Juggler of Worlds (28 page)

Bad attitude, red dye, and something else. What
else
was setting off his alarm bells? “Their real plot,” he echoed.

“Futz, Sigmund. Are you really so dense?” Feather stopped pacing to glare directly into her comm unit. “Pressure a few bankers to cede control of abandoned GP accounts. Everything else is a smoke screen.”

He could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Subverting the transfer booths? Stealing the Elgin futzy Marbles?”

“That’s so
you
, Sigmund. Invent alien involvement, so you can ignore the injustice half the world now protests. It’s a handy excuse for not doing anything about
us.”
Her eyes blazed. “Not that there is an us, anymore.”

The dye job. The attitude. And now Sigmund realized what had been eluding him: the emptiness of the room. Feather was a slob, yet the guest room was tidy. No, barren. He knew without accessing the sensors: Her clutter had moved to Carlos’s bedroom.

Despite the bright morning sun streaming into his office windows, Sigmund suddenly felt ineffably weary. “We’re done here. Get some sleep.” He broke the connection.

“You didn’t give Feather our other news,” Medusa said. She was once more a conventional gorgon. The elaborate affinity web had dissolved into the cyberspace from which it had come.

“Consider Feather’s only tasking to be protection of Carlos.” Sigmund massaged his temples. He told himself he wished them happiness.

But given Feather’s attitude, he saw no reason to share Medusa’s other progress tracing laundered funds. To be reminded condescendingly that correlation isn’t causation?

The Institute of Knowledge had accepted a large endowment of laundered GP funds just before it cut direct funding to Julian Forward. Julian Forward had taken
other
laundered GP funds, then laid siege to Sol system.

In his bones, Sigmund knew: Hidden Puppeteers were still at work.

Nature Preserve 1 was a thoroughly Citizen world. There was no real danger here—only shame and misery.

Baedeker shivered in the cab of his hovering combine. The sounds of howling wind and the unhappy grinding of jammed machinery entered through the open window. Eventually he raised the window, colder but no wiser than when he had lowered it.

It would be easy enough to float back to town. The looming wall of
black cloud, riven intermittently with great jagged strokes of lightning, was ample justification. Then, when morning came and the storm had passed, when much of the crop lay in ruin, he would be that much further behind in his quota.

Twittering unhappily, he raised the heat setting in his coveralls. The garment was bright orange—Rehabilitation Corps orange—except for the clear, permeable portions that protected his heads. He climbed down from the cab’s right-side door, to the side he had already harvested. He walked leaning into the wind, crop stubble crunching beneath his booted hooves. Even the lightest expanses of sky overhead were a sullen, featureless gray.

A bloody mass clogged the intake: the burrower he had glimpsed in his path. Cursing in minor chords, he popped open an access panel. He disconnected power to the mechanism and began hacking out the carcass with a pry bar from the combine’s toolbox. If the storm held off, he might still get the field harvested today. In this, his new station in life, he had only such tiny successes to appreciate, and them but rarely.

The animal remains had lodged deep inside. He chopped and slashed, gore spattering his coveralls, brooding how far in life he had fallen.

There was a time, not that long ago, when he had been respected and well rewarded. Deservedly so: He had skills and expertise of vital importance to the Concordance. He had held a position of honor and great responsibility within the General Products Corporation. He ate natural foods from the farm planets, instead of slaving on one and living on synthesized gruel.

He wasn’t Baedeker then, not until the end of that halcyon era.

He called himself Baedeker now, the better to remind himself every day exactly how—and by whose doing—he had been humiliated and banished. The better to concentrate on finding a way back.

It began with the scruffy scout named Nessus….

NESSUS DOCKED an interstellar scout ship due for overhaul and upgrades at the General Products hull factory that orbited Hearth. He teleported aboard—with three intruders.

“Scouts,” these three were also to be considered. That was ludicrous. The important work of scouting belonged only in the jaws of
Citizens
. Other species should not be allowed to enter, let alone tour, this factory. Baedeker had protested, but Nessus, for all his unkempt disreputability, had powerful friends.

“My name is …” Baedeker began reluctantly. The translator choked on his mellifluous name. “I will be showing you”—under protest—“around the facility.”
My
facility.

“For today, we’ll call you Baedeker,” Nessus interrupted. That didn’t translate back to Citizen.

Baedeker tried to distract these “guests” with talk of coming in-cabin upgrades, trivia like adjustable crash couches and finger-friendly keyboards. He offered only vague generalities about the facility’s main purpose: the construction of impregnable hulls.

The “scout” named Eric would not be dissuaded. He kept pressing for a tour of the fabrication volume.

“It is not allowed,” Baedeker said. “That region is a controlled vacuum.”

Eric said, “I’ll wear my pressure suit. It’s aboard—”

“It is not allowed,” Baedeker repeated, his heads pivoting emphatically left/right, left/right, on their neck hinges. In the facility’s microgravity conditions, only hoof claws hooked through fabric loops kept him on the deck. “The traces of gas and dust that cling to the outside of your suit would contaminate the process.”

“I don’t understand,” another said. Omar? “Nessus, you told us only large quantities of antimatter could harm
Explorer’s
hull. How can a bit of dust harm anything?”

“What I told you is correct,” Nessus answered. “I was speaking of completed hulls. During construction, hulls are fragile.”

Eric had been attentive, and he was not without a certain cunning. “Extreme sensitivity to gravitational variations. Extreme sensitivity to trace contaminants. It sounds like a very-large-scale nanotech process.”

