked. All she had accomplished with her warnings was to scare him. Normally Altair was one of the few ports of call she could let him roam freely. In idle moments she had considered writing a spacer’s guide to planets, rating them according to how many hours you could let a simpleton walk around unescorted before he would stumble into trouble. Altair had been the top of her list. Kassa had been second only because a person could get lost in those ridiculous forests.
Having that sense of safety taken away hurt physically, like a punch to the kidneys.
“Sure,” she answered. The fear of entangling him deeper was overridden by the recognition that she would be more worried every second he was out of her sight.
Walking out of the spaceport in broad daylight, in the middle of crowds, she nonetheless found herself instinctively hiding in his shadow. Circling around him, using him like a shield against the sniper she imagined on every rooftop. Cold, but not cruel. She had to be their first target. They would know that shooting him would only alert her. Surely they understood she was the dangerous one.
If they killed her first, Jorgun would stand dumbly over her body while they reloaded.
The people in the crowd didn’t know that. They gave way to Jorgun’s size unconsciously, flowing around the rock instead of trying to move it. With his shades on, he looked intimidating. He looked like a bodyguard. Could she trust that the League had done its homework?
“Can we go see a cartoon?” her protector asked.
“In a bit,” she muttered. Standing in front of a public net console, she tried to stop dodging invisible bullets and focus on typing. She hadn’t wanted to search for Jandi from her ship’s computer, in case they were watching. But the public console was anonymous. Not that the locals used it. Virtually every person on Altair had a comm unit in their pocket. She vaguely remembered some government program that distributed them to the financially disadvantaged. And yet they still provided free public consoles.
It was ironic that the only time she had ever used one was when she wanted to avoid precisely the government that had made them possible.
The first search result was a recorded appearance speech by Jandi, on some daytime babble-fest vid channel. The host, Willy Billy, looked like his normal topic of conversation was which celebrity was snubbing who, but for this broadcast he’d put on his Serious Face.
“You’re saying, Dr. Jandi, that the aliens aren’t dangerous?”
Jandi was an old man, small, stooped, and wreathed in a great white mane.
“I’m saying there aren’t any aliens. I’ve studied nonterrestrial biology for sixty years. We have no evidence of any other intelligent life, let alone space-faring bug-eyed monsters.”
“Are you serious, Dr. Jandi? No monsters? Then what do you call this?” Willy rolled his eyes as the camera cut to an inserted shot, and his audience duly laughed.
The screen displayed one of the less absurd mock-ups of a huge spider, a 3-D model allegedly derived from forensic reconstruction. The picture had a government label on it; they were now pretending to confirm their pretend leaks. At least this one didn’t have a half-naked woman struggling in its grasp.
Jandi was unperturbed. “I call it an artist’s rendering, which is what the government lab that released that picture called it. The overactive imagination of an underpaid academic is not evidence.”
Prudence shook her head in dismay. The old man was talking above his audience. All they would remember was the picture.
He was billed as Altair’s resident specialist on alienology, but there were no more public appearances on record. Mauree had described him as being retired years ago. Either he was too old and out of touch to be of concern to the League, or they had already silenced him. The news reports showed there were plenty of working scientists willing to endorse their arachnophobic vision.
With a little prodding, the console yielded a contact code. When she used it, an automated response filled the screen, a cartoon of a little green man in a plumed helmet.
In a squeaky voice, it said, “Oh drat these computers, they’re so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them!”
Then it waited patiently for her response.
“Dr. Jandi,” Prudence said, “I got your name from a mutual friend.” She stopped, wondering how much she should give away. “Mauree sends his … cordial greetings. If you have some time, I’d like to meet with you.”
The screen dissolved into Jandi’s lined face. “Time, my dear, is something I have remarkably little of remaining. But what better way to spend it than in the company of a lovely young woman?” The old rogue was still dangerously charming; Welsing would have melted with envy.
“Is today convenient for you?” she asked.
“If you are not opposed to vat-grown vegetable protein, then you may join me for lunch. This sad diet is a punishment from my doctors, and misery does love company.” He did something on his end, and an address appeared on the screen in front of her, spelled out underneath his chin. With an arched eyebrow he glanced past her. “Shall I cook enough for your massive young man lurking in the background, as well?”
Age had not dulled Jandi’s perceptual abilities. Poor Mauree must have been as transparent as glass.
“Yes, please.” Remarkable that he would invite two strangers into his home. Especially given that he knew she was an off-worlder. He would not have bothered to ask an Altairian if they objected to vat-grown food. Even the wealthy elite ate the stuff for breakfast.
“I’ll be expecting you at noon.” Jandi smiled what was probably meant to be a friendly smile, but came off as a college professor assigning a particularly wayward student a trip to his office after class. The screen went blank.
“You want to go for a ride?” she asked Jorgun.
“To see a cartoon?” Ever hopeful, he was.
