“Very good. Add something to the list, if it’s not already there: ‘Per our desire for the best specialist crew possible, we require that the Forestry Department’s university programs be open to all those who pass our tests, not just the heirs of First Settlers.’”
“Of course…” A second passed, just enough time for a double take. “Lord, how could we miss something like that?” We missed it because some fools are very hard to underestimate.
A thousand seconds later, Lowcinder was rising toward them. This was almost thirty degrees south latitude. The frozen desolation that spread around it looked like the pre-Arrival pictures of equatorial Triland, five hundred years ago, before the First Settlers began tweaking the greenhouse gases and building the exquisite structure that is a terraform ecology.
Lowcinder itself was near the center of an extravagant black stain, the product of centuries of “nucleonically clean” rocket fuels. This was Triland’s largest groundside spaceport, yet the city’s recent growth was as grim and slumlike as all the others on the planet.
Their flyer switched to fans and trundled across the city, slowly descending. The sun was very low, and the streets were mostly in twilight. But every kilometer the streets seemed narrower. Custom composites gave way to cubes that might have once been cargo containers. Sammy watched grimly. The First Settlers had worked for centuries to create a beautiful world; now it was exploding out from under them. It was a common problem in terraformed worlds. There were at least five reasonably painless methods of accommodating the terraform’s final success. But if the First Settlers and their “Forestry Department” were not willing to adopt any of them…well, there might not be a civilization here to welcome his fleet’s return. Sometime soon, he must have a heart-to-heart chat with members of the ruling class.
His thoughts were brought back to the present as the flyer dumped down between blocky tenements. Sammy and his Forestry goons walked through half-frozen slush. Piles of clothing—donations?—lay jumbled in boxes on the steps of the building they approached. The goons detoured around them. Then they were up the steps and indoors.
The cemeterium’s manager called himself Brother Song, and he looked old unto death. “Bidwel Ducanh?” His gaze slid nervously away from Sammy. Brother Song did not recognize Sammy’s face, but he knew the Forestry Department. “Bidwel Ducanh died ten years ago.”
He was lying. He was lying.
Sammy took a deep breath and looked around the dingy room. Suddenly he felt as dangerous as some fleet scuttlebutt made him out to be. God forgive me, but I will do anything to get the truth from this man. He looked back at Brother Song and attempted a friendly smile. It must not have come out quite right; the old man stepped back a pace. “A cemeterium is a place for people to die, is that right, Brother Song?”
“It is a place for all to live to the natural fullness of their time. We use all the money that people bring, to help all the people who come.” In the perverse Triland situation, Brother Song’s primitivism made a terrible kind of sense. He helped the sickest of the poorest as well as he could.
Sammy held up his hand. “I will donate one hundred years of budget to each of your order’s cemeteria…if you take me to Bidwel Ducanh.”
“I—” Brother Song took another step backward, and sat down heavily. Somehow he knew that Sammy could make good on his offer. Maybe…But then the old man looked up at Sammy and there was a desperate stubbornness in his stare. “No. Bidwel Ducanh died ten years ago.”
Sammy walked across the room and grasped the arms of the old man’s chair. He brought his face down close to the other’s. “You know these people I’ve brought with me. Do you doubt that if I give the word, they will take your cemeterium apart, piece by piece? Do you doubt that if we don’t find what I seek here, we’ll do the same to every cemeterium of your order, all over this world?”
It was clear that Brother Song did not doubt. He knew the Forestry Department. Yet for a moment Sammy was afraid that Song would stand up even to that. And I will then do what I must do. Abruptly, the old man seemed to crumple in on himself, weeping silently.
Sammy stood back from his chair. Some seconds passed. The old man stopped crying and struggled to his feet. He didn’t look at Sammy or gesture; he simply shuffled out of the room.
