The Summer Thieves

by Paul Di Filippo

  Minka mulled over this confident boast for a few seconds. “Your beliefs seem indisputable.”

  Johrun’s grandsire Xul hugged the young woman. “The true Soldevere sangfroid! I’m very pleased to see you so stable and philosophical, Minka. Now, let’s go entertain our guests!”

  When the family members exited the lodge en masse, Verano’s whispering dusk was half entrenched, unfolding a minute-by-minute evolving sky canvas of the more brilliant constellations. The Sand Whaler’s Trident seemed particularly sharp-edged tonight. The pleasant stridulations of the various kinds of leafhoppers carried across the lawns.

  The pre-wedding extravaganza scheduled for this evening consisted of an outdoor barbecue-cum-luau-cum-clambake under the benign skies. Vast colorfully brocaded rugs scattered with plump cushions and small low chabudai tables held the two-hundred-plus wedding company in relaxed postures conducive to leisurely drinking and eating and gay conversations. The cooking pits and carving stations and steam tables stood off a little ways, but not so far as to hinder the wafting of delicious odors. Diligent serving staff maintained a steady flow of drinks and platters. An informal style of eating with fingers and thin funnel breads added to the sense of careless abandon. The whole scene was lighted with just enough romantic flickering radiance from scattered torches burning aromatic oils with a rainbow of flame colors.

  As if these indulgences were not enough to create a memorable occasion, entertainment from a large company of sylphs, the Troupe of Curious Portents, added to the ambiance. The sylphs hailed from the world known as Ferngully. Each tall, attenuated individual displayed a beguiling androgyny, partially childlike, partially lamia-like. Clad in skintight suits of various harlequin patterns, they performed their intricate weaving dances either singly or in groups to the accompaniment of only tabla drums and piercing flutes. As they meandered sinuously in the midst of the diners, treading with impossible precision among dishes and extended limbs, they maintained utter silence and a supreme impassivity of their expressions that contrasted piquantly with their suggestive motions.

  Johrun and Minka were established in the center of the carpeted area, surrounded by their family and the more important of the guests, including High Serendip Eustace Tybalt, the future officiant of their vows, who seemed to have recovered from witnessing Minka’s scandalous costume at the masquerade. Although, truth be told, he did cast a skittish glance her way now and then. In fact, the status of each attendee could be precisely mapped to the seating arrangement, with the periphery hosting the least important visitors. And while Johrun was pleased to find Lutramella granted seating within the familial circle, he was less gratified to find Anders Braulio and Minka’s other classmates emplaced not much further away.

  The evening wore on in a pleasant stream of food and chatter, drink and appreciation of the exotic sylphs. Johrun began to relax and feel at ease. Even the delay necessary to firm up their title to Verano seemed surmountable.

  After several hours, Johrun felt a natural need to visit the loo. A battalion of luxurious portable units that flashed away all waste through a small brane-rifter had been established just beyond the seating area, to preclude long walks back to the lodge.rossing the carpet, Johrun stopped beside Lutramella and squatted to bring his face level with hers. They had not spoken since she had made her wake-up call that morning, a seeming eon ago, by the gauge of life-threatening activities and mind-whirling conjectures.

  The splice raised a soft paw and placed it against Johrun’s cheek. Her dark liquid eyes seemed ready to overspill. “I nearly lost you today. And I wasn’t there when you needed my help.”

  “Never believe it, dear Lu! I lead a charmed life.”

  “Splices are hardened to recognize no such immunity to fate, Joh. It’s not wise to claim that privilege.”

  Johrun took her paw away from his face and kissed it. “You’re ever the darling old worrywart, Lu. But this time your trepidations are baseless.”

  “I sincerely hope so.”

  Johrun straightened up and moved on.

  The row of toilets resembled not a tasteless utilitarian facility but rather a flock of beach cabanas, each separated from the rugs and from its neighbors by a modesty-preserving distance essential when so many cultures mixed. Each single-occupant unit was large enough to feature a small lounge chair and ablution area as well as the functional apparatus.

