Pawn's Gambit: And Other Stratagems

  “Oh, great. What sort of problems will I have more of?”

  “Nothing major. You might have balance difficulties for a while, and you’ll likely have a mild migraine or two within the next couple of weeks. But indications are that all of it is very temporary.”

  I looked back at Alana. “Four days. We’ll need to set up our last calibration run soon.”

  “All taken care of,” she assured me. “We’re turning around later today to get our velocity vector pointing back toward Taimyr again, and we’ll be able to do the run tomorrow.”

  “Who’s going to handle it?”

  “Who do you think?” she snorted. “Rik, Lanton, and me, with maybe some help from Pascal.”

  I’d known that answer was coming, but it still made my mouth go dry. “No way,” I told her, struggling to sit up. “You aren’t going to go through this hell. I can manage—”

  “Ease up, Pall,” Alana interrupted me. “Weren’t you paying attention? The real angle doesn’t drift when the Ming metal is moved, and that means we can shut down the field generator while I’m taking the coil from here to One Hold again.”

  I sank back onto the bed, feeling foolish. “Oh. Right.”

  Getting to her feet, Alana came over to me and patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said in a kinder tone. “We’ve got things under control. You’ve done the hard part; just relax and let us do the rest.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, trying to hide my misgivings.

  It was just as well that I did. Thirty-eight hours later Alana used our last gram of fuel in a flawless bit of flying that put us into a deep Earth orbit. The patrol boats that had responded to her emergency signal were waiting there, loaded with the fuel we would need to land.

  Six hours after that, we were home.

  They checked me into a hospital, just to be on the safe side, and the next four days were filled with a flurry of tests, medical interviews, and bumpy wheelchair rides. Surprisingly—to me, anyway—I was also nailed by two media types who wanted the more traditional type of interview. Apparently, the Dancer’s trip to elsewhere and back was getting a fair amount of publicity. Just how widespread the coverage was, though, I didn’t realize until my last day there, when an official-looking CompNote was delivered to my room.

  It was from Lord Hendrik.

  I snapped the sealer and unfolded the paper. The first couple of paragraphs—the greetings, congratulations on my safe return, and such—I skipped over quickly, my eyes zeroing in on the business portion of the letter:

  As you may or may not know, I have recently come out of semiretirement to serve on the Board of Directors of TranStar Enterprises, headquartered here in Nairobi. With excellent contacts both in Africa and in the so-called Black Colony chain, our passenger load is expanding rapidly, and we are constantly on the search for experienced and resourceful pilots we can entrust them to. The news reports of your recent close call brought you to my mind again after all these years, and I thought you might be interested in discussing—

  A knock on the door interrupted my reading. “Come in,” I called, looking up.

  It was Alana. “Hi, Pall, how are you doing?” she asked, walking over to the bed and giving me a brief once-over. In one hand she carried a slender plastic portfolio.

  “Bored silly,” I told her. “I think I’m about ready to check out—they’ve finished all the standard tests without finding anything, and I’m tired of lying around while they dream up new ones.”

  “What a shame,” she said with mock sorrow. “And after I brought you all this reading material, too.” She hefted the portfolio.

  “What is it, your resignation?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light. There was no point making this any more painful for either of us than necessary.

  But she just frowned. “Don’t be silly. It’s a whole batch of new contracts I’ve picked up for us in the past few days. Some really good ones, too, from name corporations. I think people are starting to see what a really good carrier we are.”

  I snorted. “Aside from the thirty-six or whatever penalty clauses we invoked on this trip?”

  “Oh, that’s all in here too. The Swedish Institute’s not even going to put up a fight—they’re paying off everything, including your hospital bills and the patrol’s rescue fee. Probably figured Lanton’s glitch was going to make them look bad enough without them trying to chisel us out of damages too.” She hesitated, and an odd expression flickered across her face. “Were you really expecting me to jump ship?”

