Trouble Magnet

by Alan Dean Foster

  Of more interest were transgressions that involved emotion. A lover’s spat turned to battery. Murders that evolved out of passion. Crimes of accident and opportunity rather than careful planning. These were where his knowledge of human cogitation and neural pathways were put to better use. Why did that woman kill her best friend? What prompted a good upstanding family man to suddenly abscond with his employer’s cred and throw away his entire life? To what lengths would supposedly sophisticated people go to satisfy an urge as primitive and easily sated as simple lust?

  Such musings and meldings as he scrolled patiently through the morning’s offerings almost caused him to run matter-of-factly past the mugging incident in Ballora Park. What caused him to devote slightly more attention and interest to it was the involvement of the thranx. Though Visaria was as much a part of the Commonwealth as planets with more extensive histories, the involvement of nonhumans in antisocial confrontations on a human-settled world was still something of a novelty.

  He scanned the report. Nothing remarkable about the methodology involved. Typical youth gang ambush, demand for goods (standard), resistance (apparently quite effective) on the part of the intended victims, injuries suffered only by the assailants (good for the thranx, he nodded in silent approval), reasonably prompt arrival by police in area (not his place to criticize or applaud), expedient intervention by a passing citizen (good Samaritans were rare in a challenging urban setting such as Malandere). Combination of Samaritan’s intercession and arrival of police causes assailants to flee, hauling their wounded with them (a lesson Theodakris doubted would be taken to heart, given the apparent ages of the attackers). No loss of property, no injury to intended victims beyond loss of dignity and slightly lowered opinion of humankind.

  Some question as to intent of Samaritan seen leaving in company of single assailant, though distance and lack of contact could also indicate Samaritan was possibly still chasing younger attacker (perhaps in hopes of catching him and giving him a good hiding, Theodakris mused hopefully).

  Certainly there was nothing much here for him to do. Considerable postcontact enhancement had been required to obtain any useful visuals, since the only recording made by the onboard monitor on the first of the responding police transports had been acquired from a distance and while the transport itself had been in motion. Despite the substandard quality, the visual was clear enough to enable him to sex the assailants and make out something of individual characteristics. He ran through a few quick stabilized reruns, ruminated, then verbally filed suggestions as to where he thought the Authority might look for the perpetrators, what action they might take next, and—if cornered—which ones might surrender peacefully and which might resist with force.

  He was about to move on to the next case when a few final images caused him to pause. Being secondary to the actual assault, there was really no obvious reason why he should spend any time with them. Murmuring verbal commands, he caused the projection to isolate the last visible assailant. No, not the assailant. There was nothing distinctive about the short, skinny scrawn. It was the young man leaving with him—or chasing him. It was not so much that the good Samaritan was taller than average, or even that he had red hair. And green eyes. There was something else about him. Something about his aspect, about the way he carried himself. There was also his distinctive personal adornment, which took the form of an unusual, brightly colored, lopsided necklace. It looked almost like…

  A venomous Alaspinian minidrag.

  Could the imagery be enhanced any further? Sitting up in his lounge and leaning forward was pure reflex; he could just as easily have directed the projection to move closer to him. The departmental processor did its best, but there were limits to the number and size of blank spaces in reality that its programming could fill in. The image of the good Samaritan sharpened only slightly.

  Sitting alone in his office, the picture of vigor for his age, as healthy as departmental facilities and the best city doctors could make him, Shyvil Theodakris nearly had a heart attack.

  It could not be. It was manifestly impossible. There were dozens, likely hundreds of documented reasons and verified testimonies why what he was seeing could not be so. Probably more than anyone else in the Commonwealth, he was palpably as well as furtively aware of them. Yet he knew, if he knew nothing else, his own history. And the history of his many lost, forgotten friends. Just as he knew what he was seeing with his own eyes.

