Jandi only made her wait three days. By then, early vid recordings from Kassa were all over the network. Garcia was frantic, wailing about the opportunities they were missing all day, and drinking himself into a coma every night. But Prudence didn’t have a destination yet.
Or a complete crew. Melvin was missing. She hadn’t heard from him since they landed.
“Captain Falling? If you could attend for dinner, I would be delighted.” Jandi’s smiling face was strained and haggard through the vid screen.
“Of course, Dr. Jandi.”
Pretending it was part of her disguise, she dressed for a dinner party. Girly clothes instead of jumpsuits. A silk frock, deep royal blue, purchased in a moment of weakness years ago and never worn.
It didn’t exactly go with work boots. Even the cabbie complained.
“The restaurant won’t let you in,” he announced. “Not in those shoes.”
“I’m not going to a restaurant.”
“Then your friends will make fun of you, and your young man.” Jorgun was wearing his best jumpsuit, spacer-gray and slightly worn. “I will take you to the shops. They will fix it, cheap. You will see.”
She let him have his way. It would give her more time to check for surveillance.
The shopping mall was the most extravagant structure she had seen on Altair. Glowing signs stretched a hundred meters into the sky, and there was at least one building up there that had to be grav-supported. Chattering people thronged the walkways, sitting on the grass in little groups and socializing. The cabbie led her through the crowds to a storefront.
“Here, you see. Ten minutes. I come back for you.” He strode off in a different direction. Altairian cabbies were worse than Virtue police. The police at least were prepared for the prospect of disobedience.
She almost did disobey. The store was full of teenage girls. Not the kind of place she fit into. But before she could walk away, a pretty young clerk approached her and Jorgun.
“A spacer party? You don’t want to go as a deckhand. Why not go as an admiral?” She pointed to a wall hung with costumes. Deep blue and soft gray uniforms with gold braid sprouting from them like shrubbery. “We have a special on.” She smiled at Jorgun. “Because of the spiders. Fleet outfits are very popular.”
“Can I be a captain?” Jorgun asked Prudence, like a child asking for something he knew he wasn’t allowed. She didn’t think the clerk noticed. The girl was too busy admiring him.
“Sure.” What difference did it make?
Jorgun grinned stupidly and started walking toward the wrong section—the children’s section, with outfits from his cartoon shows. The clerk attached herself to his arm and gently redirected him.
“Can we help you, too, ma’am?” Another young female clerk swooped down on Prudence.
Restraining a grimace at the terrible word, Prudence shook her head. “I think I’m good.”
“We have some very nice temporaries. The cost is extremely reasonable, considering what you get. Take a look at these shoes—they would really set off your dress so much better.”
The girl was like a gravity field. Subtle, constant, and too much effort to escape. Prudence let herself be led to a different display counter.
“How about these, for instance?” The clerk pointed to a beautiful pair of white strapped sandals with an arched heel. They were stunningly elegant and sparkling with clear gemstones. Prudence couldn’t believe the price.
“The tag must be wrong.”
The clerk grinned. “Not at all. Yes, they look just like Sammon Steps, because they are. A perfect replica of his latest, most fashionable design. A real pair would cost over five thousand credits, but you can wear these tonight for only twenty.”
“You’re renting them?” The shoes were brand-new, clearly unworn.
“Not the shoes, the design. They’re time-stamped. Eight hours after you put them on, they will melt into a nontoxic, perfectly safe lump of plastic. But until then—you’ll look like a millionaire.”
It was the stupidest marketing scheme she had ever heard of. Even Zanzibar wasn’t that shallow. But the shoes really were lovely.
While she was still justifying the expense, the other clerk brought Jorgun back.
The uniform would have looked silly on a smaller man. On Jorgun, the tangles of braid were tamed by his blond hair and massive frame. White and gold were not normally what Prudence thought of as a match, but the cloth of the uniform had a pearly, holographic sheen that reflected subtle colors as the light shifted. It wasn’t an official Fleet uniform, of course. It was much too flashy for that. With his glasses on, Jorgun didn’t quite look like an admiral. He looked like a vid star pretending to be an admiral.
On Altair, that was probably better than being a real admiral.
The clerk let go of him, reluctantly, and handed Prudence a bill. “We hope you enjoyed your shopping experience at Cinderella’s, but we know you’ll enjoy your party experience tonight! Come back soon.”
Prudence touched her credit stick to the bill, handed it back to the girl. Then she put her arm through Jorgun’s and led him away. The clerk watched them go, wistfully.
Was that part of the act? Any normal man would have been puffed up by so much attention. Maybe the girls did it on purpose.