  “I was about eighty percent sure,” I said, fudging my estimate down about nineteen points. “After all, this is where Rik Bradley’s going to be, and you … rather like him. Don’t you?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know what I feel for him, to be perfectly honest. I like him, sure—like him a lot. But my life’s out there”—she gestured skyward—“and I don’t think I can give that up for anyone. At least, not for him.”

  “You could take a leave of absence,” I told her, feeling like a prize fool but determined to give her every possible option. “Maybe once you spend some real time on a planet, you’d find you like it.”

  “And maybe I wouldn’t,” she countered. “And when I decided I’d had enough, where would the Dancer be? Probably nowhere I’d ever be able to get to you.” She looked me straight in the eye and all traces of levity vanished from her voice. “Like I told you once before, Pall, I can’t afford to lose any of my friends.”

  I took a deep breath and carefully let it out. “Well. I guess that’s all settled. Good. Now, if you’ll be kind enough to tell the nurse out by the monitor station that I’m signing out, I’ll get dressed and we’ll get back to the ship.”

  “Great. It’ll be good to have you back.” Smiling, she disappeared out into the corridor.

  Carefully, I got my clothes out of the closet and began putting them on, an odd mixture of victory and defeat settling into my stomach. Alana was staying with the Dancer, which was certainly what I’d wanted … and yet, I couldn’t help but feel that in some ways her decision was more a default than a real, active choice. Was she coming back because she wanted to, or merely because we were a safer course than the set of unknowns that Bradley offered? If the latter, it was clear that her old burns weren’t entirely healed; that she still had a ways—maybe a long ways—to go. But that was all right. I may not have the talent she did for healing bruised souls, but if time and distance were what she needed, the Dancer and I could supply her with both.

  I was just sealing my boots when Alana returned. “Finished? Good. They’re getting your release ready, so let’s go. Don’t forget your letter,” she added, pointing at Lord Hendrik’s CompNote.

  “This? It’s nothing,” I told her, crumpling it up and tossing it toward the wastebasket. “Just some junk mail from an old admirer.”

  Six months later, on our third point out from Prima, a new image of myself in liner captain’s white appeared in my cascade pattern. I looked at it long and hard … and then did something I’d never done before for such an image.

  I wished it lots of luck.

  Music Hath Charms

  “Oh, look, Jaivy! Spars and his Demonflute are on the news!”

  I sighed and poked one eye over my filmreader. Eleni, almost bouncing in her excitement, was pointing at the screen. Sure enough, there was Spars, dressed to the hilt in the standard colander haircut, body paint, and idiot grin of a Thwokerjag performer—a look, I’d often thought, probably attained by dressing quickly in a dark swamp. Clutched in his hand was that monstrosity of an instrument he’d dug out of some ruins on Algol VI a month ago. “I still say it looks more like a clarinet,” I commented, focusing on the Demonflute as the more photogenic of the two. A clarinet, that is, with a lopsided bulge in the middle, a strangely shaped and oversized flare at the end, a truly terrifying key arrangement—well, anyway, it looked even less li
ke a flute.

  “No one cares what it looks like,” Eleni chided, her eyes still glued to the screen. “It’s the neat sound that’s gonna start Thwokerjag zooming again.”

  “You’ve heard it?” I asked, ignoring for the moment the musical tragedy that a Thwokerjag renaissance would signify.

  “Sure—he was practicing downstairs when I went over to see Ryla yesterday. It sounds kind of like a chirper, only shriller. I’ll bet it’ll really knurl the neurons when he plays it with the amp tonight at Moiy’s. I still think you could’ve gotten us tickets if you’d tried.”

  “Starguard preserve us,” I muttered. “A shrill chirper and some idiot sold him an amplifier to go with it? Aren’t there laws against abetting physical assault?”

  “The amplifier’s built in,” she said, ignoring the dig. “It’s in that bulge in the middle—that’s what makes it so heavy. You don’t have to plug it in, either—Ryla said it pulls energy from cosmic radiation or somewhere. Neat, huh?”