Sammy and his entourage followed. They walked single-file down a long corridor. There was horror here. It wasn’t in the dim and broken lighting or the water-stained ceiling panels or the filthy floor. Along the corridor, people sat on sofas or wheeled chairs. They sat, and stared…at nothing. At first, Sammy thought they were wearing head-up-displays, that their vision was far away, maybe in some consensual imagery. After all, a few of them were talking, a few of them were making constant, complicated gestures. Then he noticed that the signs on the walls were painted there. The plain, peeling wall material was simply all there was to see. And the withered people sitting in the hall had eyes that were naked and vacant.
Sammy walked close behind Brother Song. The monk was talking to himself, but the words made sense. He was talking about The Man: “Bidwel Ducanh was not a kindly man. He was not someone you could like, even at the beginning…especially at the beginning. He said he had been rich, but he brought us nothing. The first thirty years, when I was young, he worked harder than any of us. There was no job too dirty, no job too hard. But he had ill to say of everyone. He mocked everyone. He would sit by a patient through the last night of life, and then afterwards sneer.” Brother Song was speaking in the past tense, but after a few seconds Sammy realized that he was not trying to convince Sammy of anything. Song was not even talking to himself. It was as if he were speaking a wake for someone he knew would be dead very soon. “And then as the years passed, like all the rest of us, he could help less and less. He talked about his enemies, how they would kill him if they ever found him. He laughed when we promised to hide him. In the end, only his meanness survived—and that without speech.”
Brother Song stopped before a large door. The sign above it was brave and floral: TO THE SUNROOM.
“Ducanh will be the one watching the sunset.” But, the monk did not open the door. He stood with his head bowed, not quite blocking the way.
Sammy started to walk around him, then stopped, and said, “The payment I mentioned: It will be deposited to your order’s account.” The old man didn’t look up at him. He spat on Sammy’s jacket and then walked back down the hall, pushing past the constables.
Sammy turned and pulled at the door’s mechanical latch.
“Sir?” It was the Commissioner of Urban Security. The cop-bureaucrat stepped close and spoke softly. “Um. We didn’t want this escort job, sir. This should have been your own people.”
Huh? “I agree, Commissioner. So why didn’t you let me bring them?”
“It wasn’t my decision. I think they figured that constables would be more discreet.” The cop looked away. “Look, Fleet Captain. We know you Qeng Ho carry grudges a long time.”
Sammy nodded, although that truth applied more to customer civilizations than to individuals.
The cop finally looked him in the eye. “Okay. We’ve cooperated. We made sure that nothing about your search could leak back to your…target. But we won’t do this guy for you. We’ll look the other way; we won’t stop you. But I won’t do him.”
“Ah.” Sammy tried to imagine just where in the moral pantheon this fellow would fit. “Well, Commissioner, staying out of my way is all that is required. I can take care of this myself.”
The cop gave a jerky nod. He stepped back, and didn’t follow when Sammy opened the door “to the sunroom.”
The air was chill and stale, an improvement over the rank humidity of the hallway. Sammy walked down a dark stairway. He was still indoors, but not by much. This had been an exterior entrance once, leading down to street level. Plastic sheeting walled it in now, creating some kind of sheltered patio.
What if he’s like the wretches in the hallway? They reminded him of people w
ho lived beyond the capabilities of medical support. Or the victims of a mad experimentory. Their minds had died in pieces. That was a finish he had never seriously considered, but now…
Sammy reached the bottom of the stairs. Around the corner was the promise of daylight. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and stood quietly for a long moment.
Do it. Sammy walked forward, into a large room. It looked like part of the parking lot, but tented with semiopaque plastic sheets. There was no heating, and drafts thuttered past breaks in the plastic. A few heavily bundled forms were scattered in chairs across the open space. They sat facing in no particular direction; some were looking into the gray stone of the exterior wall.
All that barely registered on Sammy. At the far end of the room, a column of sunlight fell low and slanting through a break in the roof. A single person had contrived to sit in the middle of that light.
Sammy walked slowly across the room, his eyes never leaving the figure that sat in the red and gold light of sunset. The face had a racial similarity to the high Qeng Ho Families, but it was not the face that Sammy remembered. No matter. The Man would have changed his face long ago. Besides, Sammy had a DNA counter in his jacket, and a copy of The Man’s true DNA code.
