It was an ironic fact that it could take longer to travel in-system from one planet to another than it did to travel through a node. But people didn’t think of it that way. In-system, you were still in contact. An hour delay on radio chatter was not the same as absolute silence. So the frontier, the wilderness, was made up of other planets and moons, asteroid belts and periodic comets. The worlds on the other side of the nodes were not distant; they were imaginary.
Prudence had been to several hundred worlds. Every place she went, they asked her about her last port of call. But no one ever asked about her
first
port. No one ever dug deeper than the last hop, because one hop was indistinguishable from a thousand. They were all merely someplace else.
Melvin wandered past her, a glazed look on his face. She’d taken him to a dozen worlds, and he’d gotten stoned on all of them. Zanzibar was a good world for him, too.
“Keep your comm on,” she called after him. He’d spent the last two weeks more incapacitated than usual. She was beginning to think about replacing him. He might be permanently broken.
“Can we go see the castle?” Jorgun liked Zanzibar too. He couldn’t see through the illusion. To him, it was an exotic and mysterious bazaar.
Prudence finally confronted the fact that she was the only member of her crew that didn’t like the place.
“Sure, Jor.” It would probably take Garcia days to line up something profitable, and Melvin at least that long to decompress. Prudence could stop running now, and let her crew catch their breath.
Herself included. Of all the local worlds, Zanzibar was the least likely to accede to an Altair extradition request. So it turned out she could find something attractive about Zanzibar’s slipshod security, after all.
She made herself wait three whole days, until her news had been confirmed by other captains coming out of the node. Of course, all of them had originally gotten the news from her in the first place, but that didn’t seem to occur to anyone.
Not directly from her. She saw a few ships she hadn’t talked to. They must have gotten their information secondhand. Naturally they were the loudest, and the quickest to cry “alien.” Ridiculous pictures were being passed around, claiming to be scientific projections leaked from government labs: the old standbys like skinny gray dwarves with bulging eyes and octopi-headed humanoids in flowing gowns, but also giant slavering spiders dripping venom and waving bulbous weapons in multiple legs.
But now that the subject had been publicly broached, she felt it was safe to start asking questions.
Mauree Cordial ran a dusty shop just off the spaceport grounds that catered to tourists and cranks. Real spacers who stumbled through the heavily barred doors invariably sniffed, laughed, or cursed before storming out. But plenty of them came back, late at night, to cut deals with Mauree. Maybe even in dark alleys and dank bars, as stereotypical as the fake glamour of Zanzibar. A bit of easy cash had a way of overcoming professional disgust.
Prudence squeezed her way through the aisles, looking for Mauree. The navigational difficulty was not from patrons—which, while numbering less than a dozen, nonetheless represented an occupancy record—but from the piles of junk precariously stacked to the ceiling. Mauree bought, collected, and occasionally sold alien artifacts. Since there were, in fact, no aliens, that meant Mauree’s shop was stuffed with the random detritus of a hundred worlds, odd bits of useless crap from spacers’ personal belongings, with histories culled from their imaginations, traded for a spot of drinking money or just a laugh.
Mauree bought it all, hook, line, and sinker. He’d never met a story he didn’t believe, or a spacer he didn’t trust. Prudence had first discovered the pleasant, crazy old man when she busted Garcia for selling him rocks at ten credits a kilo. Interesting rocks, smoothly rounded with a translucent sheen over assorted pungent colors, but just rocks. No, she had explained patiently, they won’t hatch into lithids and start eating pollution, no matter how long you subject them to ultraviolet rays. She had offered to carry them outside, toss them in the dumpster, and make Garcia refund his money.
Mauree had graciously declined. The rocks had stayed in one corner of the room, under an ultraviolet lamp, and remained there still. Out of sheer curiosity she had counted them on her last visit. Two had gone missing.
Prudence considered the hypothesis that they had indeed hatched and crawled off under their own power. Against this possibility she could set her personal observation of Garcia collecting them from a dome colony landfill, the waste products of some unknown and uninteresting manufacturing process. He had used them as ballast for a cargo of delicate hand-blown glass flowers. Since the petals and leaves were filled with vacuum, they tended to float entrancingly. Or inconveniently, given the context of the cargo hold. Multiple layers of bubble-wrap plastic proved insufficient, so Garcia had quite sensibly weighted the packages into stability, until the delivery was complete.