Except that plenty of girls were watching Jorgun now. Teenagers, she thought, until she looked more closely. Most of the girls weren’t really much younger than Prudence. They just acted like children.
Jorgun, who really was a child, didn’t notice them at all.
“I wanted to be a Space-Wolf, but she said you would like this one better.”
“It’s wonderful, Jor. You look great.” She hadn’t expected to be able to say that so truthfully.
The cabbie pounced on them, his mouth and hands full of an aromatic treat from one of the vendor carts that dotted the pathway. “You see? You see, yes?”
“Yes, I see. But we’re going to be late now.”
He shrugged. “All the best people are late to parties. You will see.”
Standing outside Jandi’s door, she tried not to be nervous. The house was dark and quiet.
The little green man still guarded the door. Perversely, when Jorgun reached out to press the animated button on the little box he held, the cartoon figure didn’t move it out of the way. A doorbell chimed in the house. Eventually the door creaked open.
“Angels!” Jandi cried in mock horror, staring at them. “Am I already that far gone? But I haven’t even tasted the fish yet. Come in, come in, my glorious friends.”
He led them to the dining room, the smell of fine cooking growing stronger with every step. The room was gently lit by candles hanging from a chandelier. Real candles, burning with the pleasant scent of sandalwood.
Silver dishes sat on the table, maintaining the temperature of the food. Jandi began whipping off covers, revealing a feast of real fruits and vegetables, steamed to a perfect consistency. The biggest dish contained an entire salmon, missing only the head and tail.
“You shouldn’t have,” she admonished him. “Especially for only three people.” There were no other guests.
“But I wanted to. Even my doctors admit it no longer makes any difference. Their only complaint is that I’m spending my money on something besides them.”
“Is that rice?” she asked. Real rice, in tiny, fluffy grains, not cultured rice-protein. You could tell the difference because the fake stuff melted into a gluey mess when you cooked it.
“It’s imported. Real broth, too, from an animal.”
Prudence frowned.
“Indulge an old man. Decadence is all I have left. You can nurture your morals when I’m gone.”
She could hardly object while she was wearing those ridiculous shoes. “Don’t explain it to Jor.”
Jandi took the lid off of another dish. Formed, pressed protein cakes, fried in synthetic oil, still in the instamatic wrapper. Junk food for kids.
“I thought he might prefer this.”
He did. There was something comical about an admiral eating star-shaped crunchies with his fingers. No, Prudence decided, not comical. Sweet.
A strange family gathering, between the old man and the boy. Prudence wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to be mother, daughter, or sister. But she had learned to take her family where she found it.
“Ah, that we could eat like this every day.” Jandi was immensely satisfied with his feast.
“On Kassa, they did.” Kassa grew their grain outside. Prudence had always been confused by that. Surely washing the contaminants off had to be harder than just growing food in a vat. “I didn’t notice that they were any happier.”
“Altair grows happiness in vats, too. Not as enjoyable as the real thing, but cheap enough for everyone. It’s the secret of our success.”
She cut into her fish, waiting for him to satiate his love of being cryptic.
“Seriously, my dear. Though I’ve not been to as many planets as you, I’ve been to many, and Altair is the blandest of the bland. That blandness is the source of our wealth. Nothing particularly succeeds on Altair, but nothing ever fails. On this blank canvas we can project whatever we want. We might as well grow people in vats. Altair is like one giant people-vat.”
Jorgun laughed.
“Most would say that’s a good thing,” Prudence commented.
“And so do I. So do I, my dear. Still, I enjoy the fish. How do you find it?”
“Marvelous.” It melted in her mouth, leaving an exotic tang she could not identify. So many times today she had said nice things that were true.
“It’s a rare planet that does not force man to adapt to it in some way. And we all struggle against that current. Like salmon, we refuse to spawn in any other stream than our own. Change is universally recognized as bad, and so evolution is dead, killed by our technological prowess and cultural stubbornness. On Altair, we didn’t have to fight that battle, because there’s nothing here to fight against. Instead, we built a society that mimicked our fantasies of home. People flocked to it, and here we are. An empire of nondescription.”
“An empire under attack.”
“Indeed,” he said. “Kassa is a muddy little world. If our spidery friends wanted it, they could have bought it for less than the cost of their bombs. No, they must have a larger goal, and that goal is Altair. For the same reason we chose it: its blandness will support the spider’s dreams as easily as it supports the monkey’s.”
“So you accept that the alien threat is real?”
“Not at all,” he said, and stuffed his mouth with salmon.