Baedeker shrieked like a slow-motion boiler explosion. His howl did not translate. Nessus responded in like manner, but longer and even louder, threatening to call Nike himself.

In normal tones, as though Baedeker had not spoken, Nessus went on. “General Products Corporation does not often disclose this information. Given what you now know, it is best that you hear the rest. It would be unfortunate if you lost trust in your ship.”

Then the dining-hall rumors were true! The Concordance was turning over a fully equipped interstellar scout ship to such as these—unsupervised. Baedeker was appalled. He resolved, during the upcoming overhaul, to integrate monitoring devices into
Explorer’s
telemetry. He would know what these “scouts” did, and where they went. And he would control explosives inside their indestructible hull, lest they stray.

Nessus had not stopped.
“Explorer’s
hull is impervious to damage. If not, would I have ventured out in it? Still, there is a fact I had not shared. The hull takes its strength from its unique form: It is a single supermolecule grown atom by atom by nanotechnology. During construction, the incomplete hull is unstable. The slightest chemical contamination or unbalanced force can tear it to pieces. That’s why there is no artificial gravity here, and why communication here”—and his sweeping head gestures suggested the totality of the enormous orbital factory—“uses optical fibers.”

Caterwauling in outrage, Baedeker stormed out. None but Citizens—and few of them—needed to know such details. Nothing good could come of this.

He seethed until Nessus and companions took a shuttle to Hearth. He did not calm down until sensors and remote-controlled explosives were hidden aboard
Explorer
.

WITH A GRUNT, Baedeker pried loose the last chunk of burrower rib cage. Blood and gobbets of flesh speckled his coveralls. Wind wailed, and he further raised the temperature of the garment before reconnecting power to the intake.

Explorer
had gone out without Citizen supervision, and Baedeker prided himself on his foresight. He monitored its telemetry. He ran samples of surreptitiously reported conversations through a translator. He took comfort in what he overheard—

While Nessus’ “scouts” bypassed Baedeker’s sensors, relayed their communications through a hyperwave buoy, and disabled the detonators. Unwatched, they penetrated one of the most secret and secure facilities of the Concordance, located a weapon of great potency, and—dooming Baedeker to this place—destroyed a General Products hull to get the weapon out.

And with that weapon, Nessus’ “scouts” had extorted a prize of inestimable value from the Concordance.

The cab was still warm, and the storm front had stalled. Baedeker resumed harvesting, the combine spewing a steady stream of grains through its towed stepping disc into a distant warehouse. All the chaff, dirt, bits of stalk and leaves, and burrower bits fell back to the ground.

The clatter of hailstones finally started Baedeker on the long way back to the barn. Hail could not harm him inside the cab; he twitched nonetheless, while the sturdy fabric of his coveralls frustrated his efforts to pluck at his mane.

Turning over a Concordance ship was the fundamental error. Nessus’ error! The safeguards Baedeker had undertaken to install—on his own initiative—had been circumvented, but was that his fault? And how could he be blamed because three unsupervised scouts had discovered antimatter somewhere out among the stars!

But he
was
blamed. Scouts were too few to hold accountable, and someone must pay. He could not alter the past. He could not say where—no one could!—vast quantities of antimatter could be found. He couldn’t be expected to—

Baedeker cut through the self-pity with a strident, double-throated blat of disgust. What
can
you do? Can anyone disintegrate a General Products hull
without
using antimatter?

To his sudden, utter amazement, Baedeker realized that, just possibly, he could.

“Your money has been well spent,” Ander said. He was newly returned from Jinx and still feeding his bulked-up weight. “Including the generous bonus.”

“I don’t remember offering a bonus.” Sigmund didn’t bother adding that two kilos of Kobe beef
was
a bonus.

Ander merely smiled and crooked a finger at the woman pushing the dessert cart.

The more arrogant, the better the news, Sigmund reminded himself. Once two cannolis and a slice of baklava found their way to Ander’s end of the table, Sigmund took out his comm unit. “Protocol gamma,” he said. Sound suppression, bug suppression, and a translucent holographic screen around the table to stymie lip-readers. Red, yellow, and green dots slowly chased one another around its screen. “We can talk freely.”

“Free except for that matter of my bonus.” Ander blotted his lips with his napkin. “I leave that entirely to your discretion.”

Sigmund waited.

“Very well. You’ll be amused to learn that I caroused our way to success.” Ander tipped his head, smiling in fond memory of something. “Once one has been accepted, there’s pleasure to be had even on West End. You should come back to Jinx with me.”

Sigmund flinched. Since he had limped home from Forward Station, near catatonic with the flatlander phobia, the idea of leaving Earth terrified him. He’d been unable to face even the short trip to the Oort Cloud, where instantaneous hyperwave radio worked, to spare Ander a far longer voyage.

“It sounds like you’ve already gotten your bonus,” Sigmund said.

A cannoli disappeared, pastry flakes raining onto the tablecloth. “As directed, I befriended workers employed by Gregory Pelton’s project. I concede the process was not without its amusements.”

“And?”

“You suck all the fun out of a story, Sigmund. I was eventually hired, of course. A drinking buddy recommended me. It didn’t get me into the inner circle, of course, but I hold a responsible position in the back office. Close enough to the action to know, I think, who the inner circle
is.”
Ander waved his fork. “Yes, I know. You’re asking yourself why, if I have a responsible position, I could get away.”