It was perhaps equally sensible to extract profit from the rocks themselves, instead of merely from their less substantial counterparts in travel, but not particularly ethical. Prudence had put a stop to it after the first dozen. Why he had only sold that few was still a mystery. Perhaps he wanted to inflate their value by artificially limiting their quantity. More likely he was just too lazy to carry any more than he had to. Having divined the depth of Mauree’s pockets, Garcia had plumbed them for the easy pickings, and then told Jorgun to shovel the rest of the rocks into a dry gulch.
With so little evidence in favor of the reality of lithid eggs, Prudence was forced to conclude that Mauree had managed to sell two rocks for the posted price of fifty credits a kilo, despite the presence of a half-ton of identical rocks not a hundred meters from his front door.
Whether that made Garcia or Mauree the villain, and Mauree or the idiot tourist he had bilked the victim, was an ethical conundrum not worth solving.
What it did make clear was the futility of trying to sell Mauree the authentic alien artifact in her pocket, or even showing it to him. He would value it no more than he did Garcia’s rocks. Open to all possibilities, he had blinded himself to genuine revelation.
But she hadn’t come for money. She had come for information, information that Mauree might not even know he had. Mauree, like his shop, was a cornucopia of falsehoods and trivialities, but also of rumors, hints, and stray facts. Now that she knew what to look for, she might be able to sift a truth from the chaff.
She found him in the most unlikely place in the shop: at the register, recording a sale. Prudence always wondered about Mauree’s customers. Superficially, they looked like normal people. This one, for instance, was a large, bearded man in casual clothes. He could be anything from a low-level accountant to a short-order cook. His purchase was a large chunk of rose quartz crystal. Curious, Prudence asked him what he was going to do with it.
“Good works, my dear, good works!” He blew out his cheeks fulsomely, a sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead. “These ordinary-seeming rocks contain alien souls, trapped millions of years ago under terrible circumstances. Innocent victims of violence—destroyed by atomic fire—blind and terrified—their essences took refuge in these entrancing crystals. We meditate over them, relieving their psychic anguish and releasing them from their prison, so that they may join the cosmic dance once again.”
“A noble endeavor,” Prudence agreed dryly. Such poetry from a man in a soup-stained cardigan suggested that he knew what it was like to be a vibrant soul trapped in a dull shell. “I’m surprised that Mauree is charging you twenty-seven credits for his participation. I would have expected at least a twenty-percent discount.”
“Shipping costs,” Mauree said gallantly. “It all adds up.” Not a trace of defensiveness. That was what amazed her most about Mauree: he had no shame. Either he truly believed his own fantasies, or he was the most core-broken sociopath she had ever met.
“Just part of the cycle,” the customer said. “Everyone who helps the spirits is rewarded. When their fear is assuaged, and their prison shattered, they grant luck and favors to those nearby. I can see by the subtle colors of this crystal that the soul within is both strong and eager to be released. A handful of credits to our dear Mauree and a few hours of meditation is a small price to pay for the gratitude of such an ancient and powerful being.”
Why did the spiritual ones always turn out to be like Garcia? Long speeches about helping others, but always the inside deal, the percentage, the cut off the top. Nobility done for the basest of motives.
Prudence thought about the fat voucher she had cashed on Altair, and subdued her delusions of superiority.
“Often the pleasurable sensations of freedom at the moment of release are overwhelming,” the chubby man continued. “The spirit broadcasts them willy-nilly, and rescuers have been known to be overcome by such exalted emotion. Occasionally even to the point of sensuality…” He smiled, aiming for inviting, knowing, sophisticated. He achieved leering.
At least Prudence hadn’t flown two straight days of rescue hops merely to get laid.
On the other hand, sex was a healthy part of life. If that’s what it took for Chubby to get in the game, who was she to complain? Just because he wasn’t her type didn’t mean he wasn’t somebody’s type.
“Sounds interesting,” she said sweetly, “but that would conflict with my vow of chastity.”
Chubby wasn’t completely thick. He smiled sadly, achieving the expression perfectly this time—presumably he had plenty of practice with that one—and excused himself.
“Would you like a crystal of your own?” Mauree asked. “Perhaps you and your young man could do a cosmic good deed.”