She had to wait until he was finished.
“The aliens are real, yes. The blood you gave me does not match any genotype in our catalogs. Of course, we can’t unwrap the genetic code and reconstruct the creature, despite what the popular vids would have you think. Genes express over time and through environment, and we have no clue what gene does what. Or, for that matter, which bits are actually genes. The blood sample could be from a brainless mite or a philosophically inclined walrus. All we can say for sure at this point is that it is verifiably alien, which tells us nothing new.”
“But…” because she knew there was one coming.
“But the alien threat is not.” He grinned, at this moment happier than she had imagined that tired old face was capable of. This must have been what he looked like when he was tearing poor Mauree to shreds, or when he was thrashing out some scientific conundrum in a hall full of academics. He had found an anomaly and battled it, man to mystery, in mortal combat. Now he was as proud as a warrior who had killed the enemy captain with his bare hands.
“They always screw up the little things. It’s hard making a really good fake, because it’s hard making anything good. To be fair, they could not have expected you to bring me that little sliver. Nor would they have expected me to test the glass. But I did, because I am an obsessive. I want to know everything. What I found out in this case is that anti-radiation materials work off a common physical principle. Salts are impregnated in the substance. The energetic particles strike these heavy molecules, transforming themselves into harmless heat instead of deadly penetration. A necessary technology to a star-faring race, naturally.”
He refilled his wineglass.
“Like anything good, these salts are not easy to manufacture. They require stellar furnaces. It is much cheaper to simply mine them from planets in the old parts of the galaxy, where nova after supernova has poisoned the worlds with heavy metals. But stars are not factories. They are not vats, controlled for purity. They contaminate everything they make with their own private signature, their own particular concentrations of trace elements. From an analysis of these traces, we can conclusively state that the shattered glass of your little alien ship was first formed on an industrial planet not too far from here, by the name of Baharain.”
An unpleasant place. Prudence had visited it once, but couldn’t afford to buy a trader’s license. A few large fleets had a monopoly on the traffic, and the local government seemed content with the situation. “What does that mean?”
“It means that someone on Baharain is equipping the enemy. It means I was right. There may be aliens, but the only threat is people. As always. And, as always, I already know who those people are. Or at least, one of them.”
How could he get all that from a sliver of glass?
“Did you know our prime minister is an immigrant from off-world?” Jandi asked, as if it were relevant.
“I heard as much,” she said, thinking of the cabbie’s rant.
“I’ll give you exactly one guess which planet he’s from.” Jandi smiled, a sad, crinkled comment on the relentless duplicity of mankind.
Prudence put down her wineglass. “Who do we tell?”
“We?” Jandi raised his eyebrows. “You don’t tell anyone. They will kill you, Prudence. They will kill me, too, but that hardly matters now. I will go public with your splinter, pretending that I received it from one of the scientists studying the wreck. They will disavow everything, of course, calling me a foolish old man merely seeking attention, and trot out their own experts to contradict me. The leak will justify increased security, leading to a purge of anyone not wholly in their pocket. Eventually they will replace the glass in the wreck so they can release public samples, thus proving that radicals like me can’t be trusted. And of course, at some point in these events I will have an unhappy accident.”
Jandi’s catalog of futility was impressive.
“Then why try?”
“Because, my dear, it’s what I must do. Having to discount me will cost them credibility. Purging their staff will cost them competence. Releasing a public sample will set a precedent. That is the problem with these people. They have no principles to guide them, merely a destination. They will paint themselves into a corner, eventually, and then the rest of the world will have one chance to fully see their destination is a dead end. Historically speaking, the people are unlikely to utilize that opportunity to protect their freedom, but that’s not my problem. I’ll be dead by then, even without the League’s helping hand.”
“Unlikely, but not impossible.” She needed to believe that.
He smiled at her again, repeating his earlier sadness at self-deception, but his voice was gentle. “Have you joined the Cult of Transcendence, too? Do you think that somewhere out there, human beings have finally found a technological fix for human nature?”
She had never shared the hidden nature of her medallion with anyone. Her father had passed it to her as a sacred trust, a secret he had kept for sixteen years. Sometimes she hated him for that. If he had sold the damn thing, he might have been rich enough to escape before the cataclysm devoured his world. But once it came, no amount of money was enough. In a sea of madness, even hard cash sunk without a trace. The medallion, unable to change reality, had become merely a symbol that a better world was possible.
Now she needed help in believing the dream.
“I know they’ve found something, Jandi.” She opened the wire locket, taking the medallion in her hand. Professionally interested, he watched her with eyes like microscopes.