  “Very.” My half-formed fantasy of protecting the city by knocking out its power stations slid off into oblivion.

  Spars had been replaced on the screen by someone else, and Eleni turned the full force of her Patient But Annoyed expression on me. “Y’know, I really don’t understand how you could have spent your whole life here without at least being willing to give Thwokerjag a try. I mean, it all started here.”

  It had indeed; and it had singlehandedly raised Haruspex from total obscurity to a status of genuine distaste among music lovers throughout the galaxy. From here Thwokerjag had swept outward to the other worlds of the Great Republic, inciting whole teenage populations as no other movement before it. For a while it had looked like it might bury even Neodisco beneath its onslaught … but even as sheer size slowed its momentum an unexpected resurgence of Classical Impressionistic Rock dealt it a blow that had ultimately proved its undoing. Now, only on Haruspex was Thwokerjag the dominant musical force, and even here a more classically oriented person like myself could find concerts and records that suited my taste.

  One eventually got used to feeling like a fifth columnist.

  “I appreciate your patience with me,” I told Eleni, hoping the implication that I might convert someday would sidetrack the otherwise inevitable argument-cum-recruitment pitch. “If you’re finished with the news, why don’t we grab the trans and go downtown for dinner?”

  “Sure. Let’s eat at Moiy’s.”

  “You don’t give up, do you? Anyway, I told you before that I couldn’t get tickets.” I passed up the obvious comment that if she were as well glommed onto the fringes of Spar’s group as she thought she was, a brace of free tickets ought to have been forthcoming.

  She sighed theatrically and got her coat, and a few minutes later we were on the inbound trans. As we sat there I found my mind drifting toward the Demonflute. The name itself, I guessed, was a product of Algol’s “Demon Star” nickname and Spars’s limited imagination. As far as I knew it was the first musical instrument of alien design ever found, and while I deplored the use it was about to be put to, that was hardly its fault. “Ele, you didn’t by any chance get to see the Demonflute up close, did you?”

  Eleni turned from her contemplation of the holo-ad drifting past our noses. “Sure. Spars let me hold it, even.”

  So she was deeper into Spars’s friendstack than I’d thought. My opinion of the group went down one more notch: no free tickets for anyone, apparently, when a concert looked to turn a profit. “Can you describe it for me?”

  “It’s about yi by yi,” she said, indicating sizes with her hands, “with a sort of flat mouthpiece and eighteen separate keys. The end—the far end, I mean—swivels a little, probably so you can change how you’re holding it and still point the music at the audience. Um … it’s made of a coppery sort of metal with some neat curlicue engraving down one side. Spars says it’s at least three hundred years old, and that it says a lot about Algolite technology that the amp is still working.”

  And the fact that they’d made a gadget that sounded like a shrill chirper said a lot about their musical tastes, too, I told myself silently. No wonder the race had died off.

  But I didn’t care nearly as much about the late denizens of Algol VI as I did about what the Demonflute was going to do for Thwokerjag. I wasn’t all that well-versed in musicology, but I did know that new instruments had often revitalized movements that were supposedly on the decline. Until Classical Rock or Canton-Nadir could adapt the Demonflute to their own music, Thwokerjag would have the edge in impressing the pocket change out of the billions of novelty-­seekers out there. Of course, if someone started duplicating Demonflutes fast enough the power balance would remain essentially unchanged—

  That is, if anyone could duplicate the thing. For all I knew, the Demonflute could have a tone/texture mix that even the best synthesizer couldn’t handle.

  A unique instrument in the hands of Spars and Thwokerjag. It gave me cold chills just to think of it.

  The passageway door ahead opened and one of the security guards strolled through, eyes alert for trouble. I winced slightly as he passed me and the flared nozzle of the Peacekeeper in his belt almost brushed my ear. Call me paranoid, but I’ve never liked the idea of some overeager junior lawman being able to turn my legs to putty with instant subliminals. Sure it’s humane, but I prefer to know when someone’s telling me to stop or—

  My trans of thought froze on its rail. Turning quickly, I got one more look at the guard before he left the car. There was no mistake: the nozzle of his Peacekeeper looked exactly like the flared end of the Demonflute.

