by Diane Duane
His assistant said, out of the air, "WX994 02BIN to speak to you, sir."
Damn! He wasn't supposed to call for another- But there he was, in all his theoretical glory, sitting behind his desk. The hologram wavered a little above the floor, but WX994 02BIN was unconcerned if he noticed it. UU563 56VIW stood up hurriedly. "Sir, I-"
"Am not ready, as usual. I could have told you that." If there was one thing Sander hated about the man, it was his big bluff air of geniality. Behind it, inside that huge bear-like body, was a heart of meteoric iron, well coated with ice. "You know what I want to talk to you about."
"The Thalaassa incident, sir. Yes. The first thing that needs to be dealt with is-"
"Don't get the idea that you're handling this meeting," said old WX, grinning, and the mustache positively bristled with amusement. "What you need to know first is that I am not pleased. The second ambassador was not to have been targeted for any purpose. There were projects in which her hand would later have been valuable."
Specifically because she wasn't as smart as her boss, UU563 56VIW thought. "Sir, that is one of the aspects of the operation that regrettably did go out of control. Unfortunately no one could have predicted that the marine whom the Ambassador had been seeing privately would have-"
"And about him," said old WX, frowning. "Was he possibly working as a double? Genuinely Diplomatic or Concord Security, I mean, as well as an acquired asset?" "No evidence of that, sir. If we look at the-"
"We haven't looked at half the things we should have," said WX, "and one possibility that disturbs me is that the Concord Diplomatic Service's Intelligence people, or just normal Intel, have somehow undermined our assets in that area. That would be a tragic result, both for the undermined and for you. Ombe would come down on you like a ton of the rock of your choice."
UU563 56VIW swallowed. "Ombe" was the VoidCorp Sector Security Chief QN105 74MAC, a fierce- tempered and small-minded woman who took her job more seriously than anything in the world and had a list of "enemies," or Employees whom she considered failures, as long as a weren's arm. Her enemies tended not to prosper.
"I don't see how that could possibly be, sir," said UU563 56VIW as carefully as he could. Almost certainly this interview was being taped, and if it later proved that he had been wrong ... "If you look at the results, they suggest that such undermining would have meant the ambassador being tipped off as to-" "If you look at the results," WX said, his voice getting a little louder, but not unsociably so, "you would notice that the leaders of Phorcys and Ino signed a treaty. Signed their names to it in private. They had to sign their names to it in public because the third ambassador, who would have been killed if I had my druthers, and the wretched captain of Falada held their noses to it and insisted that they go through with the public ceremony on time, despite trying to stall 'in memory of the architect of the peace, blah blah blah.' Now we have useful people dead, useless people alive, and a treaty that, even though it isn't quite a peace treaty, is so bloody tightly worded that these two planets can no longer carry on with their previous business, which I desperately hope I do not have to spell out to you at this late date." WX smiled, a genial expression which ran ice down Sander's spine. "This is not a good situation, UU563 56VIW, not in the slightest. Had the ambassador not gained the intelligence jump on us that she did, the treaty would never have been signed. Soon enough matters would have relapsed to the comfortable status quo that we have been promoting for lo, these many years. I want to find out how she knew what she knew. I want anyone who seems to have information about how she knew what she knew found, brought in as subtly or unsubtly as you like, and emptied of everything that may be of use to us. I want that done now. Soon. Maybe not before you get up to pee, but nearly that soon. And then I want recommendations on how to get the Phorcys and Ino situation back to the way it was. Fortunately, those idiots hate each other's guts so thoroughly that it shouldn't take much time to think of something. Others are thinking of things too. Let's see if what you come up with is better." That smile seemed to be suggesting that it had better be. "Attention attracted to them, once again, will divert it from other things better ignored. How long will it take you to get a report of present intelligence status on my desk?" "Just a few minutes, sir."
"Do it. I'll speak to you again this time tomorrow." And WX was gone.
Sander Ranulfsson, UU563 56VIW, sat down in his chair and put his head in his hands.
As subtly or unsubtly as you like, the man had said. They must have that new software in place, at least in the beta stages.