  Johrun pinged the nearest unit and found it vacant. With torchlight at his back, he swung wide the door and strode across the threshold before he realized he was stepping into utter darkness. The cabin’s lights were out—

  A large hand gripped his throat and a fist slammed against his head.

  He regained consciousness with a sourceless but unquestioned sense that only a second or two had passed.

  Two hands clutched one of his arms, and he felt his own hand in contact with the metal slope of the toilet bowl.

  His assailant was trying to push Johrun’s hand into the throat of the disposal mechanism. Teleportation of some important portion of his flesh to an empty multiverse awaited.

  Johrun swung his free hand up in an awkward arc, and clouted his attacker. He began to thrash about. He tried to yell, but found he could produce only a croak from his crimped throat.

  The thumping noises produced by Johrun’s frantic struggles must have unnerved the assailant, or convinced him that the possibility of an easy secret assault was gone. The fellow suddenly shoved Johrun away into a corner and dashed out the door. Johrun was in no position to see his attacker’s silhouette against the exterior illumination.

  Sore but unharmed, Johrun climbed to his feet. He used his vambrace in flashlight mode, and saw that the mechanical safety interlock on the expulsion mechanism had indeed been vaporized, as by a gun. Johrun knew that the brane rifter also featured software prohibitions against treating living human tissue in the same manner as waste, but suspected that such code, like all software, could be subverted as well.

  Johrun adjusted his appearance as well as he could, and splashed some water on his face to help regain his wits. A blast of the cabana’s antiseptic gargle, dialed up to maximum strength, soothed his throat somewhat. He used his vambrace and his Danger Acres managerial priorities to mark the unit as DISABLED and to lock the door after he exited.

  Once abreast of Lutramella, he crouched down again.

  “Did you notice if Braulio was up from his seat in the past few minutes?”

  Lutramella looked curious when she registered his low and harshened voice, but did not inquire. “I have had my eye on him, on general principles. But he hasn’t moved.”

  “What of Ox or Braheem?”

  Lutramella showed dismay. “It did not occur to me to keep tabs on those two.”

  “And of course there they sit now, innocent as butterflies.”

  In the constrained rasp that fortuitously kept his words from being overheard by Lu’s neighbors, Johrun explained what had transpired. Lutramella reflected on the matter, then said, “There are easier ways you could have been killed, and ways that would have even made your death look like an accident. This strikes me as vindictiveness of the most bitter sort.”

  “My thoughts as well. Who to suspect among two hundred strangers? I shall just have to pee in the bushes from now on.”

  Johrun rejoined Minka, who seemed genuinely pleased to have him back, granting him a kiss once he dropped down to the cushions.

  Just as he claimed from one of the waitstaff a new drink specifically formulated to further soothe his throat, the constant music ceased, the sylphs retreated to the fringes of the celebration like dawn-frightened spirits, and all the members of the Corvivios and Soldevere clans stood up. Johrun’s father motioned for Johrun and Minka to do the same. A treetop spotlight lit them up, and naturally the entire attention of the crowd was instantly focused on the group.

  Grandpa Xul spoke in his commanding and confident voice.

  “Kindly friends, both new and old! I cannot tell you how thrilled a
nd pleased I and the rest of my family are that you have all honored us with your attendance at these celebrations in anticipation of a most joyous of culminating ceremonies, the wedding of Johrun Corvivios to Minka Soldevere, and hence the union of our two clans. These past few days have been the highlight of my long life, and I could wish to see them prolonged for an indefinite time. And, as matters eventuate, I am going to get my wish, to some small and not entirely amenable degree. Intensely vital business matters, arising out of the blue, demand the offplanet presence of our conjoined boards of directors, for just a few extra days. Perforce, the wedding must await our return. Naturally, we cannot hold any of you here against your wishes, acknowledging that you all have equally pressing concerns of your own back home. But if continuing free accommodations and all the amusements that Danger Acres can provide are any inducement to remain, then I hope you will. And as additional small kumshaw to indicate our high regard for your attentions and to palliate any inconvenience, allow me to do this!”

  One tap on Xul’s vambrace summoned up an instant sonic response from two hundred other vambraces: a chorus of the universal sound icon for “funds received.”

