“And you, one is to infer, happen to be the expert on that.”
“On rights? I am a p’Nan debt assessor. It’s my business to be an expert.”
“That it is, sir, that it is.” Another sip of beer. “And should you determine that I am about to begin Appropriating people, what then?”
“If you do Appropriate anyone, then there will be Restitution.”
“The sword?” If he had had eyebrows, he would have lifted them.
Eichra Oren nodded. “If it turns out to be necessary. That grave responsibility—the honor and the burden—was given to me, in the very moment of his death, by my mentor in p’Nan debt assessment, Elyodruthrananocris. It had been handed down to him by his own mentor, and so on and so on. The point is, Misterthoggosh, this line of p’Na of which he and I have been a part, first saw service in the Great Restitution.”
“Formidable. I knew your mentor Elyodruthrananocris well and I honor his memory. His passing was a great loss to all of us—by proxy, I attended the ceremonial Breaking of his Sword—and the action that you took to balance the moral account is the stuff of legends.”
Eichra Oren shook his head. “I did as I was educated to do, no more.”
“That is all I would have you do in this instance as well. Be my technical advisor on ethical matters as the enterprise unfolds. Are you interested in learning the entire truth, or is your current case load—”
“I’m certainly interested.” He didn’t hesitate. “However there is a client whom I will have to persuade that this is a satisfactory resolution.”
“Hyppod Zart of the Famensed Tanoh. I thought you’d say that. An ethical being avoids a conflict of interests. I couldn’t allow myself to transact business with you otherwise. Will you have some more beer?”
There was more than one chore we were obliged to attend to before we could depart for the bright lights of the big city. This one had to do with the exact opposite of those things, bright lights and the big city.
Eichra Oren felt an ethical obligation—rightfully so, I thought—to explain to our most recent clients exactly why he now proposed to go to work for the very individual whose suspicious activities they were paying him lavishly to investigate. Slice it though you might, it still smelled pretty cheesy to me. I was interested in what he would say.
It was well after dark before we could get to it. Otherwise, we would never have been meeting with Hyppod Zart of the Famensed Tanoh, Burrowmaster of the Investment Warren of Greater Kiflivopuws, outdoors.
“Please, my friends,” the big furry mole-descendant almost begged us, his nose tentacles waving around like an octopus who’s had one too many espressos. I didn’t know whether it was with excitement or just frustration. Somewhere in the great distance I could hear a night-bird singing.
Or maybe it was just a sponge.
We stood outside of a low building where Hyppod had agreed to meet us. The building was mostly constructed of glass, and it was entirely surrounded by rolling meadows we couldn’t see very well at the moment. Hyppod himself was dressed in what I will swear to the end of my days was the silliest outfit I have ever seen in my life. “It’s the latest thing, I tell you! The very height of energetic sportiness! Kindly allow me to rent you each a bag of propellers, and we will play it together!
I shook my head. “I can’t do it, Hyppod, thanks—no thumbs.”
Not having thumbs himself, he was momentarily puzzled, then: “Ah, yes, I see. That would be a drawback.” Happily enough, although it was a moonless night, there were no lights on the grounds, and my boss and I were seeing by a slight light-amplification factor built surgically into our eyes, Hyppod was wearing dark-tinted glasses. “Sirius, you know,” he tried to explain. “It’s exceptionally bright this time of year.”
The Dog Star. And here I’d just thought it was the sartorial ambience that was blinding him. Hyppod wore baggy trousers, cut short and gathered at the knees of his bowed and stubby little legs. The things were plaid, a sort of fluorescent orange set against a sort of iridescent green. The fellow’s knee-length stockings, by criminal contrast, were a brilliant yellow that almost matched the shirt he was wearing. Over the shirt, he affected a brilliant robin’s-egg blue sweater vest. The whole ensemble was topped off with a little purple hat.
Snap-brimmed.
“If you don’t mind, Hyppod,” Eichra Oren was in a hurry to get this interview over with so we could head north for a couple of days. I was looking forward to it, as well, but was also kind of horribly fascinated with whatever our client would do next. “I think we’ll just walk around with you for a while and watch you play. We need to talk business.”