Whether they did or not, it was not a good day any more.
Chapter Seven
THE BAR WAS a dive. There was no kinder word for it. The grimy, crowded room had little light and was further dimmed by the various smokes and fumes emanating from the tables and booths. It was the kind of place into which no self-respecting marine would ever have gone unless it was to help a buddy win a fight. From the booth where they were sitting, Gabriel looked around at the dim, ugly little restaurant-cum-bar with its tacky, dingy furnishings-suspended lamps with fringe hanging down, moving "modern art" wall images that had ceased to be modern two decades ago-and thought, not for the first time, that he had come a long way down from his former exalted place in the world. For the truth was that, right now, even this looked good to him. "You have not touched your soup," said Enda.
Gabriel looked up at Enda with what was fast becoming the usual look: bemusement. " 'Swill' would be more like it," he said.
"That may be so," she said, "but we lost the right to treat it like swill when we paid for it. If you do not eat it, I must."
"I wouldn't put that much strain on a new friendship," Gabriel said as he picked up the spoon again. On the day that his trial ended, the day Enda had come for him the second time, she made no great demands on him. She merely walked him out into Duma, the brown-looking capital city of Phorcys, and there engaged a tiny two-room suite for the night. Calling the place a "suite" had been nearly as much an act of hyperbole as calling the contents "rooms." There was just enough room to lie down in each of them, with a two meter line of shelf space above the pallet that nearly filled each "room." Sanitary facilities were down the hall in which the suites were stacked. These so-called facilities were exceptionally minimal, the lights being metered as rigorously as the water. At the time Gabriel noticed little of this. He had thrown himself down on the pallet with the unthinking gratitude for freedom of someone whose most recent sleeps have been in a jail cell, and there he lost the next twenty or so hours of his life, going blissfully and instantly unconscious.
His awakening under a ceiling only two feet from his nose was less than rapturous. There had been that magical moment when everything was dark and he was still befuddled with sleep. For a moment only, he actually believed that he was back in his cabin on Falada. It took only a second's worth of light (brought on when he reached out to feel for the edge of his bunk) to show him reality, and it was bitter. Not even Enda's gentle voice was able to do much for his mood on that first morning, or rather afternoon, of freedom.
It had been Enda's opinion that human physiology was briefly at fault-specifically, blood sugar-and she had brought him down a grimy, garbage-strewn street, under yet another dim, cloud-curdled sky to a banged-up wooden door set in an old blank stone wall. Inside was the Dive. The entry was itself uncomfortable enough. Even the gray day outside was bright compared to this place. It took a good few seconds for Gabriel to get his vision working. He must have looked like a gaping hick, standing there blinking into the darkness for some seconds. When his eyes were working again, he could see that everyone in the place-maybe eight people, scattered around the ill-lit booths and curtained-off tables- was staring at him. None of the looks were friendly, and to tell the truth, Gabriel would not have wanted any of them to be friendly, to judge from the general looks of the people. They were unkempt and ill-favored, and they sat hunched over their food or drinks like men and women who thought that, as a gen
eral rule, strangers should be shot or-better yet-knifed, since lanth cells and bullets cost money.
Enda paid them no mind at all but led Gabriel over to an unoccupied booth and made him sit down. It was hard. Gabriel wanted to grab a scrub brush and attend to the table, the benches on either side, and some square meters of the floor before actually coming in contact with them.
"Not now," Enda hissed at him, good-humoredly enough, and Gabriel sat, though he kept shifting and twitching in the seat.
After a little while the food came, and Gabriel had to try to do something about it, though mostly he wished what he had done was to order just bread and kalwine, as Enda had. The soup was highly suspect to the scrupulous palate of a marine-a former marine, he kept telling himself, while still finding it somehow impossible to believe-and the atmosphere got worse, not better, as the other habitues of the Dive got used to his and Enda's presence there enough to begin ignoring it. The group over at one of the curtained corner tables in particular got noisily jocular-at Gabriel's expense, he thought, but their dialect was so thick that it was hard to tell for certain. Then they got obscene, and finally they began to sing, which to Gabriel's eventual astonishment turned out to be even worse than the obscenity. It wasn't that the song itself was rude. It was innocuous enough-but not one of the entities present had the faintest idea what key they were in.
