The Summer Thieves

by Paul Di Filippo

  He hastened with Lutramella to the monument commemorating the discovery of Verano: the plinth with the half-sized replica of the Jangalo one-person explorer named Bumming Around.

  DROWNE’S LANDING HERE HONKO DROWNE FIRST TOUCHED THE LOVING SOIL OF VERANO AND CLAIMED IT FOR HIS OWN— ALTHOUGH HE WAS NOT TO HOLD IT FOR LONG THANKS TO THE GOOD FORTUNE OF THE SOLDEVERE AND CORVIVIOS CLANS

  Johrun placed his hand over his heart. “Mother, father, Xul and Chirelle, and all the Soldeveres. I swear I will reclaim our world and honor the memory of your accomplishments. Nothing will stop me!”

  Lutramella said, “Best to anticipate success, but prepare for disasters. Let us move sharply now, or we’ll face the setback of losing our ride before we even begin!”

  CHAPTER 10

  The initial hour in space proved to be a soul-stirring experience for Johrun, bringing with it the flotsam and jetsam of a thousand unbidden thoughts, comforting and dismaying, and a flood of wordless heart twinges. Like the vaporized Against the Whelm, the smaller ship of Anders Braulio, the Bastard of Bungo, had the capacity to turn practically all of its interior surfaces into a massive contiguous omnidirectional viewing sphere. When activated, the feature caused the voyagers to feel as if they floated almost naked in the vacuum, observing the splendors of the cosmos with a godlike eye.

  The first novel sight to impinge on Johrun’s sensibilities was the totality of Verano. Never having been further out than a suborbital jump, he had never seen the full disc of his beloved planet. But in a few minutes after takeoff, there it hung, the mottled green-grey-blue-tawny beauty of his native world against the clamor of the myriad brilliant features of globular cluster M68. A few more minutes fast travel under conventional fifth-force drive shrank the planet to merely the largest object in a whole enormous field of dusty nebulae, throbbing pulsars, rich gemstone stars and a hundred other exotic cosmic species. Constellations such as Yattaw’s Mermaid and the Seven Wolfheads carried a freight of legend. An empty tract dubbed the Pessoan Marches, with one blue star at its center, resembled a baleful eye. The purple light of Verano’s nearby primary, Wayward’s Spinel, had been stepped down with a protective software filter so that the star did not blind them.

  Absorbed in the spectacle, Johrun took some time to notice that Lutramella was shivering with a kind of holy terror beside him on the divan. He put an arm around her shoulders and drew her close to comfort her.

  Till that moment, his fellow passengers had ignored the two hitchhikers, busy making small talk among themselves and detailing unlikely and nonconventional constellations.

  “There’s the Bishop’s Prick!”

  “The Slatternly Fishwife has never looked sharper!”

  But when they observed Johrun offering Lutramella some solace for her instinctive fears caused by the immensity and humbling grandeur of space, the classmates laughed and mocked, causing Johrun to seethe. Lutramella visibly composed herself, quelling her shakes at whatever cost, and turned her attention to her vambrace. She said in a dignified manner, “I will study up on our destination now, if you please, Joh.”

  Minka addressed Johrun after the gibes had subsided. “I hope you realize how ridiculous you look, Joh, babying that creature in such a manner. It’s juvenile behavior at best, and quisling betrayal at worst. You’re a human, and she’s a splice— even if now she is free! Haven’t you any sense of proportion? Your feelings toward this old drudge are humiliating, to you and her. Splices don’t care for human affections. All they need and cherish is a warm doss and a full belly.”

  Johrun had to wait until the red scrim in front of his vision had faded before he could bring himself to speak calmly.

  “I attribute your ignorance about what matters to a chimera, what their true capabilities are, to not being raised around them as I was. Even during those months you spent each year at the Pasturage I always noticed you avoided and slighted our nonhuman staff. But because you made no overt disparagements, I always told myself your attitude didn’t really matter. But now I know better.