“Very well, Eichra Oren, but you don’t know what you’re missing! It’s given me an entirely different outlook. Since I started playing, I’ve spent more time outdoors than I did in my whole life, before this.”
“This” turned out to be a game called “golf”, although, after watching it played, I believed it was spelled backwards. Somebody—I don’t know if it was the mole people—had seen it being demonstrated endlessly on hundreds and hundreds of imported entertainment channels, and had decided to try it here, on the Elders’ world. The object, apparently, was to hit a little ball around a gigantic lawn until it goes into one of several holes bored into it. Emphasis on the word “bored”.
To make it even more challenging, Hyppod’s people liked playing golf—they didn’t have much choice, actually—at night, in the dark. Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry when somebody hollers “Fore!”
“Let me do this first, then we’ll walk and talk.” Hyppod stood on a designated spot, pushed a small plastic peg into the soil, and set a ball on it. Turning to a wheeled cylinder full of “propellers” behind him, all of them with very peculiarly-shaped ends, he selected one—I saw no particular reason for choosing it over the others; maybe it was a sentimental favorite—wrapped several of his nose-tentacles around its leather handle, bent over a little, and swung hard at the ball.
The stick connected, and as the ball hurtled away, it made a hideous shrieking noise until it abruptly stopped. I gathered there were holes drilled in it for that purpose. The Famensed Tanoh may not be able to see very well, but they can hear even better than I do. Hyppod put his golfing appliance away with all the others, seized the cylinder’s handle, and started off toward where he’d last heard the ball.
As we moved to follow him, the great and graceful martial artist Eichra Oren stumbled over the edge of the sidewalk and cursed. He muttered something impolite about Hyppod’s species, but I’ve since learned that human beings play this game in the snow with orange balls.
Eventually, starting and stopping along the way as Hyppod found his silly ball each time and struck it, screaming, toward its even sillier objective, Eichra Oren explained what had happened so far in his investigation of Misterthoggosh. Once he got around to the old cephalopod offering him employment—in view of the conflict of interests it obviously involved—the human offered to resign his commission and return the retainer that the Famensed Tanoh had paid him.
Potato soup tonight, I thought. I hate potato soup.
Hyppod had been about to bat the ball away, again, and seemed deeply concerned with a bed of sand that, for some reason, had been left at one side of the course, and a small pond that lay on the other side. Now he put his flogger away in its bag and turned toward my boss.
“I don’t see why that should be necessary, Eichra Oren.”
“Why not?” I was curious.
“Are you planning to help Misterthoggosh do something dishonest or unethical? Or is it your plan to stop him if he tries something like that?” Taking up his stick again, the underground mammal grunted a little as he tried to drive the ball a couple of hundred yards between the sand and sea, but in the process curved it into a deeply wooded plot.
“The latter, of course,” my boss replied. “But—”
The fellow pressed on, both with his game and his theory. “If you had accepted a
job from him so that you could clandestinely observe him for us, would you accept what he paid you, as well as what we pay you?”
The ethical debt assessor shrugged. “I hadn’t thought about it, to be truthful. I suppose that I would, if only for the sake of staying undercover.”
Having found his ball among the trees, Hyppod turned to him. “Then you have the distinction of being our world’s first overcover agent. According to Misterthoggosh, we’re both after the same thing. So we are both paying you to assure that we get it. I see no conflict of interests.”
He hit the ball, which bounced off one tree, then another, and struck him on the head. By that time, I was hiding behind a big rock. Hyppod sat down on the ground abruptly, rubbing his noggin with a tentacle. “I’m starting to believe,” he told us, “this is a stupid game.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Semlohcolresh
THERE STILL REMAINED CERTAIN “SECRETS OF A PROPRIETARY character” Misterthoggosh hadn’t let us in on—absolutely wouldn’t let us in on—he explained without really explaining at all, having little to do with business at hand. Pay no attention to the cephalopod behind the curtain.