"Now my newfound friends My money spends Almost as fast as winkin', But when I make
To clear the slate, The landlord says, 'Keep drinkin'! '
Oh, Lord above,
Send down a dove
With beak as sharp as razors
To cut the throats
Of them there blokes
What sells bad beer to spacers-"
It was a universal sentiment, or at least one that Gabriel had heard before on other planets, in other company, and sung in recognizable keys. The poignancy of the contrast between then and now made his eyes sting. He worked to master himself, intent that whatever else he might do with this soup, he would not cry in it.
Gabriel glanced up at the fraal sitting across from him, calmly crumbling her bread into her plate, and wondered for about the thousandth time what to make of her. She had come from nowhere, given him clothes and guidance, and most bizarrely of all, hope. Even a grain of that was welcome at the moment. Enda was unquestionably a godsend. But questions were a matter very much on Gabriel's mind at the moment, and he was unable to simply let any recent occurrence, no matter which god was involved, go uninvestigated. He had been too trusting about letting other matters of late go that way. As a result, his life was changed out of all recognition. He was determined not to let it happen again. Enda was at least more somberly dressed than she had been on that first meeting, now in a dark coverall that favored the prison clothes Gabriel had been so glad to get rid of after the "suite." But there was no hiding the blue radiance of those eyes, and it was surely an illusion brought on by her natural paleness that made her seem to glow slightly in the darkness of the Dive. Gabriel was perfectly aware of the glances being thrown at Enda from some of those booths. Here and there a curtain would twitch back, eyes would gaze briefly out into the darkness, then the curtain would fall again. Enda went on with her eating, delicate and abstracted, and paid the watchers no mind-or at least, she seemed not to. She had already often given Gabriel the impression that she was watching everything but making an art of seeming not to.
Of course there was always a slight sense of mystery about any fraal, even though they were the alien species that humans had known the longest. Partly this had to do with their innate sense of privacy. They had long since lost their homeworld and many of the talents and treasures associated with it, but they did not generally trumpet the fact or bewail their fate. They got on with life as they found it, which included humans and other species, and they handled it in the ways that best suited them.
Gabriel knew that by and large there were two kinds of fraal, Wanderers and Builders. The former came of stock that, after leaving the fraal homeworld long ago, preferred to hold to the traveling lifestyle, moving from system to system in their city ships and avoiding too much contact (or, humans whispered, "contamination") with other species. The Builders, even before they came across human beings, were more committed to establishing colonies on planets. After their first official contacts with humans in the 22nd century, Builder-sourced fraal began to intermingle and intersettle freely with human beings. Gabriel often wondered whether any other of the known sentient species could have pulled off this coup so successfully, and often enough he doubted it. The fraal, however, had possessed an advantage. Earlier contact with their kind, in the centuries before human space travel, had made its mark on numerous human societies in terms of myths and images that had come to haunt the "racial psyche" of mankind. The recurring tales of slight, pale, slender people, human but not quite human, longer-lived than human beings and somehow involved with them-for good or ill-had been there for a long time, changing over centuries but never quite going away. When the fraal finally revealed themselves and their ancient settlements on Mars, the response was not the widespread xenophobia that might have been expected, but a kind of bemused fascination, as if the human race was saying to itself, Oh, it's only them. There were those, more paranoid than others, who had seen some kind of elaborate plot behind this, who were sure that the fraal had planted the stories or made those earlier clandestine visits to Earth as part of some obscure master plan having to do with domination or invasion. Later history made nonsense of this, of course, but there were still some who found the fraal, especially the Wanderers, too oblique for their liking.
