by Eric Brown
She laughed. “Dutch Calvinist stock, for whom religion imbued everything and sex was a duty.”
“Well, I’m not religious.”
“But you were still shocked, no, when that little Malagasy bisexual took you to bed that first evening on Avoeli and put you through the ringer?”
“I’ve never heard it put like that before,” he said, to hide his unease.
She reached out a tentative hand, found his and squeezed.
“And here we are,” she said, gesturing through the screen as the flier powered down and descended to a landing pad at the centre of a large sand-fringed island.
SIX
“ABRACADABRA,” MERCURY SAID.
“Why?” he asked, again uneasy at the fact of his thoughts being accessible.
She gestured through the windshield. The landing-pad was elevated, with several walkways leading through the jungle to the jewel-like domes. Holidaymakers partied on raised platforms beside the domes. Mood music pounded through the trees.
“I’ll scan for Maatje out there. We don’t want to alert her to your arrival.”
He nodded. “But what if—?”
“If she’s close by, I’ll take a look and come back here when it’s safe for you to exit.” She looked through the screen, frowning in concentration. “I don’t detect her anywhere close. I’d better take a walk, look for the bitch, and find out where our dome is. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
She ducked from the flier, pressed her tricorne into position on the side of her head, and strode off across the landing-pad. She cut an impressive figure in her tight-fitting black bodysuit and distinctive headgear.
She disappeared along a walkway, lost from sight behind a spray of alien greenery.
He had fallen into the company of a woman built like an Amazonian supermodel who also happened to have telepathic powers. Surely, he thought, it was too good to be true.
Mercury emerged from the stand of exotic ferns and crossed to the flier. “You can come out,” she said. “She’s nowhere in the immediate vicinity. Our dome’s over there.” She pointed through the foliage to a lighted hemisphere fifty metres away. If she were reading his mind now, his suspicions, then she gave no sign.
They shouldered their packs and strolled along the walkway flanked by a riot of foliage. Huge insects bumbled from bloom to bloom, and deeper in the jungle animals gave shrill, staccato calls. The elevated walkway passed a few metres from the deck of a dome, where a party was in progress, men and women in various states of undress enjoying alcohol and eye-watering euphor-fumes.
Mercury stopped, laid a hand on his arm and cocked her head to one side.
“What?”
“I’m catching something,” she murmured, concentrating. “Come on.”
She hurried on, and he followed her along the walkway to their dome. A sliding door opened to admit them onto a spacious gallery overlooking a sunken lounge. Mercury found the bedroom and dumped her bag, then turned to Hendrick.
“What is it?” he asked again.
“Maatje’s no longer on the island. She left, along with the Hovarth character, about an hour ago. She got talking to a woman from Brazil, Earth, soon after they arrived. I read the woman as we passed the party.”
“Does she know where Maatje went?”
Mercury shook her head. “Just that she left aboard a flier, heading south. But they were with an alien, a Krinthian. His clan is still here. I wonder . . .”
Her lips described a crimson rosebud as she contemplated something. “I need to shower and change. Then how about we go and find the Krinthians and see what they know?”
“You can read aliens?” The little he knew about telepaths suggested that while a few A-Graders were able to read the occasional extra-terrestrial mind, it was never with the same degree of success as they read human minds.
“Some aliens, and it can be painful. But I’ve never come across a Krinthian before. How we’ll work it is, we’ll go out on the town and when we find the ee-tees you make contact. I’ll be nearby, doing my best to scan them. It’ll be better that way, rather than if I brazenly confront them and start asking questions. This is something of a give away.” She pointed to her connected minds sigil.
“Couldn’t you just disguise it like Vizzek did?”
“And face having my licence revoked if I were found out? It’s not worth it.”
He nodded. “What should I say to them?”
“Tell the truth, that you’re trying to locate Maatje, and see how they respond.” She frowned. “I just hope I can pick up something relevant from them.”
Hendrick smiled.