  “At Danger Acres you were used to human workers who defined their relationships to the Soldeveres strictly in terms of money given for labor received. Their inner lives did not come into the equation. You did not have to cultivate their esteem. But when employing splices, more than mere commerce comes into play. They react like all sapients to good will and camaraderie, generosity, and caring. And their portions of human genes only amplify whatever animal heritage they possess. A playful and loving nature emerges for most. Savage and predatory for others, as the specs of the sartors compel. And with a longtime companion like Lutramella, who guarded my welfare for years, asking nothing in return but love and loyalty—well, there’s no difference between her and, and—”

  Minka said coldly, “Her and me.”

  Johrun jumped up and fervently took Minka’s hands. “Don’t be mean-spirited and vindictive, Minka! You know that’s not the comparison I was seeking to express.”

  Minka withdrew her hands and turned toward the others. “I don’t know about you all, but I could use a meal. With my fellow humans.”

  Braulio said, “Let me just make the transition to branespace first, and then we can relax.”

  He toggled off—and locked down against accidental triggering—the viewing augmentation, returning the interior surfaces of the craft to their true appearance. There was nothing to be gained—and much to be lost—by displaying the non-Euclidean topography of branespace. Many a human, in the early exploratory days of such travel, had emerged with their nervous systems deracinated and lateralized. Nowadays, the onboard artilects would easily handle the reiterated fractal mappings that would bring them to Bodenshire. With that precaution taken, a simple command string sliced open the multiverse and inserted their ship into shortcut otherness.

  Unconcerned with any holistic âmago, the six ex-students were quite happy to conjure up their favorite dishes from the ship’s fabricators. Soon various delicious odors filled the small central salon of the ship.

  After everyone else had been supplied with their orders, Johrun had to ask Braulio, “Would you engineer a simple meal for Lutramella and me? My vambrace is dead, you know.”

  Braulio said with a nasty smile, “I don’t recall meals being included as part of your tourist package. Only transportation. But it’s only two days to Bodenshire. I’m sure you can survive until then. Water, of course, is readily obtainable from the basin spigot in the loo.”

  Johrun turned away and joined Lutramella. She shared a commiserating look with him, then unseamed her duffel and reached inside, to retrieve two generic splice nutribars.

  “This is my favorite flavor. Carrots and sourpango.”

  Johrun accepted a bar with an overblown genteel gesture. “As the Lonely Bard of Farundel said, ‘A goldflake cocktail in a goblet of Transrekian crystal among one’s enemies is less to be cherished than a drop of dew shared with a friend.’”

  Minka and her crew snorted.

  “Don’t you care for poetry?” Johrun asked coldly.

  “Yes, of course,” said Braheem. “But we dissected the lyrics of the Homely Bard of Farting Dell in first-year post-transcriptives, and determined them to be utterly without merit.”

  Unable to make a response, Johrun unwrapped his bar and bit off a chunk. It tasted more like the unknown sourpango than the familiar carrots.

  During the next several hours, while the university graduates played cards, Johrun and Lutramella quietly familiarized themselves with Bodenshire and the local outlets of the five Quinary omniafirms.

  The Smalls, the Indrans, the Pollys, the Motivators, the Brickers—those consortiums that welded galactic civilization together—had no central headquarters. No single planet was devoted to a command nexus; there was no unique concentration of forces and resources and executive corps. The omniafirms existed as distributed nodes across the Milky Way, a network of branch offices, so to speak. Not every system hosted representatives of all five consortiums. But Bo
denshire happened to be home to an office for each arm of the Quinary. The Bricker node was located at a place called Nesiotium Neomeniarum.

  With no exterior time cues, the passengers aboard the Bastard of Bungo had to rely on their body clocks for bedtime. And Johrun’s physiology was telling him that he had run a marathon across a desert with lead shoes while being pelted with stones.

  The Corvivios family craft had afforded twelve cabins. Johrun thought to identify four on Braulio’s ship. How would the sleepers be divided up? Would Minka favor him with an invitation to hers? But what then of Lutramella? Could she sleep on this short divan?

  Johrun’s speculations were put to an end by the disintegration of the card-playing crowd.

  Ox stood up and swept giggling Viana and Trina into his large embrace. Those three headed to one cabin.

  To Johrun’s immense surprise, the next pairing was Braulio and Braheem!

  Minka then quickly claimed cabin three, without so much as a backwards glance at Johrun.