He was bundled in blankets and wore a heavy knit cap. He didn’t move but he seemed to be watching something, watching the sunset. It’s him. The conviction came without rational thought, an emotional wave breaking over him. Maybe incomplete, but this is him.
Sammy took a loose chair and sat down facing the figure in the light. A hundred seconds passed. Two hundred. The last rays of sunset were fading. The Man’s stare was blank, but he reacted to the coolness on his face. His head moved, vaguely searching, and he seemed to notice his visitor. Sammy turned so his face was lit by the sunset sky. Something came into the other’s eyes, puzzlement, memories swimming up from the depths. Abruptly, The Man’s hands came out of his blankets and jerked clawlike at Sammy’s face.
“You!”
“Yes, sir. Me.” The search of eight centuries was over.
The Man shifted uncomfortably in his wheeled chair, rearranging his blankets. He was silent for some seconds, and when he finally spoke, his words were halting. “I knew your…kind would still be looking for me. I financed this damn Xupere cult, but I always knew…it might not be enough.” He shifted again on the chair. There was a glitter in his eyes that Sammy had never seen in the old days. “Don’t tell me. Each Family pitched in a little. Maybe every Qeng Ho ship has one crewmember who keeps a lookout for me.”
He had no concept of the search that had finally found him. “We mean you no harm, sir.”
The Man gave a rasp of a laugh, not arguing, but certainly disbelieving. “It’s my bad luck that you would be the agent they assigned to Triland. You’re smart enough to find me. They should have done better by you, Sammy. You should be a Fleet Captain and more, not some assassin errand boy.” He shifted again, reached down as if to scratch his butt. What was it? Hemorrhoids? Cancer? Lordy, I bet he’s sitting on a handgun. He’s been ready all these years, and now it’s tangled up in the blankets.
Sammy leaned forward earnestly. The Man was stringing him along. Fine. It might be the only way he would talk at all. “So we were finally lucky, sir. Myself, I guessed you might come here, because of the OnOff star.”
The surreptitious probing of blankets paused for a moment. A sneer flickered across the old man’s face. “It’s only fifty light-years away, Sammy. The nearest astrophysical enigma to Human Space. And you ball-less Qeng Ho wonders have never visited it. Holy profit is all your kind ever cared about.” He waved his right hand forgivingly, while his left dug deeper into the blankets. “But then, the whole human race is just as bad. Eight thousand years of telescope observations and two botched fly-throughs, that’s all the wonder rated…I thought maybe this close, I could put together a manned mission. Maybe I would find something there, an edge. Then, when I came back—” The strange glitter was back in his eyes. He had dreamed his impossible dream so long, it had consumed him. And Sammy realized that The Man was not a fragment of himself. He was simply mad.
But debts owed to a madman are still real debts.
Sammy leaned a little closer. “You could have done it. I understand that a starship passed through here when ‘Bidwel Ducanh’ was at the height of his influence.”
“That was Qeng Ho. Fuck the Qeng Ho! I have washed my hands of you.” His left arm was no longer probing. Apparently, he had found his handgun.
Sammy reached out and lightly touched the blankets that hid The Man’s left arm. It wasn’t a forcible restraint, but an acknowledgment…and a request for a moment’s more time. “Pham. There’s reason to go to OnOff now. Even by Qeng Ho standards.”
“Huh?” Sammy couldn’t tell if it was the touch, or his words, or the name that had been unspoken for so long—but something briefly held the old man still and listening.
“Three years ago, while we were still backing into here, the Trilanders picked up emissions from near the OnOff star. It was spark-gap radio, like a fallen civilization might invent if it had totally lost its technological history. We’ve run out our own antenna arrays, and done our own analysis. The emissions are like manual Morse code, except human hands and human reflexes would never have quite this rhythm.”
The old man’s mouth opened and shut but for a moment no words came. “Impossible,” he finally said, very faintly.