Pressing on the medallion, she extended the blade. Gently she moved it across her ceramic plate. The dish did not change, still holding a puddle of carrot juice. Only a thin line through the white pottery testified that she had done anything at all.
Jandi reached out and gently tapped one half of the plate. Disturbed, it jiggled, the crack widening into reality, no longer watertight. Bright orange juice dribbled onto the table.
Heedless of the mess, dumping food onto his tabletop, he picked up the plate and critically examined the cut.
“Don’t touch it,” she warned. “It could be sharp.” The molecular edge of her knife made even ordinary objects dangerous.
He dragged a napkin across the edge. The cloth fell in two pieces. But when he repeated the experiment, nothing happened.
“I’m afraid I’ve just polished my atomic evidence out of existence.” Picking up the other half of the plate, he did the same. “Let me get you another plate, dear. Don’t bother to clean it up, just move to a new chair.” The table was large enough to seat a dozen people. “Remarkable,” he said, when he came back from the kitchen with a clean plate. “All those years I wasted flying around in space to find alien artifacts, and the only one I’ll ever see walks through my front door.”
“It’s not alien,” she said defensively. “I got it from my mother.”
“Did she say where she obtained it?”
Prudence bit her lip. “I never met her. She died when I was an infant.”
“May I?” he asked. Prudence put the medallion in his open palm. “Can you show me?”
She touched it delicately, with one finger. “Here, here, and here. Not anywhere else. It’s very hard to do, though.”
Jandi fumbled with the medallion for a moment, and then the blade slid out. Prudence caught her breath in surprise.
“A misspent youth,” he grinned. “I used to hustle vid games in bars, when I was a boy. I’ve kept up the dexterity through constant practice. On the odd chance I could win a bet, or impress a pretty girl. But I agree: it is not alien. It is too perfectly designed for the human hand. So somewhere out there a world is making nanotech pocket knives. And your mother…?”
“I don’t know. My father was a baker. He never went more than fifty kilometers from the apartment block he was born in. She was a traveler…”
She had been a spacer, a wanderer, a free spirit that flitted unanchored through the galaxy, working her passage on an endless succession of stray freighters and liners. Something about Prudence’s father had caught her, and she had fallen for the last time into the gravity well of a planet, to bud and seed like a tumbleweed taken to root.
Within a year she was dead.
Prudence had been the only thing her father had left of his beautiful star-crossed bride. He had married again, because that is what people do. He had loved his new wife, and the children they made; he had been a dutiful husband, a loving father, a good man. He had built a normal life. When he tried to tell Prudence the stories her mother had told him, the places she had been and the sights she had seen, it was as if he was relating a fairy tale that he had read in a book. Only when he had shown her the medallion had it become real to her. Only then had she seen the memory of grief in his eyes.
A few stories, a medallion, and the legal status as half off-worlder were all the inheritance he could pass on to Prudence. The thing she envied the most, the time that he had spent with that wonderfully exotic person, could never be shared.
When his homeworld of Strattenburg had burst into self-immolation, Prudence had fled in helpless despair. Only her status as half off-worlder had let her escape the clutches of a mad bureaucracy. Only the invisible beacon of her mother’s world had given her direction, kept her moving on an uncharted course instead of drifting aimlessly.
“You found Baharain, from a sliver of glass. Can you find her world from this?” Prudence didn’t dare hope, but she had to ask.
“No,” Jandi said. He put a data cube on the table. “I was going to trade you this, for your sliver. It is a copy of the university’s star compendium; every fact, observation, and rumor we’ve collected over the last hundred years. To buy it would cost a fortune, and undoubtedly break a law in the process. So I thought it would be a fair trade, but now I am in your debt again. The most I can tell you is that nothing vaguely like your artifact is described in that cube. I cannot guess how the medallion came to you, yet no other technology followed.”
Prudence had thought long and hard on the problem. “Maybe a node failed. Maybe we’re cut off now, the okimune split in half. Or still connected, but by a roundabout way, and it’s just taking this long for knowledge and tech to work its way through node-space.”
Jandi shook his head sadly. “There are a thousand maybes, Prudence. War, disease, stellar collapse, or even aliens could have nipped this flowering in the bud. Or maybe they just don’t care. Maybe the gods are jealous. Prometheus is still bound to his rock; perhaps no other chose to join him.”
“I thought Hercules set him free.”