  Johrun’s own vambrace registered not funds, but a silent message from Xul: 10K chains apiece to each guest. Even to your foolishly liberated chimeric wetnurse!

  Two million chains dispersed without a quibble, in addition to all prior and future costs associated with the wedding. Johrun experienced a kind of mortified pride. Again, this family heritage was a weighty load.

  The attendees erupted in massed applause and hoots that went on for minutes. The food preparers caused their cooking fires to roar skyward, the drinks flowed like floodwaters, and the sylphs launched into an ecstatic dervishing propelled by maenad music.

  By the time the festivities were over, and Johrun conducted a weary Minka back to her room and bade her goodnight, he had almost forgotten the attack in the WC. But memory of it resurfaced with a jolt, and caused him to doublecheck any hiding places in his room, and to triple lock his door.

  In the morning, after breakfast, the family members who were about to journey to Bodenshire to quell the machinations of the mysterious Redhook Combine assembled outside the lodge. Johrun and Minka joined them, but no grand show was made of their departure, and in fact any of the guests who might have been inquisitive had been subtly discouraged from tagging along as spectators. Lutramella, however, had shown up unbidden and was readily accepted into the party.

  The ten humans and the splice marched solemnly down the path that led to the landing site where the Devilbuster ketch named Against the Whelm, the Corvivios family craft that had ferried them from Sweetmeats Pasturage, awaited.

  Johrun experienced a nearly overwhelming storm of emotions: apprehension, pride, affirmation, eagerness, anxiety, love, disappointment, irritation, a longing for closure. He almost envied those who would be leaving Verano, despite any trials that faced them. How he would endure the wait without going round the bend was less than clear—especially with the lingering presence of some assassin to consider. He wondered if he should bring the capable figure of Bona Tipstaff into the affair as his confidante and helper.

  At the ship, the family exchanged hugs, kisses, and reassurances that all would be well, and be soon mended. Johrun’s elders trooped up the short ramp, each one turning at the portal to wave goodbye. Their faces looked at once utterly familiar and utterly foreign.

  The ramp retracted, the hull assumed integrity, the ship lifted.

  When it was only about a kilometer high, looking like a child’s toy, Against the Whelm and all it contained, a fragile cargo of love and hope and history, was transformed without warning from a soaring confident craft into a massive wavefront of radiation.

  When Johrun could see again, with eyes he wished were blind, nothing of the ship—or its beloved occupants—remained.

  CHAPTER 8

  Oz Queloz was provably not a man without sympathy. Molded of the common clay of all mankind, a superior grade in fact, he possessed a warm heart, a sharp and receptive intellect and a kindly disposition. On the other hand, he was by trade and nature a licensed Invigilator, the nearest thing to a professional interstellar lawman that the Quinary offered, and that meant that he was merciless in his quest for justice; decisive and perhaps even somewhat arbitrary in his conclusions and discriminations; and inclined to treat indisputable malefactors with a heavy stick minus any juicy carrot.

  Affiliated with the military-grade security forces of the Motivators—the same bunch that had come to Verano just a few days ago to pack up the rustlers captured at Sweetmeats Pasturage—he had a remit wider than that force’s standing directives, which were merely to suppress unsanctioned hostilities, corral prisoners, and enforce Quinary rulings. Often the only Quinary representative for lightyears around, he could legally function as jurist and hangman, overriding the wishes and protocols of local law enforcement.

  Of course, in his current assignment—rationalizing the destruction of the Verano-registered braneship Against the Whelm—he had no planetary police with whom to interface. This was a situation both salutary and restrictive. No interference, no help.

  All this Johrun Corvivios knew—or had learned or intuited— after three days of dealing with Queloz. The affable yet brusque fellow—a lanky yet solid bruiser with a chin like an alchemist’s ancient stone mortar, save for its central dimple; a flyaway mop of wheat-colored hair; and an omnipresent sidearm which Bona Tipstaff had identified as the maximally lethal Hoffnung boson disruptor—had, with seemingly unlimited but perhaps deliberately distracting candor, revealed everything about himself in days of measured but relentless questioning and probing, ever since he had arrived some forty-eight hours after the destruction of all of Johrun’s dreams and all his reasons for existing. Five days of mental torture, an intensity and a kind of pain unthinkable before the tragedy, but now seemingly inevitable and eternal. Any of the famous palliative effects of time passing, the conferring of cold but comforting wisdom, had not yet accumulated in this short span, and Johrun could not foresee how they ever would.