Mercury squinted at him. “What?”
“You’re no longer reading, are you?”
She looked surprised. “How do you know?”
“Easy, you aren’t finishing my questions.”
“Quite the ex-detective, aren’t you, Matt? Come on, I could kill a beer.”
The island was a kilometre wide by two long, with a central village where a few clubs and bars were located. Hendrick checked his wrist-com as they strolled into the village. He’d left it still registering Western European time, by which it was approaching ten in the evening. That felt about right to him, though it was odd to be setting out for an evening drink with the sun blazing overhead.
They came to a central plaza dotted with bars and shallow leisure pools. Mercury touched his arm and murmured, “There, half a dozen Krinthians at the shaded table to your left.”
He glanced across the plaza and was surprised by what he saw.
The ee-tees who hailed from the star of Dzuba resembled bloated sea elephants with four arms and as many legs, and heads that sat atop a mass of blubber without an intervening neck. Two tiny eyes moved around at the end of short stalks set above slit mouthpieces.
“I thought they were humanoid?” he said to Mercury as they crossed to a bar that appeared to have been, in an earlier incarnation, the carapace of a space-tug.
“The term covers a multitude of types,” Mercury said. “They’re warm-blooded, communicate orally, and have many neurological similarities to human beings.”
Hendrick hitched himself onto high seat fashioned from an engine-nacelle and ordered two beers. Mercury’s attention was on the Krinthians as she drank; Hendrick watched her long throat ripple, then turned to the ee-tees.
“Abracadabra,” she said under her breath.
“Catch anything?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Surface emotions, the odd memory.” She touched her head. “And reading them is like suffering one hell of a migraine. But . . . they’re on Tourmaline to wind down after acting as facilitators on a trade mission. They came to this island, specifically, because Maatje had hired the services of one of their number, the individual called K’ransa.” She shook her head. “But that’s all I’m getting.”
“Maybe—” he started.
“Yes, go across and introduce yourself. They speak excellent English, and they’re unfailingly friendly. I’ll move a little closer and see what I pick up.”
“You’ll be okay?”
“I can deal with the headaches, Matt.”
In his time working for the Amsterdam police force he’d Telemassed to more than fifty planets, and interviewed perhaps a dozen extraterrestrials, but he’d never approached an alien without experiencing a certain degree of apprehension. These people—though he used the word in the loosest sense—were unlike him and his fellows humans in every respect; they were the products of environments totally unlike any he had ever experienced, the end result of biology stranger than the strangest ever encountered on Earth. Their mindsets, their way of apprehending the universe, was at odds with his own in every way. He’d always come away from interviewing an alien with the feeling that he’d failed to connect with them on any but the most superficial of levels.
He told himself that this time all he had to do was enquire about his ex-wife, Maatje, and let Mercury’s tele-ability do the rest. Nevertheless, he fel
t nervous as he approached the ee-tees’ table and cleared his throat.
Six grey, bulbous heads swung in his direction, and a dozen beady black eyes regarded him on the end of waving stalks. Their burbling conversation, which sounded like the gentle churning of water in a hookah-pipe, ceased abruptly.
“I hope I’m not interrupting, but I wonder if I might join you . . . ?” He stuttered to a halt, cursing himself for sounding so stiltedly formal.
The closest Krinthian spread its four spatulate upper limbs and said in English that seemed to reach him through a fathom of water. “Human . . . be seated, be seated. And your name?”
Hendrick told them, and listened as the alien introduced itself as Heanor, then introduced its clan. “But your drink is almost exhausted, Hendrick,” Heanor said. “On Krinth, it is a custom to replenish the liquid of guests.”
Hendrick thanked the alien—he was unable to determine its sex—and accepted another beer.
Behind the aliens, he saw Mercury slip from the bar and seat herself at a nearby table. She drank her beer, feigning interest in a bloom that grew from the centre of the table and acted as a sunshade.