  So long ago. So many exciting, harsh, fervid, desperate, deliberately locked and filed-away memories. So much potential, thrown away. So many deaths. So much rage and rampant mindwiping on the part of the authorities and the general public. All gone now. All lost to time and fury. A hidden episode of Commonwealth scientific history.

  Yet there it was, transparently represented not by edicted records or some scrap of accidentally dredged-up information, but by a real, living person. He knew who it was because despite the danger, he was unable to keep himself from occasionally, just occasionally, using the department’s excellent search facilities to scan otherwise restricted references. Using appropriate cover and misdirection while doing so, of course, so that such searches could not be traced back to him. For years there had been hints, suggestions, whispers—and nothing more. Nothing concrete, nothing real.

  Until now.

  He jerked around sharply, but it was only his imagination. The chamber was still empty. No armed and armored figures were bursting through the door to arrest him. To cart him away for summary justice, pronouncement of sentence, and immediate full and complete mindwipe.

  What to do?

  Clearly, the next step was to make certain he was neither dreaming nor hallucinating. To positively ascertain the identity and history of the Samaritan. There was, however, one alternative. A sensible alternative.

  Move on. Pretend that what he had seen, what he was staring at this very moment, meant nothing in the scheme of things. Go on with his life, continue with his work. Doing otherwise meant risking everything he had labored so long and hard to raise up from a virtually nonexistent foundation.

  Old memories came flooding back; memories he thought he had managed to suppress forever. Had they been able to view them, they would have shocked the good citizens of Malandere. Shyvil Theodakris was an esteemed member of their society: one might even say cherished.

  He was also, though not one surviving person on the planet knew it, something else. Something more. Something that had flared briefly in the life of the Commonwealth’s scientific community only to be ruthlessly quashed and stamped out. All gone, all done with now. Except for a single survivor. One whose real name was not Shyvil Theodakris.

  That was his name now, he reflected forcefully. His name, and the life he had made for himself. Until this moment. Until the utterly unexpected appearance of this Samaritan, this shadowed and haunted figure from the past. What a remarkable past it had been, too. He—it—should not have survived. It should have vanished, gone down, disappeared along with every other iota of evidence of the group’s work and existence. He should ignore it. He should pretend that it did not exist, and certainly that it did not exist on Visaria. That was the logical, the reasonable, the sensible thing to do.

  Of course, if Shyvil Theodakris had been any of those things, he would not have been involved with the history of the Samaritan in the first place.

  Recognizing as he did something of himself in the younger youth, it was not surprising that Flinx should also think Subar an orphan, as he himself had been. Not wanting to offend his young guide, he pondered how best to broach the subject as Subar led him away from the gang’s priv space and down into the teeming depths of Malandere.

  While the ambience reminded him somewhat of his home city of Drallar, the mood was quite different. Darker and more frenetic, as befitted a larger, more modern city more closely attuned to the pulse of Commonwealth commerce. Even the alleyways and back avenues through which Subar led him seemed wider, the buildings that canyoned them in on both sides
higher and more impersonal. Or maybe, he mused, despite recent visits he was still remembering Drallar as the playground of his adolescent self, when everything would have seemed bigger, darker, and more intimidating.

  No matter. Malandere had its own perverse charms. Alewev District, however, seemed singularly devoid of them. It was an area of older, already run-down structures, many of them commercial in origin, that had been taken over and cannibalized for living quarters by the lowest rung of the city’s inhabitants. Those futurists who had speculated in the distant long-ago that machines would one day take over all the dirty work of humankind had been little more than entertaining dreamers. An automaton could clean floors and empty itself, but at the end of the disposal chain some poor human still had to decide what to do with the final refuse. Machines could wash dishes, but not sort them according to individual taste. And inevitably, invariably, there were always humans or aliens willing to do the work of machinery for less than the applicable machines cost to operate and maintain.

