“You and your co-investors weren’t given all the pertinent facts when you signed that contract. Now you know more, and your obligation as a professional advocate is to protect the interests of your fellow investors.” He didn’t actually say “professional advocate”, but used a one-word term in the fellow’s own language that described a position almost as complicated as the one he occupied himself, as a p’Nan Debt Assessor.
The guy mulled it over. I’d have expected him to retort that his obligations as a professional advocate were none of Eichra Oren’s damn business, but the being was neither human nor canine, so all bets were off.
“What you say is true enough…” the fellow began.
Evolution is a funny thing. I suppose to someone like one of those flower folks, or a mollusc like Misterthoggosh, all mammals must seem pretty much alike—fast, furry, bi- or quadrupedal, filled to the brim with smoking hot red blood—though my ancient ancestors were wolves, the boss descends from a long line of monkeys (I love thinking about that), and the person sitting before us now was…I’ll get to him in just a minute. In the end, we all come from Permian-era animals called cynodonts that actually preceded the dinosaurs that they ended up skittering away and hiding from for the next couple hundred million years.
As for the creature whose office this was—a member of a species that called itself Famensed Tanoh—he reminded me of nothing so much as the so-called star-nosed mole. Unlike his probable ancestors, he was very large, at least two heads taller than Eichra Oren, even sitting down behind a big desk of vegetable ivory, beautifully inlaid with decorative strips of mahogany. As broad as two Eichra Orens, he was covered with thick short fur, rather like a seal’s. I couldn’t see the lower half of his body; the upper half was startling, to say the least.
To begin with, his front legs or arms or whatever looked like they hadn’t come to work today with the rest of him, but had stayed home sick. They were tiny, vestigial, like those of a Tyrannosaurus, two pairs of claws held before him on his chest, not unlike that of a begging puppy.
Other features made them difficult to see. Nobody knows what T. Rex’s front limbs were for; they were too short for anything, even to groom his teeth. But this worthy whose name was Hyppod Zart, didn’t suffer any lack of manipulative ability. Below his eyes, surrounding his nose, he sported eleven pairs (I consulted my implant record later) of…well, call them tentacles, somewhere between two and three feet long. It says here they evolved from shorter but similar organs of touch and smell among his presapient ancestors, to become a bizarre sort of compromise between an elephant’s trunk and humanoid hands.
Hyppod (it was his surname) expressed grave trepidations—that’s what wildly-flailing tentacles were supposed to mean—with regard to what Eichra Oren was asking him to do. My boss had briefed me on the way here, and we’d expected nothing less. The Famensed Tanoh are a naturally trepidatious people for whom to reach out for something is exactly the same as thrusting your face—and the eyes and brain that lie directly behind it—straight into whatever it is you’re curious about.
As a direct evolutionary consequence (one theory, anyway—mine) they are not great innovators or inventors. Most of them live quietly and conservatively, happy to avoid changes and other forms of excitement. I’d read that half of them had died from the shock of Appropriation.
And yet, the highly circumspect Hyppod and the large consortium of Famensed Tanoh of which he was the Chairman (okay, his actual title in Famensed Tanohian, or whatever, was more like “Burrowmaster of the Investment Warren of Greater Kiflivopuws”), were among the heaviest financial angels of whatever mischief Misterthoggosh happened to be up to.
“Look at it this way,” Eichra Oren told Hyppod. “If this project turns out the way I think it may, and you and your associates withhold vital information about it, you could all be helping to accrue one of the greatest moral debts in the history of sapience, with concomitant economic consequences that could easily prove impossible to recover from.”
If Hyppod had been wearing a collar, and had possessed fingers, he would have nervously stuck one of the latter into the former to loosen it. He tilted his head forward a few degrees and ran his tentacles through his vestigial claws. So that’s what they were for: tentacle grooming.
“Yes, well, er…” He squinted at the boss. I don’t think the Famensed Tanoh could see very well, although this one was wearing spectacles.