“Why would I have a young man?” she asked him. “I just said I had a vow of chastity.”
Mauree looked over to where Jorgun was playing with some vaguely dinosaur-shaped toys, and shrugged genially. “I try not to judge.”
Given that her relationship with Jorgun was both special and chaste, it was understandable that Mauree might think they were in some weird romantic entanglement. Mauree didn’t necessarily know it was more like mother and son. Mauree wasn’t trying to offend, and he wouldn’t be offended, no matter what her relationship with Jorgun turned out to be. As always, she found his total acceptance of any arrangement, no matter how inherently unbalanced, to be itself a source of aggravation.
“No,” she said, more shortly than she intended. “I’m here for something else. Something special, Mauree. Something … new.”
“Battle tokens of the killer fleet that destroyed Kassa?” Mauree looked truly sad. “I don’t have any. The shop’s had more visitors in the last day than all of last week, but all anybody wants are Kassan souvenirs.”
“Have you gotten any new curios in, Mauree? I mean in the last few months.” If the ship had been planted, maybe they planted other evidence.
“Always, dear, always! Look at these Burgundian shamanistic feather-wands, still charged with power. And here are two ancient scrolls speaking of alien visitations, although sadly untranslatable by modern means. Or perhaps this vial of rare sea salt, said to restore youth and vigor … oh, you did say you were specifically not interested in that. Perhaps a chakratic notch filter? I understand it works off of an alien technology that enhances audio replay. A young fellow brought me some just a few weeks ago.” Mauree started to wander down the corridor, peering at objects on the shelves, as if he were not entirely certain himself what a chakratic notch filter would look like.
She would have to steer him in the right direction. It should be safe to reveal facts to him that she had concealed from everyone else. No one was going to question Mauree, anything he said would be easy to deny, and in any case, he was unlikely to remember who had told him the facts in the first place.
“What about spiders, Mauree?”
“Eh?” he said, surprised. “No, I don’t think so, dear. I had the exterminator in a month ago.”
“Giant spiders, Mauree. Giant alien intelligent spiders with spaceships.”
“Oh no, dear.” His tone was authoritative and reassuring. “You don’t need to worry about that. I’m sure this Kassan thing, however terrible it is, is just ordinary people misbehaving. There aren’t any evil aliens in the great Out.”
This answer was so utterly at odds with what she expected from Mauree the alien artifact dealer that her suspicion went into full thrust. If only she could figure out a plot that included Mauree in any capacity and still made a shred of sense.
He sensed her change of mood, and tried to comfort her. “My dear, the aliens mean us no harm. They’re trying to help.”
She remembered Kassa, smashed like a sand castle. She wanted to reach out and shake Mauree until his head cracked. She didn’t, but she wanted to.
Mauree surprised her again, reading her emotional state. She had lied to smarter men than Mauree, deceived sharper vision than his rheumy old eyes. But now he could sense her pulling away from him, and he tried to bridge the gap.
“Let me tell you a secret, my dear.” He lowered his voice, in conspiracy. Or perhaps just in shame. “All these artifacts are junk. They don’t matter.”
She followed him, to see where he would go. “Then why do you sell them?”
Mauree shrugged again, the same way he had at the register. “Because people need them. They need a focus for their work. But the artifacts are just signposts. The path is internal, my dear. We are the problem. Our own inner selves. Our own violent, petty human nature. They are watching us, you know, watching from other dimensions. They are waiting for us to cleanse ourselves, to outgrow our obsession with the physical and the material. To become like them spiritually, before we can join them.”
She had to ask. “Who are They?”
He smiled at her. “The tech-ten, of course.”
Prudence unconsciously fingered the medallion that hung around her neck. There was an obscure school of sociology that rated the technological capacity of various planets. The scale was logarithmic, from one to ten, and star-flight was set at seven, for unfathomable academic reasons. Level-one planets were in the Stone Age, capable only of making simple things that did not require tools. Prudence had never actually heard of a world that poor. Kassa had been classified as level two, producing biological goods like wood and grains. Altair was level seven, since it built starships. Level eight was the level of automatics, computers that anticipated your needs and ground cars that drove themselves. According to the advertising industry on every planet Prudence had visited, this level was just around the corner. It had been just around the corner since mankind left Earth.