“Briefly,” the great mollusc had told us over his third or fourth baggie of beer, “I am indeed mounting the great expedition that you ingeniously inferred from so little information. Even now, I am in the process of enlisting scientists, engineers, investors, for the purpose of studying one particular asteroid, in one particular alternative reality.”
Eichra Oren said, “There’s more. What is it?”
The nautiloid generated a noise as if he were sighing. “Highly astute. Very well, it happens to be the same reality—I believe it to be a coincidence—from which your own mother’s people were Appropriated so very long ago.” The mollusc didn’t vocalize through his breathing siphon—his “voice” had nothing to do with respiration—but he had a huge library of mammalian sounds at his disposal, and almost certainly a collection grunts and clicks for talking to other species, as well. Spiders, sea scorpions, and dinosauroids come to mind.
“Fifteen thousand years doesn’t seem that long to Eneri Relda,” Eichra Oren replied. “And I wouldn’t be that confident. I distrust coincidences.” Eichra Oren was speaking for me in that respect, as well.
“Ordinarily, so do I,” replied the mollusc. “However I have investigated the matter as thoroughly as one may at this remove, and lacking the powers of observation and deduction for which you are renowned.”
“And…?”
“And the body in question is small, under the average as asteroids go, completely airless, very cold, and, quite naturally, uninhabited. Thus, by the by, there can be no question of my Appropriating anybody, even if I were capable of such a distasteful moral breach, which I assure you emphatically I am not, because there isn’t anybody there to Appropriate.”
Misterthoggosh got himself another beer and offered one to Eichra Oren who accepted. I had begun to regret turning the second one down, but Aelbraugh Pritsch appeared at that moment, and I corrected my error.
“However,” Misterthoggosh continued, “I appear to have digressed. As I have indicated, although that version of Earth is inhabited, its dominant species—your species, sir—is momentarily incapable of reaching their own Asteroid Belt and asserting a claim to anything there.”
“I would have thought, said Eichra Oren, “after fifteen thousand years—”
“Some years ago, they were able to send out primitive unbeinged remote sensing machinery, but, regrettably, at the present instance they have succumbed once again, like so many others, to the vice of collectivism. They are consequently suffering an abyssal economic depression and subsequent loss of technical capabilities, both of which are in every possible manner of speaking quite unnecessary and entirely self-inflicted. Moreover, it is a situation from which, at least at this point, they are highly unlikely ever to extricate themselves.
“That bad,” I offered.
“You jest, Sam. But it presages the end of the current wave of civilization, and quite possibly the extinction of that branch of the species.”
A real conversation-stopper. But: “And you know this because…”
“D.L.O.,” the mollusc said, as if he were proud of it. Making up acronyms was mostly a human hobby. “‘Dirigible Loci of Observation’. Only seldom seen by those we are observing, and whenever they are, invariably dismissed as angels, demons, chariots of the gods, or ‘unidentified flying objects’, although in fact, they are no more substantial or real than a spot of light on a wall coming from a hand torch.”
“‘Unlikely to extricate themselves’,” Eichra Oren mused. “Meaning titanic dislocations, mass starvation, and if these people possess the technology, ultimately thermonuclear war.” We were both aware that many Earths that the Elders had probed were lifeless and radioactive precisely for this kind of reason, or sometimes murdered by artificial plagues. The only cheerful aspect—if you want to call it that—being that it wasn’t just H. sapiens who had done it to themselves, but a great many other species, as well. Sapient individuals aren’t naturally warlike, and they don’t start wars—governments are, and do.
“I assure you, sir, they do have that technology firmly in hand. Destruction is always easier than creation; that’s the greatest of the tragic truths of sapient existence. They can’t cure the common cold, or cancer of the literal, medical variety, nor of the metaphorical variety—”
“War is the invariable, inevitable legacy of all authority. And you—”
“And we must stand aside and permit them to fashion their own outcome, no matter how painful it may be for us to do so. It is theirs and theirs alone, my young friends, to trek across the vast Forge of Adversity on their own, to pit their intelligence, their skills, their luck, indeed, their very will to live, against the deadly fall of the Hammer.”