“Exactly,” said Eichra Oren, brightening, and pretending to have extracted meaning from all that mumble. “On the other hand, if you help me, you may even be able to get your money back. Some of it, anyway.”
The boss knew when he’d gotten as far as he could for the nonce. He rose. I hopped down to the floor. “You think it over, Hyppod. Talk with your co-investors.” In groups, they were even more risk-averse. “I’ll get back to you in a few days—provided we have enough time left.”
Our next stop, as it turned out, was home. The veek knew the way from long-established habit. I hardly had anything to do. Eichra Oren took his samples to a small but well-equipped laboratory he maintains on the ground level. I lay on the ivory floor outside the door where I could watch and listen to him work as I perused the data networks via implant.
I was looking for publicly accessible knowledge with regard to the Elder Misterthoggosh. The records were dismayingly sparse, but then I’d expected that. The Elders—and everybody who grows up around them, in their world—have a strong tendency to value their personal and business privacy more than almost anything, except for freedom itself.
There were no vast administrative archives, for example, of unique biological markers—DNA, fingerprints, tentacle patterns, retinal photographs, voice comparisons, brain waves—like those I’ve heard about in other civilizations. Not only was there nobody to do it, the merest attempt to create one would have been met with immediate violence and, if absolutely necessary, bloodshed, which represents a formidable threat among beings who commonly live for thousands of years.
But aside from general principles involving privacy and freedom, the Elders have their own special reasons, rooted in their peculiar biology.
And I agree with them.
Half a billion years ago, in what cultures in some universes call the Cambrian period, the first nautiloids made their appearance upon the Forge of Adversity—the cruel world we live in, that strengthens us while it does its best to kill us. For some reason peculiar to only a small handful of alternative realities, these creatures—simple but promising marine molluscs resembling a squid in an ice cream cone—evolved relatively quickly into the giants they are today, with enormous coiled shells, long tentacles, and exceptionally powerful minds.
Nautiloids have a great deal in common anatomically with ammonites—fossil critters killed off in most universes when the Hammer came down sixty-five million years ago—which they closely resemble, as well as with various squid and octopi, to whom they are also related. One thing they have in common with the octopus was—and remains to this day—the peculiar and unlikely manner in which they “make love”.
When a male and female Elder “get together”, they may not even be in the same room. Or in the same town. Instead…now how can this be put delicately? The male mollusc does something that Eichra Oren says his mother’s contemporaries used to tell their male offspring would make them go blind—or grow hair on their palms. (Although if they were blind, then they couldn’t see the hair on their palms, so why worry about it? And maybe they could only do it until they needed glasses.)
But I digress.
The Elders and their evolutionary relatives (I refrain from saying “on the other hand”) then do something even weirder. The tentacle in which they’ve…well, let’s say, “invested their hopes”, is a very special one, capable of separating itself from their bodies. I’m told that it doesn’t hurt, but quite the contrary, is the equivalent of…well, never mind. It then swims to the lady, bearing his message of love.
Among their octopi re
latives, that tentacle, having achieved its all-important mission, withers and dies, and another one eventually grows back. But with the Elders, the thing swims home and reattaches itself.
Over tens of millions of years, the Elders’ precursor species, being a bit large and ponderous (although they can fill the unused portions of their shells with, well, not air, exactly, achieve neutral buoyancy, and ride around surprisingly well on a water jet), learned to control this increasingly useful separable tentacle and to dispatch it on missions that didn’t necessarily involve making more little nautiloids.
It seems they had evolved a specialized kind of cell—analogous to the specialized cells used by electric eels to fight off predators, some fish for navigational purposes, and other fish for coordinating the school they swim in—that allowed them to send instructions to their separable tentacles, and receive information back from them, as well. Organic radio, low frequency, low bandwidth—that’s what works underwater.