  Eleni was looking at me questioningly. “Ele,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “why did Spars conclude the Demonflute was a musical instrument?”

  Her eyebrows lifted a fraction. “Because when you blow into it music comes out?” she suggested, obviously waiting for a punchline.

  I shook my head. “Not necessarily. Sound comes out, all right. But sound comes out of lots of things.”

  She rolled her eyes skyward. “I hate it when you get all abstruse like this. What, in plain English, are you driving at?”

  “Could the Demonflute be the Algolite version of a Peacekeeper?”

  She looked at me as if I’d sheared a pin. “You mean with all that subliminal suggestive stuff? Don’t be silly. The group’s been practicing with it for a month now. Nobody’s gone frizz-brained yet.”

  “Has Spars tried it with the amp?”

  “No-o-o,” she said slowly. “They’ve checked to make sure the amp works, but I think that was all done electronically. I don’t think he actually played it during the tests.”

  “Who would build a musical instrument with a built-in, self-contained­ amplifier?” I continued. “And you said yourself it sounded like a shrill chirper. A chirper alone is already playing close to the uppersonic frequencies a Peacekeeper’s message comes in on.”

  “Wow,” she breathed. “You mean the whole audience at Moiy’s is going to be wide open to suggestion tonight? Thwokerjag really will be on the way back up.”

  “Maybe,” I said, suppressing a shudder at that idea. “But only if the uppersonic carrier is the only part still working.”

  “There’ll be interstellar tours again—what? What do you mean?”

  “A Peacekeeper doesn’t just set up a suggestive state, you know. It beams in a prerecorded capitulation message.”

  Eleni could be as dense as hullmetal when she wanted to be, but I could see by the look on her face that she’d picked up on this one fast enough. “But the Demonflute would have an Algolite message in it. What would it do to humans?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not sure I’d like to find out first-hand.”

  “We’ve got to call the cops,” she said, fumbling for her phone. “Or try to talk to Spars or—”

  I stopped her. “We haven’t got eve
n a shred of evidence,” I pointed out. “Until we do no one’s going to waste ten seconds listening to us.”

  “What kind of evidence can we possibly get?”

  “Well … you said there was some engraving on the Demonflute, right? Could it be some sort of writing?”

  “I suppose so. But I can’t even remember what it looked like.”

  “You won’t have to.” The trans was slowing down, and I took a quick look out the window to see where we were. “Come on,” I said, grabbing Eleni and hauling her all but bodily out the door.

  “This is where we get off for Moiy’s,” she said, looking around her as she rubbed her arm. “I thought you said we couldn’t tell Spars yet.”

  “We’re not going to. This way; come on.”

  The library was only two blocks from the trans station. Once inside, I pulled a copy of the newstape Eleni had been watching earlier and we ran it through a filmreader to the spot where Spars had been showing off the Demonflute. Moving the tape frame by frame, I finally found a shot that Eleni said was at the right angle to see the engraving. Jiggling the controls to keep the Demonflute centered on the screen, I ran the enlarger to its limit.

  “There,” Eleni said, pointing. “His hand’s covering about half of it, but you can see the last few squiggles.”

  “Okay. Go find us a computer terminal while I get a hard copy of this picture.”

  It took a few minutes for me to get my photo and join Eleni at a terminal. We then spent the better part of an hour programming the machine to scan the engraving in the picture and compare it to any previous data on Algol VI languages. I wasn’t sure any such information even existed, But it seemed unlikely that anyone would have let Spars poke around those ruins unless the archeologists had already been there and gone. The computer seemed to agree with my logic, informing us there would be a short wait while the proper files were located.

  I leaned back in my chair and tried to relax. It was already seven fifty-eight, my watch told me, which meant Spars was due on stage in two minutes.