Prudence hailed a cab, a ground car. Part of Altair’s fetish for growing out, not up. Grav vehicles were restricted to emergency and military use. Prudence didn’t particularly like ground cars. The sensation of speed was magnified when you were that close to the ground, and she always wondered how they avoided running into each other. On the tight, narrow strips of concrete the little cars were often less than a meter apart.
In the sky, there was plenty of room. Vehicles kept a safe buffer around themselves, never coming closer than a hundred meters for anything the size of a starship. That struck her as a much more sensible arrangement.
“Do you have a vid?” she asked the driver.
“Yes, lady.” He was an off-worlder too, with an accent from several hops away. The cab drivers were always foreigners. It made no sense to Prudence. Surely the locals knew their way around better. “The latest news on now. Alien spiders!” The cabbie grinned at her. An incongruous reaction, she thought.
Inside the cab, she gave the driver an address on the opposite side of the city from Jandi’s house. She had time to waste, and she wanted to see if she was being followed. Jorgun set himself to the vid controls and found a cartoon channel by the time the cab started moving.
“Aren’t you worried about the spiders?” She instantly regretted starting a conversation with the cabbie. He hardly seemed to be paying attention to the traffic as it was.
“Yes, of course, lady. But it is good news for me. Immigration is hard. I want to bring my cousins to Altair; the work is easy and the air does not stink. But that whoreson of a dog stopped the immigration. Now, with the aliens, they will have to start it again.”
She hazarded a guess. “You mean the prime minister?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, as if it were obvious. “The whoreson of a dog. That one. He is an immigrant himself, but does that matter? Not to a dog that eats his own vomit.”
She hadn’t known that about the prime minister. Or about dogs, either, but that part might just be color commentary.
“Why do you think the alien problem will restore immigration?”
The cabbie grinned at her in the mirror. “It already has. Fleet is recruiting. Anyone in Fleet can become a citizen. Many other foreigners are joining Fleet, to become citizens. And who will drive the cabs then? My cousins.”
A remarkably provincial view of the threat of alien invasion. The inability to credibly project the future was an intractable flaw in the human design.
But if the cabbie could project the future she remembered, he would be paralyzed by horror. Maybe it wasn’t a design flaw. Maybe ignorance was the only thing that kept people going.
An hour in the cab left her with motion sickness. It wasn’t the rapid changes in velocity that did it, but the constant rush of objects past the window. In space, the stars did not move. The background was always still.
She had wanted to close her eyes and ignore it all, but she had to watch for surveillance. After a handful of false destinations, she had directed the cabbie to Jandi’s house. Now they were parked outside, while she tried to decide if it was safe to go in.
“We were not followed.” The cabbie was grinning conspiratorially again. It seemed to be his only expression. He’d used it even when he was insulting the prime minister. “I drive like a madman. And the government, it cannot put secret cameras in the cab. It is not allowed.”
Yet, she thought, but kept it to herself. “What makes you think I was worried about being followed?”
“Pretty girls are all the time taking long cab rides with young men. I won’t tell your rich husband, lady. If I were a rich man and my wife cheated on me, it would be my fault, for not making her feel like a queen.”
“Don’t they usually end up at hotels?”
“Yes, lady.” He grinned even wider. “That you come to such a fine house means your husband must be very rich indeed.”
She tipped him well. He deserved it. Then, gratefully, she put her feet on unmoving ground, and dragged Jorgun after her.
Jandi’s house was indeed “fine.” Not a mansion, but large enough to be stately, and on a private lot. The entire neighborhood was like that, the street lined with tall, majestic trees. On Kassa trees were cut down as a nuisance. On Altair, they smelled of age, stability, and money.
On the door screen, the same little green man glared silently at her, holding up a small box with a button in one hand. When she reached to push it, he moved it away.
She tapped on the center of the screen, ignoring the antics of the little figure. It squeaked at her in annoyance, but she could hear a door chime sounding inside the house.
“Come in, come in!” The door opened as Jandi hauled on it from the other side. The door was two meters tall and made out of a single piece of wood. Altair must pay their professors quite well.
“Do you like my door? It’s an import. Something I picked up on a field trip. All of my colleagues thought I was insane to pay the freight charges to bring it home. All of my neighbors are insanely jealous, and think I paid a dozen times what I did.”
The trader in her couldn’t resist asking. “Why didn’t you import a dozen more?”
Jandi smiled at her, crinkling the bulk of his face into an impish grin. “The value of the door as a stanchion of perspective was greater to me than a fistful of credit sticks.”
“I like the cartoon on the front,” Jorgun said.
Jandi bowed his head in respect. “A discriminating taste you have, young man. That is also an import—said to be an image from Earth itself. Do pardon my speech, I beg you; I am an old man and politeness is such an imposition on my time. I have what is reputed to be a digital copy of the original sequence: the little man, an alien, engages in a comic battle with a Terrestrial rabbit. Would you like to watch it?”
Jorgun nodded eagerly. Probably the only thing he got out of the speech was the swear word and the idea of watching a possibly naughty cartoon. It was enough, for Jorgun.