Gabriel had no problem with fraal. There had been many communities of them on Bluefall and later on his other home. There had been some on Falada as well, though not as part of her marine complement: a few Star Force officers, one of them (Gabriel thought) a pilot who did shuttle work. The thought came before he could stop it. Not one of those I killed, thank everything. He winced, though. Suddenly there were whole great parts of his mind into which he could not venture without pain. Almost everything to do with being a marine, for example. The matter of his lost friends, and that last look of Elinke's, that had outstabbed any knife-
"Brooding at the soup will probably make it no warmer," Enda said mildly. "I believe entropy runs the other way."
"Sorry," Gabriel said. "Enda . . ."
"You will still be asking questions," she said, somewhat resignedly, "and under the present circumstances, indeed I understand why. But there are differences between the ways our two species order their priorities, despite our many likenesses. So I will probably not be able to satisfy you as to my motivations for a long time."
Gabriel sighed. "I don't want to seem ungrateful or suspicious, but you picked me up in a situation where any sane person would have dropped me."
"Perhaps that is why I picked you up," Enda said, crumbling a bit more of her loaf on the plate. "I do not care for littering."
She looked up just in time to catch what must have been a fairly annoyed looked from Gabriel. He regretted it instantly. "A resource thrown away," Enda said, as if she hadn't seen the look, "is in danger of being lost forever, unless it is salvaged quickly. I know many humans find altruism difficult to understand, but for some of us it is a lifestyle, one we count ourselves fortunate to be able to enjoy." She nibbled at a bit of the crumbled bread and said after a moment, "It is an error to say too much too soon, but this you will find out soon enough if our association continues. I too have known what it can be to be cast out of the society in which one has lived comfortably for many years. I Wandered for a long time. Eventually I decided to stop-a decision that sufficiently annoyed some of those with whom my path had lain so that they hastened the process considerably. I go my own way now, but the settled life is not for me."
She cocked an eye at him, an amused look. Gabriel's face must have been showing a great deal of what he was thinking, mostly along the lines of 'If our association continues?
Peculiar as it was, uncomfortable as it had made and still was making him, he did not want to lose it.
"Uh," Gabriel said, "I don't think I'm in any position to make any judgments about anyone else's lifestyles at the moment."
"That is well," said Enda slowly, and took a long drink of her wine, "which, I suppose, leaves us with the same question we had earlier. What will you do?"
By itself that was a question that had given Gabriel enough to think about. A marine didn't have to do much thinking about it- you went where you were sent, and it wasn't your business why you were going where you were going or which stellar nation controlled the territory. That was your superior officers' business. Suddenly, though, all of space was spread out in front of Gabriel. And he didn't have a clue where to go.
Thirteen stellar nations inside the Ring. Well, twelve actually. The Galactic Concord and its neutralities were shut to Gabriel, at least if he wanted to remain free. But elsewhere lay wide choice, depending on how you defined personal freedom and the ways it was implemented. There was the unbridled profiteering capitalism of the Austrin-Ontis worlds, the robotic-oriented hedonism of the StarMech Collective, Insight's freewheeling information-based mysticism, the Nariac workers' "paradise," the fierce pride of the Thuldan Empire, the ancient wealth and history of the Union of Sol, the competitive corporate wealth and ferocity of VoidCorp, the Orlamu Theocracy's hungry search for the knowledge that constituted the key to its universe. Theoretically, Gabriel might find a spot in any of them, though again he would have to consider carefully how to avoid running afoul of the Concord's ban. And outside the Ring was always "Open Space," the huge areas that during the Second Galactic War were largely devastated-at least in the direction "toward" the other stellar nations. Out beyond the spaces of shattered worlds rendered unlivable by bioweapons, who knew what possibilities lay? Perhaps it was on purpose that the Concord had made no attempt to do much mapping that way. Perhaps it was a tacit admission that though the Galactic Concord had designated this the last area of human territory, their writ could not truly run so far. The vast distances from the rest of civilization made Open Space, for the moment, effectively ungovernable. Maybe the free spirits of the galaxy who wanted nothing to do with any other races might move out that way, but Gabriel was too gregarious to seek that kind of life, and anyway, it went against the grain in other ways. To find out what had been done to him, he must not run away from the populated spaces but toward them. And do what?