As with many another evolutionary advance, there are drawbacks, or at least trade-offs. Eichra Oren, lovely Lornis, and other humanoid creatures like them often experience severe back problems resulting from an erect posture that they haven’t fully evolved into yet. As they grow older, their internal organs tend to shift downward, as well.
Gravity: it’s not a pretty thing.
The Elders’ ancestors almost lost themselves as individual beings because, owing to their developing ability to guide their separable tentacles by remote control, they gradually lost whatever mental privacy they’d ever had. And yet they were by no means evolved to live within a hive-mind, like termites or ants. It looked very much like they’d encountered an evolutionary dead end. Suicide and insanity of various kinds became epidemic among them and the species nearly died out.
But then some genius managed to get himself lost, far away from his fellow molluscs, while herding squid, or whatever ancient Elders did for a living. Maybe he just fell into “dark territory” between undersea mountains. In any case, he rediscovered his privacy. Why he didn’t die right there from the shock of the experience, nobody can say. There are a lot of Elder myths and legends about the whole silly saga.
As soon as he got back, of course, all his fellow molluscs knew about his discovery After a couple of civil wars over it—between weaklings and parasites who liked mental communism and those to whom the whole idea had become repulsive—technical means were developed, beginning with homes that were Faraday cages, and with metallic…headgear for traveling, to protect one’s thoughts from one’s fellow beings.
A million years passed.
Employing what we would now call gene therapy, eventually each Elder’s communications with his separable tentacle were encoded, using his genetic pattern, and a truly individualistic civilization was born among the sapient nautiloids, ensuring peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity—as long as nobody else knows your personal secret gene code.
A couple hundred million years passed while they tried to get it right.
When the Elders discovered (or finally acknowledged) their hideous ethical mistake, in having Appropriated thousands of other sapients from alternate universes, and before the guilty parties committed suicide out of moral chagrin, they made what is still called the Great Restitution.
They couldn’t imagine getting along every day without their handy separable tentacles, so they created equivalent conveniences for those they felt they’d wronged. Dinosauroids have little lizards living in their feathers when they aren’t fetching and carrying. Marine critters like Ray (not to mention various dolphinoid species) are accompanied by pairs of nonsapient squid they use as ten-fingered hands. All of these auxiliary creatures, known as symbiotes, are communicated to and communicate back via electronics implanted in their nervous systems at birth.
I am Eichra Oren’s separable tentacle.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Test Tube Truth
“EUREKA!” CAME THE BOSS’S VOICE FROM THE OTHER ROOM.
I’d moved back into the office because I didn’t like the smells coming from the laboratory. Out here, the house got to them before they got to me and tidily did away with them somehow. Meanwhile, night had fallen, and, as some local blossoms closed and others opened, the whole character of the outdoor odors coming from both land and sea had changed completely, a phenomenon that many humanoids never seem to notice.
“Very sorry, Boss,” I quipped. “I could go take a shower.”
“Clown!” But he had said it with a chuckle.
Our only real client had called while the boss was slaving away over a hot Erlenmeyer flask. She was more interested in talking to him than to me—they always are, no matter what species they are—but I let her know that we’d been to see her fiancé’s bepetalled business partner.
I didn’t mention the partner collapsing while we were talking to him, although it was probably all over the public networks by now. Still, we had nothing to indicate whether it was relevant to the case or not. Nor did I mention we were planning to see the fiancé’s family tomorrow. I never like to tell a client what I’m going to do. Plans change, and simple things can get complicated when you try to explain them.
My educated guess, which I did not share with the client was that Meerltchirt of the Fronzeln Zirnaath’s family was simply hiding him out somewhere, and we’d be finished with this case sometime tomorrow. Or maybe he had already skedaddled (a splendid expression I’d heard, courtesy of Misterthoggosh and company, on a video broadcast from some other universe and liked) and we would never actually be through with the case, and have to be satisfied with getting reimbursed for our expenses.
No way to run a business, at all.