The Elders would be the first to tell you that there’s nothing that makes them superior to any other sapient beings. They’re just a lot older, and, in their view. that’s given them time to make a lot more mistakes. In their culture’s terms, they’ve been out there on the Forge and struck by the Hammer more often than anybody else they know of.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, they learned—several times, and invariably the hard way—that whenever you try to help somebody, there’s a much greater probability that you’ll ruin him rather than do him any good. It’s an ugly truth, but there’s absolutely no evading it. Beings who become dependent on others never get the opportunity to evolve, but they tend to devolve, instead. That’s why it’s vitally important, whenever somebody does you a favor, to return it in full, as quickly as possible, so that you won’t become dependent. Most civilizations—and species—never last long enough to learn that lesson.
“In any case,” said Misterthoggosh, attempting to return to the point, “we will not be interfering with these people, nor they with us.”
Eichra Oren looked him in the eye. It greatly resembled the planet Mercury, peering into Jupiter. “And you’re just interested in this one asteroid.”
“Yes, I’m just interested in this one asteroid. Nothing else.”
“And you won’t tell us why.” He sat back, taking a big draw on his beer.
“I cannot tell you why, Eichra Oren. I have my investors to consider—your esteemed mother among them—and they all quite reasonably demand that this ambitious undertaking be kept closely confidential.”
Maybe, I thought, the boss could ask his mother about it. On the other hand, if you checked a reference source for correct parental attitudes under the Forge and Hammer doctrine, you’d probably find an illustration of Eneri Relda telling her favorite son to find out for himself.
“Okay, then,” I said. It was the second time I’d spoken. Might as well live up to all this partner stuff. “What do you need with us?” I resisted scratching behind one ear with a back foot. Somehow it seemed unprofessional.
“An excellent question, Sam. It would appear that some ne
ws of our adventure has leaked out. You told me so yourself, Eichra Oren. And now I believe that someone is trying to obstruct it—perhaps this whispering campaign about Appropriated Persons is a part of such an attempt.”
Eichra Oren nodded. “And what else?”
“Sabotage, unexplained and unlikely accidents, anonymous attempts to intimidate my best personnel. Activities involving space travel are dangerous enough—” I actually saw him shudder; a species that show no fear of the Great Deep (which personally gives me the willies) have an almost paralyzing terror of the vast empty volume of outer space. “—without someone deliberately damaging equipment and making wrong adjustments.”
“And you want Sam and me to go find out who’s doing it and stop them.”
“Or him. Or her. Or it. Yes, I do, indeed.”
Eichra Oren nodded. “In that case, maybe you can tell us what you know about this…” He let the nautiloid see a brief snippet of poor Ray’s memories of the alien creatures that had attacked and murdered him, almost featureless faces set with a pair of gigantic, black, oval eyes.
Misterthoggosh was quiet for a long time. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep—if nautiloids sleep. Then he said, “I believe you’d better go see an old friend of mine who presently makes his home in Lanternlight.”
Semlohcolresh was that very rarest of eccentric individuals, a landlocked nautiloid, choosing to dwell more than a hundred miles up a freshwater river from the ocean in which he and his fellow Elders had evolved.
It would be as if Eichra Oren and I, for some reason, had elected to keep our home and office in a bubble at the bottom of the Inland Sea. Lamplight is an enchanting city, to be sure. But I don’t think the old mollusc was in much of a position to appreciate that aspect of it.
Having arrived at the restaurant within a couple minutes of Eichra Oren’s call, Scutigera stretched his many legs and carried us swiftly, all the way across the river to what appeared to be a small park. It was on a corner lot, bordered on all sides with a stone fence that was too tall for me to see over (which isn’t saying much), just waist-high to Eichra Oren. There were wide openings to the pair of intersecting streets, with short square columns on either side, made of the same kind of stone, each with a carved stone ball at the top, sitting on a pyramid.