Snapping his fingers, Jandi led them into a large den, where a wall-mounted vid sprang to life. He rattled off some commands and the vid began displaying a cartoon, complete with the strangest music Prudence had ever heard. Its age was undeniable; the graphics were primitive beyond belief. Yet despite their crudeness, they had an innate power, like cave paintings of men hunting deer.
Prudence had only seen pictures of cave paintings in history books. She wondered what it would be like to see one for real. To view an artifact that had been made by human hands before the exodus. All she had ever seen were digital reproductions of digital recordings.
“Make yourself comfortable, lad.” Jandi waved at the various couches sprawling about the room. “My dear, if you would help me in the kitchen?”
She followed him through the house, feeling the need to reassert some control. “We can talk in front of him. He’s not simple enough to babble to strangers.”
“I did not doubt his valor,” Jandi responded politely. “But I thought you would not want to disturb him with your speech. I presume you did not really come out here to discuss Mauree Cordial. How is the old rogue, by the way?”
“He seems happy enough. Zanzibar suits him.”
“Yes, it would,” Jandi agreed. “Flavor over substance. And none too picky about the cleanliness of the plate it’s served on.” That did describe the planet succinctly, to Prudence’s mind. “But now that we’ve established your bona fides, we can stop sparring. Why did you come? Surely not just for the free meal. I am vain, yes, but not about my cooking.” They had reached the kitchen, and he lifted a pot lid, stirring the contents. Cubes of various vegetable proteins, boiling in a thick broth. Stew, soup, mush, gruel, whatever you wanted to call it. It had a thousand names and flavors on a hundred worlds. Prudence had stopped counting long ago. Jandi’s version at least smelled palatable.
“I watched you on the Willy Billy show.” She took the bowl he was offering, held it while he spooned soup into it. “I wanted to tell you that you’re wrong.”
“You believe in space-faring aliens?” He raised his bushy white eyebrows, like snowy caterpillars on parade.
“I saw the evidence myself. A ship, crashed in the snow. A single-pilot fighter, but not built for humans.”
Calmly Jandi snapped on the vid screen over the stove, flipped past the cooking channels, and called up a picture.
The alien fighter craft. Photographed in a warehouse, lit by floodlights. Jandi paged through a dozen shots from different angles.
“Fleet has been handing out these pictures to their friends. I still have friends at the university, so I’ve received an unofficial copy. I’ve seen the pictures, and I’m still not convinced. Ships are made by men.”
Prudence fished a plastic bag out of her pocket. Inside was the precious sliver, stained in blue. She offered it to Jandi silently.
Taking it gently, he held it up to the light. “A nice touch, making it blue. Any idiot can tell it’s not human that way. But why bring this to me instead of the government?”
“What government? All I’ve seen is the League. There was a League officer on my ship when I found the alien vessel. Then a League officer showed up and claimed the prize.”
“And you don’t like the League?”
“I was born on Strattenburg.” She didn’t know if that would mean anything to him, but it meant a lot to her.
He looked at her sadly. “Are the rumors true?” He was an academic, a member of a university, the one social institution that lived longer than governments. They were the only entities that tried to keep any kind of contact between the far-flung driblets of the okimune. He had at least heard rumors.
“No. The truth is worse.”
“You fear it could happen here? The situation does not seem analogous.” He spoke about tragedy in scientific terms. She had to remind herself that he couldn’t help it. He was an academic.
“All I know is what I feel. And the League scares me.”
Jandi nodded in acceptance. “I can analyze this without going through official channels. But it will take time. Yes, I know, you are in a hurry. Young people always are. I am in a hurry, too, my dear. My doctors are terrible liars. Take some soup to your young fellow. Enjoy the cartoon. I will contact you as soon as I can.”
She left her berth number at the spaceport, and went to find Jorgun. He ate his soup without comment, watching the end of the cartoon. Prudence waited with him, wondering if the police were on their way now, wondering if Jandi had betrayed them.
“That was funny. But they said the dirty word a lot.”
“It’s a grown-up cartoon, Jor,” she reassured him. “They’re allowed.”
Jandi’s voice came over the house intercom.
“My apologies for being such a poor host. But I have so little time left, and this puzzle needs solving. Please show yourselves out—I’ve already summoned a cab. Do not despair, my brave young captain. I will not fail thee in thy hour of need.”
“He has a puzzle? Can we play with it?” Jorgun was phenomenally good with jigsaw puzzles. Prudence wasn’t sure why he enjoyed them. All he did was take the pieces out of the box, one at a time, and put them where they belonged. Once she had chastised him for tossing a piece into the trash when he was halfway through a puzzle. Contrite, he had fished it out again, and placed it on top of the duplicate piece already on the table. After that, she had let him do the puzzles his own way.
“It’s not that kind of puzzle, Jor. But we can go get you one from the store.”
Outside, they waited for the cab. The cab would take them to her ship, where she would wait some more. Prudence tried to pretend that she was in a node. Those days of enforced waiting never bothered her. They were like vacations from the world. There was nothing that could touch you, and nothing you could do about it. The node was safe.
Kyle Daspar’s death had proved that Altair wasn’t.