Despite good transportation and even better communication, it’s still a great big world out there. To begin with, there are five whole other continents—the one directly to the south of us across the Inland Sea, the pair across the Lesser Ocean, the one toward the south of the Greater Ocean, and the frozen one at the bottom of the planet, where Eichra Oren and his folks had come from in an alternate reality. They’re all smaller than the really big continent we happen to live on, on a giant peninsula, way down in the southwestern corner. We also had an appointment tomorrow with Ray, of Ray’s Salvage, who was going to show us what he’d found where Eichra Oren had shot that missile-slinging flyer down. I kept expecting moral repercussions—somebody else’s p’Nan debt assessor swinging his sword our way—but so far, at least, nobody had inquired, which struck me as extremely strange.
“Eureka? No, not you, Sam.” Eichra Oren stood in the doorway, his face-protecting visor tilted back, stripping off his thin, translucent gloves so they finished inside-out. “Although, the individual most famous for having said it was sitting in a bathtub at the time. It’s a word from my own universe, spoken in an ancient human Successor Tongue from a period in which mathematics and science were being slowly rediscovered after the world turned upside-down and the Continent was Lost.”
“Epic,” I said sarcastically. “And it means?”
“It means, ‘I have found it!’”
That rang a bell—or tweaked a synapse. “Good old Archimedes of Syracuse. I remember now. I’ve watched several of Misterthoggosh’s imported videos about that guy. Some historians believe that he invented a death ray. If he did, he should have used it on that Roman soldier and then gotten back to his work. And what is it that you’ve found?”
Eichra Oren took his visor off, handling it with the gloves, then wiped sweat off on a sleeve from where the headband had been. Not good laboratory procedure. Sometimes I wished that I could sweat like humans. He then removed his lab smock, bundled it with the other gear and tossed it at a chute, where the house would clean what could be cleaned and recycle the rest. Finally, he threw himself down, not into his desk chair, but onto a sofa under a window. He let the house bring him a drink through the arm of the couch, and indulged in his one rare vice, lighting a cigar.
Our cerebrocortical implants, both of them, chose
that precise moment to go off inside our respective heads. It’s never a comfortable feeling. Apparently the mole investor’s “a few days” had somehow been shrunk to a few hours. As I hopped up into Eichra Oren’s desk chair and assented to answer the call, an image of the caller formed in my mind.
“Hullo,” he said, mentally squinting at my image in his head. The custom, whenever possible, was to look at yourself in a mirror as you talked, so the other party could see what you saw. Most desks, and some other furniture, were appropriately equipped with mirrors that folded away.
In his image, his eyes were so tiny that they would almost have been invisible if it hadn’t been for the bottle-thick spectacles he wore. The Famensed Tanoh senses of smell, taste, and touch are famously unrivalled among this reality’s Appropriated Persons, but their unassisted vision is virtually worthless. I wondered if the creature was somehow smelling, tasting, or touching me through his electronic communication system. The thought of it gave me cold chills.
“Hyppod Zart, here,” the strange being reintroduced himself unnecessarily. His voice seemed more cheerful than might have been expected, but his face tentacles or nose trunks or whatever writhed in a way, or so my implant advised me, that in his species betrayed great nervousness. “Burrowmaster of the Investment Warren of Greater Kiflivopuws. I assume that I am addressing Eichra Oren, the p’Navian Assessor?”
So in addition to being nearly blind—his use of a mirror was a courtesy—he couldn’t smell or taste or touch remotely, after all. A relief, although I wondered exactly what he was getting out of this conversation. The species’ hearing seemed to be okay, which made sense.
“No, sir, Mr. Hyppod, sir. You’re addressing his trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent assistant, Oasam Otusam.” I had no idea where all that came from; something about these people—or maybe it was just him—inexplicably seemed to put me on edge. I glanced over to where Eichra Oren was sitting, in lurk mode, watching and listening, without mirror. He nodded at me, so I went on. “Eichra Oren is indisposed at the moment. Is there some way that I may be of help?”