“We are curious,” Heanor went on, “about your provenance. With humans inhabiting many stars of the universe, thanks to your miraculous Telemass, we are unable to ascertain your planet of birth. With ourselves”—Heanor gestured to its clan—”no such difficultly arises. We are all from the world of Krinth!” And the ee-tee made a choking sound which Hendrick thought might be laughter.
“I’m from Earth,” he said, “and I’ve come to Tourmaline in an attempt to find someone.”
“Ah,” said another Krinthian. “You are an investigator, no?”
“Not as such,” Hendrick said. “You see, the person I seek is . . . was . . . a member of my clan. I understand that she came here expressly to meet one of your kind, a Krinthian named K’ransa.”
A burble of excited comment met his words, as the ee-tees turned to each other and conversed in their own mellifluous tongue. It was a full minute before Heanor turned back to Hendrick and said, “Indeed, indeed. You speak of Mat-jay, the tall golden human being. Indeed she consulted with K’ransa, and their coming together was deemed successful by our clansman.”
Hendrick smiled around the group, hoping the expression might mean something to them. “I wonder if I might ask why she wished to meet with K’ransa?”
The ee-tees conferred again. Hendrick glanced across at Mercury, who caught his eyes and shook her head.
Heanor swung its considerable bulk back towards Hendrick. “Mat-jay enlisted the aid of K’ransa in the hope that he might effect an introduction.”
“An introduction?” Hendrick repeated. “Might I ask with whom?”
The alien stared at him in silence, its eyestalks waving in what Hendrick thought might be agitation. “I can tell you only that the being Mat-jay wished to meet was an alien, but . . . alas . . . protocol dictates that I can say no more.”
“An alien?”
Heanor gestured with two of its upper limbs. “As I said, protocol dictates . . .”
“I quite understand,” Hendrick said. “But . . . am I right in thinking that she left the island today with K’ransa?”
“That is correct, yes.”
“And do you know where they were heading?”
Again Heanor gestured with the same two upper limbs. “Hendrick, forgive me. It pains me to repeat that this information is beyond my power to transmit. Clan protocol, you understand . . .”
“Of course. And I hope that my enquiries have not offended you.”
“How can offence be taken between two members of civilised races?” Heanor said with touching magnanimity.
Hendrick stood, trying not to allow his disappointment to show. Not, he thought, that the aliens would necessarily recognise it. “It is a custom on Earth,” he said, “to return the compliment when someone buys you a drink. It would be my pleasure to ask what you and your clan are drinking.”
Heanor expressed its delight at this, and asked Hendrick if its clan might have their fruit juices replenished.
Five minutes later, having said his farewells to the ee-tees, Hendrick made his way back to the space-tug bar, heavy of heart. By now, Maatje and Hovarth might be anywhere on Tourmaline.
Mercury joined him and called for two more beers. “Don’t be so glum.”
From her expression, he knew she had something.
“You’re right,” she said before he had time to ask. “I read Heanor and everything he knew about Mat-jay.”
“And?” Hendrick took a swallow of ice-cold beer, his mood reviving.
“They left here for the southern island of Istria, where they were due to rendezvous with a member of an alien race called the Zuterain, out of Betelgeuse.”
“Never heard of them.”
“No, neither had I. And when I tried to find out more, look what I came up with.”
She extended a long brown arm and activated her wrist-com. She read from the screen, “All information regarding the extraterrestrial race known as the Zuterain is, for the time being, proscribed, pending a final judicial decision.”
Hendrick shook his head. “What the . . . ?”
“According to reports on the Net, the Zuterain had information pertaining to their race removed from all media. They’re a very . . . insular race, I suppose you could say, and they don’t like people poking their noses into their business.”
“Strange,” he said, and took another mouthful of beer. “And why might Maatje want to meet a member of their race?”
Mercury shook her head. “The million unit question, Matt. Maybe we’ll find out when we get to Istria. Oh, and we can’t just fly there. The island is rather exclusive and doesn’t accept air traffic.”