  The first seconds, the first minutes after the cataclysmic evaporation of the airborne family ship had consisted of stunned immobility, succeeded by piercing, bestial cries and wailings, wrung from the belly, the soul, and the very fiber of Johrun’s self. Minka had fallen to the ground insensible. Lutramella had loosed an endlessly protracted, uniquely chimeric sound that Johrun hoped never to hear again, for it evoked the cries of an infant being strangled while lying in a bed of hot coals.

  Of course, dozens, scores, seemingly the whole establishment came running. Helpers flocked to uphold Johrun and pick Minka up off the ground. Some primitive noises resembling words were dredged from the pureed soup that now seemed to fill Johrun’s skull. Apparently he made himself understood, limned the incredible situation with staccato phrases and helpless gestures.

  Doctor Fraisine Zahkuala and her co-workers raced up. When she learned what had happened, she immediately insisted that every single individual on the premises undergo high-grade anti-radiation treatment. Whatever the exact nature of the explosion, the complete destruction of the vessel, even a kilometer high, argued for a huge sleeting release of energetic particles injurious to cells and tissues, organs, and prosthetics.

  And so the first twenty-four hours had been devoted to medicining—and reassuring—all the guests and staff. Johrun had to make a hundred decisions, issue a hundred orders. Minka remained catatonic in her room. In taking care of others, he managed to put his private anguish on a shelf for that busy interval. At least until it came time to snatch a few hours of troubled sleep. Then the sheer titanic impossibility of events, the impassable wall they had erected between him and any happy future, reasserted their dominance in a parade of ghastly images, real and imaginary, mixed with more tender memories that burned implacably and with savage irony due to their very tenderness.

  By the end of that first stretch of emergency prophylaxis,
Doctor Zahkuala felt secure in deeming all her patients utterly saved, hale, and hearty. Furthermore, no residual radiation remained in the environment—a finding consistent with a catastrophic failure of the ship’s strangelet reactor. So Johrun could erase one potential debt from his ledger of worries. At least Danger Acres had not killed everyone.

  The next twenty-four hours consisted in arranging the mass evacuation of guests. Danger Acres could not, of course, go on as if it were business as usual. The majority of the well-off wedding guests had arrived in their own braneships, and so they had a ready means of departure. Socially interconnected as the guests were, an elite network of six degrees of separation or less, those who had ships handy arranged to carry those who did not. So in a mass exodus all the revelers left. Saying goodbye to two hundred folks, accepting their commiserations, left Johrun a limp sack of bitter woe.

  The regular guests then had to be dealt with. Luckily, the capacious tourist liner christened Girl of the Pleasaunce was due to arrive at Verano in her regular circuit that very day. When she emerged from branespace, she was walloped by the news of the disaster. All those preparing to disembark on Verano got an instant change of plans. Goodbye vacation, hello circuitous return home. As a tribute to the compassionate spirit of the visitors, no one even complained of the inconvenience. The instant refunds and a stipend for extra expenses authorized by Johrun (in comatose Minka’s name) might of course have elicited such fine feelings. Soon the liner was loaded with the current guests and underway to her next stop, the Harvester world of Venex Tertius, whose untethered continents floated in complex circuits around the globe, providing leisurely passage through a thousand different artificial climates. Meanwhile, all future bookings were cancelled via the Indranet.

  That left the staff. No one wanted to leave. Nor did Johrun want them to go. Faint, almost impossible glimmerings of a day far in the future, when the business might resume, and the necessity for reassembling all the well-trained personnel, counseled Johrun to keep the workers close. He mandated an indefinite continuation of pay without duties, leaving the workers to entertain themselves in their dormitories and on the premises as best they could.