Sammy felt himself smile. “It’s strange to hear that word from you, sir.”
More silence. The Man’s head bowed. Then: “The jackpot. I missed it by just sixty years. And you, by hunting me down here…now you’ll get it all.” His arm was still hidden, but he had slumped forward in his chair, defeated by his inner vision of defeat.
“Sir, a few of us”—more than a few—“have searched for you. You made yourself very hard to find, and there are all the old reasons for keeping the search secret. But we never wished you harm. We wanted to find you to—” To make amends? To beg forgiveness? Sammy couldn’t say the words, and they weren’t quite true. After all, The Man had been wrong. So speak to the present: “We would be honored if you would come with us, to the OnOff star.”
“Never. I am not Qeng Ho.”
Sammy always kept close track of his ships’ status. And just now…Well, it was worth a try: “I didn’t come to Triland aboard a singleton, sir. I have a fleet.”
The other’s chin came up a fraction. “A fleet?” The interest was an old reflex, not quite dead.
“They’re in near moorage, but right now they should be visible from Lowcinder. Would you like to see?”
The old man only shrugged, but both his hands were in the open now, resting in his lap.
“Let me show you.” There was a doorway hacked in the plastic just a few meters away. Sammy got up and moved slowly to push the wheeled chair. The old man made no objection.
Outside, it was cold, probably below freezing. Sunset colors hung above the rooftops ahead of him, but the only evidence of daytime warmth was the icy slush that splashed over his shoes. He pushed the chair along, heading across the parking lot toward a spot that would give them some view toward the west. The old man looked around vaguely. I wonder how long it’s been since he was outside.
“You ever thought, Sammy, there could be other folks come to this tea party?”
“Sir?” The two of them were alone in the parking lot.
“There are human colony worlds closer to the OnOff star than we are.”
That tea party. “Yes, sir. We’re updating our eavesdropping on them.” Three beautiful worlds in a triple star system, and back from barbarism in recent centuries. “They call themselves ‘Emergents’ now. We’ve never visited them, sir. Our best guess is they’re some kind of tyranny, high-tech but very closed, very inward-looking.”
The old man grunted. “I don’t care how inward-looking the bastards are. This is something that could…wake the dead. Take guns and rockets and
nukes, Sammy. Lots and lots of nukes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sammy maneuvered the old man’s wheeled chair to the edge of the parking lot. In his huds, he could see his ships climbing slowly up the sky, still hidden from the naked eye by the nearest tenement. “Another four hundred seconds sir, and you’ll see them come out past the roof just about there.” He pointed at the spot.
The old man didn’t say anything, but he was looking generally upward. There was conventional air traffic, and the shuttles at the Lowcinder spaceport. The evening was still in bright twilight, but the naked eye could pick out half a dozen satellites. In the west, a tiny red light blinked a pattern that meant it was an icon in Sammy’s huds, not a visible object. It was his marker for the OnOff star. Sammy stared at the point for a moment. Even at night, away from Lowcinder’s light, OnOff would not quite be visible. But with a small telescope it looked like a normal G star…still. In just a few more years, it would be invisible to all but the telescope arrays. When my fleet arrives there, it will have been dark for two centuries…and it will almost be ready for its next rebirth.
Sammy dropped to one knee beside the chair, ignoring the soaking chill of the slush. “Let me tell you about my ships, sir.” And he spoke of tonnages and design specs and owners—well, most of the owners; there were some who should be left for another time, when the old man did not have a gun at hand. And all the while, he watched the other’s face. The old man understood what he was saying, that was clear. His cursing was a low monotone, a new obscenity for each name that Sammy spoke. Except for the last one—
“Lisolet? That sounds Strentmannian.”
“Yes, sir. My Deputy Fleet Captain is Strentmannian.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “They…they were good people.”
Sammy smiled to himself. Pre-Flight should be ten years long for this mission. That would be long enough to bring The Man back physically. It might be long enough to soften his madness. Sammy patted the chair’s frame, near the other’s shoulder. This time, we will not desert you.