  Inside the fourth cabin, Johrun sagged down with bone-tiredness and fully clothed onto the bed. It took him almost ten seconds to fall asleep, but that was long enough to register Lutramella’s warmer-than-human backside pressed up against his.

  Baggage in hand and paw, Johrun and Lutramella stood at the foot of the ramp of Braulio’s ship, Minka above him, framed in the portal. Seeing her beautiful indifference wrenched at Johrun’s heart. Although he knew what her answer would be, he could not restrain himself from making one last plea.

  “Minka, won’t you cast your lot with mine? Come help me regain our world.”

  “I don’t chase mirages, Joh. Verano is gone from our hands. I’ve faced this reality, and you should too. This is goodbye, until you come to your senses. Find me on Maradyth. Farewell.”

  Ramp retracted, hull again seamless, ship slowly levitating. Accelerating to swift invisibility. Gone.

  Johrun sagged a bit. Not favored by his fiancée with so much as a “Good luck and travel safely!” This truly seemed a milestone moment in his life, but not one to celebrate. Exiled from his homeworld, pauperized save for the slim resources of his companion, chasing an impossible dream. What other burdens could an iron fate and he himself pile onto his own shoulders?

  Lutramella spoke. “We need to get out of this rain, Joh. And find transportation to Nesiotium Neomeniarum.”

  After two days jackrabbiting through branespace and another half day, post-egress, advancing through basalspace to reach Bodenshire—a period of high and low insults from Braulio and company—Johrun had suffered the final indignity. Braulio had insisted on depositing him far from his ultimate destination.

  “You’ve made me detour wide enough of my home. The delay proved really insufferable. I’m not carrying you like a prince to the doorstep of your palace.”

  “But it will only take you about an hour longer on this inbound approach!”

  “True. But if I land directly at the main port in Bodenshire’s Quadrant Ninety-five Hundred, I can visit the tourist entrepôt and purchase a case of Kreuger’s Posset, which is absolutely my favorite liquor and sold nowhere else! Thus will this boorish side trip justify itself.”

  Disinclined to argue, Johrun rationalized that any delay would be trivial and inexpensive, even if frustrating. And so here he stood, for the first time on another world, though not precisely at his goal.

  Lutramella’s comment on the weather suddenly brought his foreign surroundings into sharper reality. The sky above was a leaden shade Johrun had never experienced before. In just the past few minutes, a slow but persistent drizzle had wetted down his hair and dampened his new jacket.

  “Why is the air so damn cold? Is this what they call winter?”

  Lutramella consulted her vambrace. “It is only ten degrees below Verano’s median temperature.”

  “It’s horrible. I feel as if someone had dumped an icy drink on my head. Do people actually consent to live in such a place?”

  “This is considered mild weather here, Joh, as it would be on many other worlds as well. The natives think nothing of it.”

  “They are plainly all brain-damaged, their cortexes frozen into premature senility. We need to ensure that we can return to Verano as its rightful owners before we too succumb.”

  “I see what appears to be a refectory over there. We could get something to eat while we plan our passage to Nesiotium Neomeniarum.”

  “I’d appreciate anything that does not taste of sourpango.”

  “I’m sorry you did not enjoy those bars.”

  Johrun instantly regretted his thoughtless words. “Those bars were literally lifesaving, Lu. Your foresight in packing them is rivalled only by the time you suggested to me that climbing atop a herple and goading it with an electro-prod would not be a wise move.”

  “But did you listen to me then?”

  “No, of course not. And I suffered the busted head and limbs I deserved. But this doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate your wisdom in retrospect.”

  After crossing the glistening green geopolymer tarmac, they reached the canteen and escaped the rain. The class of odors inside unmistakably somehow denoted breakfast, and Johrun got some sense of local time after days of travel limbo. The noisy place was thronged and colorful, with most of the patrons looking like port workers, cheek by jowl with the occasional offplanet visitor of unfastidious tastes.

  Seated gratefully at a table, Johrun and Lutramella soon did justice to a spread consisting of rashers of sea pig, buttermilk scones, wine pudding, and two pots of hot whey-thread cider. The meal considerably improved Johrun’s disposition, and Lutramella seemed to derive a boost from the food as well.

  Finishing the last scone crumbs, Johrun said, “I could wish the Bricker enclave were closer by. But I suppose we owe its whimsical location to Lubero Varadkar’s personal sense of style.”