A twinkle of dark humor in Jandi’s eyes. “You believe in heroes? But of course. You are full of hope, as the young should be. Even a tired old man like myself can look at the edge of your knife and see possibilities. Take this cube, Prudence, and continue your quest. I lay only this charge upon you. When you find another university that has not heard of Altair, share the contents of the cube with them, even if they refuse to share theirs with you. We academics have learned to overlook petty stumbles in the march of knowledge. When you’re so far away from here you can’t gain any profit from it, then give it away, as I gave it to you.”
Prudence probably couldn’t gain any profit from it now. She already had a database of the local stars, and it was undoubtedly more up-to-date on current commercial issues. Kassa’s sudden change in buying patterns, for example.
But for a person intent on traveling beyond common knowledge, it might be of considerable value.
“Thank you,” she said. “I will.”
“If you can bear it,” he added softly, “you might update the entry on Strattenburg. We chose not to slander based on rumors. But you know the truth.”
She would have to think before she made that promise. Carrying his data cube like pollen to a distant flower was one thing. Bleeding her heart into it to make it richer was something else.
“I’m going to update the entry on Baharain first. By going there.”
“I advise differently, my dear. I advise you to run without looking back. You cannot materially affect the collapse of this world, and why should you try? Your fate does not lie with us, child. We strangers cannot ask this of you.”
Coming from a man who had just announced his intention to commit state-sponsored suicide, this paean to self-interest was unconvincing.
“It’s what I must do,” she parroted at him. “For my own sake, Jandi. I can’t flee without at least trying to help.”
He sighed. “You should. You would serve us better as a pollinating bee, not a warring wasp. One sting more or less will not matter to the bear who raids our honeyed chambers. At least promise me you won’t surrender completely to vainglory, to the point of thinking your death will matter. I know mine won’t; I offer it only because it is already so immediate. The advantages of decrepitude—one has nothing left to lose.”
More lies. It was obvious that Jandi would have picked a fight with the League at any age. Courage was as integral to his character as the sharp eyes and deft fingers.
But would he have endangered a wife and children? Would he have stood up to the authorities if he had a family that depended on him, children who needed him, innocents they could threaten with destruction?
There was a reason the heroes of legend were never married. There was a reason so many people on Altair stood by silently and did nothing. It was the same reason that so many on Strattenburg had done nothing, until it was too late. Only the people without attachments could afford to risk everything. And if they weren’t attached to the world, why would they care what happened in it? Prudence had kept herself free of attachments since the day Strattenburg had burned them all. Or tried to; people kept creeping inside her defenses, like Jorgun and Jelly and Kyle and now Jandi. She had been running away out of self-protection, but now she found herself too detached to fear and too attached to flee.
Jandi pushed the cube into her hands. “I can give you two days’ head start. Go and see, but don’t touch. And don’t come back! The danger that they linked us together will be too great. On that cube is a list of scholars you can trust. Send them the results of your investigation by parcel post, and then abandon us to our fate. It is no more than we deserve.”
She left that night. No point in trying to find a cargo. Altair had stopped all outgoing shipping. The planet had become a black hole of commerce. Goods poured in, but the only thing that could escape the pull of the government’s gravity was that mass-less, ephemeral substance known as debt. Theoretically it was self-regulating. The physicist Hawking had proven that the virtual particles that leaked out of the event horizon of a black hole would eventually evaporate it. But physicists were not known for their financial acumen.
She had to kick a dent in Garcia’s door to wake him. He was too drunk to understand the dangerous course she was setting, but he refused to leave the ship. It was a choice, of sorts. As much as she could give him at the moment.
Melvin’s network contact was now listed as “unregistered.” When she went to his stateroom, intending to pack his belongings into storage at the spaceport, she discovered it was already empty.
“Yeah,” Garcia mumbled, when she confronted him again. “I forgot. Melvin bailed on us. Bastard didn’t have the guts to face you. He waited for days for you to leave the ship so he could clean out his locker. Don’t know why. He won’t need any of those surfer clothes now.”
“Why not?” she asked, wondering what terrible fate she had consigned her crewman to when she had chosen to land on Kassa, instead of running away.
“He enlisted. Can you believe it? Fleet took him. Him! Earth-fire, he even tried to get me to enlist.”
This war was sucking her clean. Credits, crew, cargo—everything she had that wasn’t nailed to the deck. They only left her with the broken bits, the simpleminded Jorgun and the incurably dishonest Garcia.
No, she thought, not even the broken were hers to keep. Kyle Daspar had been something she might have repaired, an old cracked vase that she might have found value in, but the League had taken him too.
In the early hours of the morning, when Fleet finally gave her clearance to approach the node, she felt something warm on her feet. The shoes had melted, turning dull gray and soft. They were no longer pretty.