  At least there were fewer floating flads in Alewev, he reflected as Subar urged him along. A lack of disposable income among the local populace corresponded to a parallel decline in neighborhood advertising. Damaged machines competed for space on the streets with damaged people. The emotional aether he could not shut out was ripe with treachery, envy, despair, frustration, hatred, desire, and ennui. The fate of all humankind, he wondered—or just of this particular slice of the species? His head throbbed.

  He was glad Clarity was not with from him, that she was back on New Riviera and safe in the ministrating hands of Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex. Better she recuperate from her wounds there than have to suffer his increasingly despondent company in such disheartening surroundings.

  Subar took no notice of his melancholy. Either that, or the youth was indifferent to it. Reaching out with his Talent, Flinx could not tell. It didn’t help that his guide was not yet emotionally mature.

  Then they turned down a ridiculously small, substandard walkway, mounted a series of winding stairs that had been laboriously laid into an old drainage sluice, and, on the third level, paused outside a doorway that was so primitive it was utterly devoid of watchful electronics.

  “Home.” Subar’s expression as he spoke said far more than did the word itself. A lifetime of experience was encapsulated in that one semi-expletive, Flinx suspected as he studied Subar’s face. A lifetime that had not, insofar as he could perceive from the youth’s emotions, been filled with delight. Subar used a key—an actual primitive polymorph key, Flinx saw in amazement—to open the portal. The interior was filled with the stink of the unwashed and the shouts of the uncouth.

  They proceeded down a hallway that consisted of a single prefabbed molded tube. From the shape and wear evident on the curved interior, Flinx decided, it was a decommissioned commercial component salvaged from a scavenged industrial site. At the far end, another door yielded to Subar’s primitive input.

  Flinx had visited zoological parks before, on other worlds such as Nur. Without exception, all had been both quieter and cleaner than the landscape spread out before him now.

  A small girl was chasing a smaller boy from one chamber to another. Homicidally intent on one another, they ignored him and his guide completely. The girl’s hair had been neocharged and was standing straight out in every direction. The boy held tightly to a small device that rendered him immediately suspect. Beyond them and farther into a large room whose omnipresent stink could not be dispersed even by the cheap yet powerful area deodorant whose nose hair–curling scent irreversibly corrupted the local atmosphere, a pair of adolescent females lay slumped atop a torn and frayed sonomound. Their eyes were glassy and the skin of their tattooed skulls vibrated to the pulse that emanated from the mound to pass through their bodies via direct induction. Off to Flinx’s right, a woman was screeching.

  “Not on my time you don’t. If you were half the man you claim to be…!”

  Sounding vexed and vituperative in equal measure, a male voice cut her off. “If you were half the woman I cojoined, it would take three houros to keep you quiet!”

  Subar glanced up at Flinx. “Sire and dam. Take your pick. Me, I don’t get that choice.”

  Fuming, a woman appeared in the doorway off to the right. Beneath the garish singlepiece that draped her prematurely aged form, she was skinny and straight. Her face, like her life, had been badly whittled. Her skin was flushed, and not from overexposure to the sun. It supplied the only color to an otherwise pallid expression. She started to shriek anew at the unseen male of the household, caught sight of Subar and Flinx, and stopped herself.

  “Oh.” Her expression darkened, albeit ritualistically. “Where you been, boy?” Out of reflex more than emotion, she mustered a smile in Flinx’s direction. “Brought home a friend, I see?” The rage that had underlined and given force to her screaming was fading within her, Flinx perceived. But though the emotional pot no longer boiled over, it continued to simmer beneath the woman’s otherwise cordial façade.

  “His name’s Flinx,” Subar muttered without meeting her gaze.

  A man appeared, following behind the woman. At the sight of the tall stranger he frowned, eyed his mate, then his eldest male offspring, and finally stuck out a hand.

  “Gorchen’s the name. Flinx?” He looked like he wanted to burst out laughing, but did not. He did not have to. Flinx could sense his derision without having to hear it vocalized. “Unusual tag.”

  “It’s a nickname,” Flinx told him pleasantly. On his shoulder, Pip raised her head. The woman’s eyes widened slightly.