  Each of the five omniafirms sported a figurehead prime representative, more mascot than chief operating officer, whose role was not so much to issue ukases and plot fiscal conquests from on high—the enterprises were actually guided by a blend of emergent consensual decision-making among the stockholders and vizier-level artilect heuristics—but rather to embody the unique spirit and esthetic of each firm in the eyes of the public.

  As head of the Brickers, Varadkar projected the image, factitious or true, of a sedate landed collector and architect, a fancier of arcadian prospects.

  Saudia Thrace, helming the Smalls, favored the aspect of a meditative ascetic.

  Sterk Zazum, emblematic of the Indrans, assumed the role of madcap adventurer and daredevil, explorer of new realms.

  Felicia Obst, in the forefront of the Pollys, had seemingly devoted her glossy life to high fashion and the nightlife.

  And Derek Balash of the Motivators played the sportsman, with a particular fondness for elegant and dangerous race cars.

  Here on Bodenshire, each firm had established its outpost in a signature fashion.

  The Motivators shared space with a lush country club whose wicket-ball courts were famous across the Quinary.

  The Pollys maintained offices in the Designers’ Barrio of Port Calash.

  The Indrans could be found in a huge lighter-than-air ship that roamed the globe.

  An innocuous and humble corner of the Monastery of the Blind Shepherd served well enough for the Smalls.

  And the Brickers were housed in a beautiful mansion at Nesiotium Neomeniarum.

  Lutramella’s deft researches had selected the cheapest transportation to this outpost from the port in Quadrant Ninety-five Hundred where Braulio had dumped them.

  “First we ride a local ship to Whetstone, the ninth moon of Bodenshire. Unfortunately, our ride makes intervening stops at moons one through eight first. But upon arrival, it’s just a short hop to Bisko, the moon of Whetstone.”

  “The moon has a moon?”

  Lutramella sighed. “That’s quite common. Did you ever really pay attentions to any of your lessons?”


  “Only enough to pass your quizzes, after which I promptly forgot most of it. Not much seemed relevant to my life on Verano. And that I knew in my very meat and bones.”

  “Let us hope we do not ever have cause to regret your scholarly slackness. In any case, once we land on Bisko, we simply fly overland a short ways. We have a scheduled appointment for you to go under the inquestorial meshes tomorrow at three in the afternoon. Our ship departs in four hours.”

  With his activities for the next twenty-four hours all delineated and their path clear, at least for the very near future, Johrun experienced a sudden sense of excitement and freedom. Despite all his grief and travails and the uncertainty of success, he knew himself as still a young man, sound of limb and mind, unencumbered by mundane obligations, and standing on an alien world. An irrepressible vitality coursed through him. The allure of the new beckoned like an enchantress.

  “Could we see a little of this world in the next three hours perhaps?”

  “Very little. Bodenshire is a superplanet, seventy thousand kilometers in circumference. This continent we are on, just one of a dozen, constitutes an area greater than all the land masses of Verano combined. There are approximately fifty billion inhabitants scattered across thirty thousand significant metropoles. The dominant language changes approximately every thousand kilometers.”

  The numbers daunted Johrun, who had considered the crowd of two hundred assembled for his wedding to be almost intolerable.

  “Suppose we order another pot of cider and just wait here?”

  “My notion exactly. But we might also use the next few hours to avail ourselves of one of the port’s hamams. I believe I’m beginning to smell like my non-sartorized ancestors. And you as well!”

  The fifth-force rental flyer from the shipyard on Bisko took Johrun and Lutramella over a verdant, unstained landscape. Manicured copses of purple-fringed trees. Herds of galloping big-horned ungulates. It seemed that at least part of Bisko was a nature preserve.

  All the moons and all the moonmoons of the Bodenshire system featured conditions harmonious for human living unmediated by any suits or masks. The concealed Harvester engines and infrastructures maintained proper gravities and atmospheres and ecosystems flawlessly, as they had for eons, just as they maintained Verano at its mellow tropicality. Without them the satellites would be lifeless hellholes of solid gases and razored, cratered terrain. The inhabitants took this for granted. Daily familiarity even with the work of gods incurred indifference and ingratitude.