“But I thought . . .” he began. He had been about to say that he thought Maatje and the alien had left aboard a flier, but Mercury cut in.
“They did—hopping to Xanthos, the next island along the chain, where a ferry leaves for Istria every day. The next one is at three tomorrow. So”—she smiled—”we’ll have to spend the night here.” She leaned close and whispered, “Finish your beer, Matt, and take me to bed.”
“Is that—?”
“An order?” she finished for him. “Yes, it is.”
SEVEN
ISTRIA WAS THE LARGEST LANDMASS ON THE SOUTHERN CONTINENT, one thousand kilometres long and five hundred broad. For the most part it was covered in jungle, with just a small tourist resort at its northernmost point, and a town situated in its central region. The resort island was off the beaten track, exclusive, and very, very expensive.
The ferry that docked at the resort eight hours after leaving Xanthos carried a dozen passengers other than Hendrick and Mercury. Everything about these people, from the cut of their clothes to their refined accents, spoke of privilege and wealth. Hendrick felt uncomfortable in their company, conspicuous in his worn trousers and frayed shirt.
The resort of Nea Zakinthos consisted of a dozen domes strung out along the beachfront. Again Mercury had called ahead and booked a dome, and again she suggested Hendrick lie low until she’d assessed the situation. Next to the jetty where the ferry docked was a bar, frequented by a group of tourists. Hendrick sat in the shade, ordered a beer, and watched Mercury cross the tiled plaza to the administration dome.
He considered last ‘night’, and the intimacy he had shared with the telepath. He had been surprised by her domination of him, a passion that bordered on aggression, and he wondered now if this was her normal lovemaking technique or if she had simply been starved of sex for a while. Afterwards they had lain on the bed, the wall of their dome dimmed, and talked quietly for an hour.
She had told him that she was not reading him, now.
“Now?” he’d said. “But you were, while we . . . ?”
“It enhances the experience, Matt. I share your experience of me, your passion. I can’t begin to describe how wonderful it is.”
“So you read how much I enjoyed it?” he asked. “It makes the cliché, ‘How was it for you?’ redundant, doesn’t it?”
“I’m pleased that it was even better than the sex you had with the Malagasy woman.”
They lay face to face, her long left leg slung over his hip. She touched his cheek and said, “And you have every right to be suspicious, Matt. Please don’t feel guilty about it.” She stared into his eyes. “Oh, to think how accidental it was! If I hadn’t been at the bar on the pier, if I hadn’t looked up when I did, read Vizzek and what he was pulling with you . . .” She laughed. “And then I looked into your head, Matt, and I liked what I saw. And to think, if I hadn’t agreed to go along for a drink with the fellow telepaths I’d met that morning . . .” She shivered. “It’s a frightening thought, Matt, the arbitrariness of fate.”
If she were lying, then she was a consummate actress.
“I’m not lying, Matt. And I’ll prove that to you, in time. Soon, you’ll understand why I had to help you get Samantha back, okay?”
Then she had pressed a finger to his lips and said, “No, you don’t have to say a word. Now, are you going to talk all night or will you make love to me again?”
Now he sat in the warm shade and sipped his beer, and five minutes later Mercury came up behind him, looped an arm around his neck and kissed the top of his head. She sat down next to him, her tricorne pulled low to the left so that its brim partially concealed her connected-minds sigil.
“Well?” he asked.
“The clerk at admin wasn’t that forthcoming. She said she wasn’t at liberty to discuss the private affairs of guests, but”—she tapped her head—”I read that Maatje, Hovarth, and the Krinthian booked a dome last night. This morning they hired a land-car and took off into the jungle, bound for the town of Kallaniki, two hundred kay south of here. Interestingly, the Krinthian booked the same dome here for this evening. He should be returning, alone, pretty soon.”
“So . . . you think he accompanied them to Kallaniki to make the introductions between Maatje and the Zuterainian?”
Mercury nodded. “Looks that way.”