  “A pet? Does it bite?”

  “Only when provoked.”

  “That’s better than somebody else I know.” Beset by his own wit, the man roared. “Come on in, I guess. Can’t offer you much. Work to do, too.” He glared down at the youth standing alongside the visitor. “Boy, offer your friend something to drink.”

  But nothing too much, Flinx inferred, and the cheapest we’ve got. The man’s emotions were as easy, and sordid, to read as a three-way projection. Somewhere off in the distance the boy and girl continued to scream. With a look of faux apology, the woman went in search of them. Within seconds she was promising her unrestrained charges traditional hellfire and damnation if they didn’t shut up. From the sound of it, her threats had no effect. One of the girls lying in semi-comatose state on the sonomound opened an eye, observed Flinx, and promptly shut it again. Meanwhile the man of the house, if such he could be called, had drawn forth the day’s recyclable outercoat and was departing.

  “Leave you two boys to chat.” A grin that could only be described as positively ugly in inspiration split the haggard, pulpy face. “Don’t do nothing in private you wouldn’t do in public.” When the door sealed automatically behind him it was difficult to tell whether Flinx or Subar was the more relieved.

  Subar was not an orphan, then. Another supposed similarity rescinded. Evaluating what he had seen of the youth’s family so far, Flinx found himself wondering which of them had suffered the more grueling upbringing. His young acquaintance, who was “blessed” with a family? Or himself, an orphan adopted by a rough-hewn but caring older woman.

  Similar in construction to the hallway tube, yellow prefab ovoids of analogous industrial-strength material had been melded to its sides and top. One such large ovoid formed the main body of the apartment occupied by Subar’s family. Smaller ones served as side rooms. From the outside, such buildings resembled stacks of insect eggs laid on twigs. The analogy, Flinx reflected as he followed his young host deeper into the overheated familial complex, went beyond appearances.

  Subar’s “room” was smaller than the transport that had brought Flinx from the port into the city. The curving walls were lined with flashing, blinking images of genetically modified females, weapons, and sports figures that were remarkable only in their deadening predictability. There were a few cabinets and drawers fastened to walls, a pile of the latter whose permaseals had proven to b
e anything but, and the ubiquitous communit. An ancient model from the look of it, not even capable of full-dimensional projection. The living area was as ragged and unkempt as its denizen. Remembering his childhood on Moth, Flinx had felt cleaner and more at home on the city streets of Drallar than he ever would have in a claustrophobic urban cocoon like this.

  “A real hole, ain’t it?” Subar passed a hand across the far curved wall, rendering it transparent. The view outside consisted of another, similar egg-like wall a couple of meters distant. Variety was provided by a leaking water pipe. A second pass of his hand over the print-coded wall and it turned opaque again.

  Flinx tried to show some interest. “When I was your age, I spent most of my time on the street.”

  Subar let out a sardonic chuckle. “You think I do anything here besides sleep?” He nodded belligerently back in the direction they had come. “Sometimes I don’t know which is worse: getting yelled at by my dam, smacked around by my sire, or having to listen to the scrawn siblings I didn’t get to choose and can’t get rid of.”

  This visit was doing nothing, Flinx realized, to improve his view of humanity. By coming, he had fulfilled his promise to Subar and seen all there was to see in the youth’s immediate environment. It was time to move on, if only in search of further disappointment elsewhere.

  “I’m going.” He had to bend to exit the cubicle. “You wanted to show me your home, I’ve seen your home.” Burrowing beneath his shirt, Pip had hidden most of her body from view.

  “Wait!” This was not working out the way he had hoped, Subar saw as he followed his guest back to the main chamber. “There’s one more person I’d like you to meet.”

  Flinx was already at the door. Neither of Subar’s older sisters glanced up from the sonomound and their self-imposed music-and-image-fueled stupor. He sighed. “Another member of your confrontational social group?”