Threshold

by Janet Morris

  "We'll be loaded into the cargo area of my ship, and I'll have different identification. So will you. The Brows will make sure we look like the people on our papers, and sound right too. Don't worry!"

  She broke away from him. "How can I not?"

  "Because I'm your husband—or will be."

  "Oh, if only Secretary Croft would have married us!"

  Rick Cummings spun her around. "But he didn't, did he? I've been planning this ever since Dad showed up to get us out of Croft's clutches. Even before. I know my father. I know how he thinks, the way his mind works. On the Nostril, we'll be married in the grandest style. And no Medinan thugs are going to find us, or terrorize us, or stop us. I promise." He gave her a little push. "Now, are you coming, or not?"

  "What choice have I?" If she'd refused to go with Rick, things would have been even worse for her. She would be alone, a violated woman helpless before Medinan justice. And she loved Rick. She was sure she loved him.

  The mocket was whining at the study door.

  Rick Cummings said, "Come on. Let's go get the Brows." As he hurried down the hall, he didn't even look back to see if she would follow.

  But she did. And when the door opened, revealing the Brows who sat up on their hind legs in delight and made little cluttering noises, Dini knew everything would be all right.

  When one Brow came scampering over with a Leetle for her, she knelt down to take it. "Oh, thank you," she crooned to the Brow. Its tiny black fingers curled around one of hers. With her other hand, she carefully took the proffered Leetle and popped it into her mouth.

  Dini closed her eyes in delight. Leetles were bad for most people, but most people didn't have Brows. Leetles made communicating with the Brows much easier. And Leetles made all the anxiety inside you melt away as if it were snow on a mountain peak in summer. Anxiety was fear of the future, and the Brows helped you mold your future.

  She looked up at Rick, who had one Brow on his shoulder and the second in his arms. He was beaming.

  "Ready for our great escape?"

  Of course she was.

  Dini picked up her Brow and it scrambled up to perch on her shoulder. Its tail curled around the back of her neck and the tip of it beat against her breastbone.

  "Come on, Pepi; come on." She called her mocket, and it came up, wagging its tail.

  "Here, take the Leetle feeder cage." Rick handed her the cage, which let the Brows get at only a certain number of Leetles per day. It had been very generous of her Brow to offer her that Leetle.

  But she'd really needed it.

  Out they went, down the stairs: Rick, his two Brows; herself, her mocket on its leash, a Brow balanced on her shoulder; the cage of Leetles, in her hand.

  And as Rick had predicted, a small van was waiting. They all climbed in the back. The driver shut the door, got in front, and swivelled his seat to hand Rick some documents.

  "Okay, sir?"

  Rick looked the documents over. "Perfect. Just perfect." He handed a set of documents to Dini. "You're a NAMECorp employee, Dini. How does it feel?"

  She looked at the papers, which said she was a female exobiologist named Mackenzie, and a qualified pilot as well.

  "How will we ever pull this off?"

  "The Brows," said Rick confidently. "Just be brave, and show your Brow how you want people to react to you, and everything will be fine."

  And everything was fine, all the way to the dock, where they went aboard a ship of some kind through a cargo-loading hatch that fit the back of the van like a glove.

  She never saw the outside of the ship.

  Inside, she'd never encountered a ship this small, or this complicated-looking. She put the cage of Leetles down where Rick told her to, and the Brow jumped off her shoulder.

  Her mocket tugged on its leash. Once Rick had said farewell to the NAMECorp men and closed the ship up tight, she let the mocket go.

  It wanted to explore with the Brows, who were climbing over and under everything.

  "Dini, come sit up here with me," her beloved called.

  She did, and sat for the first time in the cockpit of a starship.

  She could hardly believe it was a starship, it seemed so tiny. But despite the small control area, and the even smaller viewscreens, the ship had a galley and two cabins and a lounge and a cargo bay.

  Rick was caressing the control panel, a look of total concentration on his face.

  Finally he sat back. "Here we go, Dini. Next stop, freedom!"

  "Next stop, home for you," she told the Brow who'd put one little black hand on her thigh and was now trying to crawl into her lap.

  She shooed it.

  "Let him up here. I might have to talk to the traffic controller, and if I do, he'll be handy to have around."

  But, evidently, Rick did not have to talk personally to anyone. Everything seemed to be handled by the ship's artificial intelligence. Lights lit. A roar began. Numbers flickered on controls she didn't understand. And in the rear, somewhere, a vibration and then a roar began.

  Belts came out of the seat and she was secured in a harness.

  "Just sit back, enjoy the ride," Rick crowed. "We'll be out of pursuit range in less than four hours."

  They weren't out of pursuit range yet. But soon enough. The ship started moving.

  "What's that, Rick?" Her hands were at her throat. One Brow was perched on the headrest of her acceleration couch.

  "The power plant, silly. We're beginning to move. Easing out of the slip. The next thing you feel will be thruster burn. ..."

  Rick Cummings kept up a general description of what was happening until, triumphant, he said, "We're on our own. Course laid in."

  And she felt the acceleration rip through her as her beloved aimed their vessel at the stars—at freedom, safety, and a whole new life, beyond the reach of her father's domineering hand.

  CHAPTER 20

  Second Thoughts

  Riva Lowe slipped into Mickey Croft's modeling chamber, feeling like a criminal skulking around in the dark.

  Inside, she felt her way as her eyes adjusted to the dim, multicolored illumination of ready lights and standby modes on consoles.

  Lowe sat at the padded control console and powered up the main screen. A tiny point of light appeared at its center and blossomed before her.

  The modeler was ready to go.

  She had no business being here right now, let alone using her precious modeler time for what she wanted to use it for. But it was her modeler time, that she'd wheedled out of Mickey. She could use it for whatever she pleased.

  She leaned her forehead on her hand. She should never have decided to review the scavenger's log, that was the problem.

  She should have gone back to her apartment and gotten some much-needed sleep. People who are overtired make mistakes, and she was as prone to error as anyone else in the advanced stages of sleep deprivation.

  Riva Lowe had no idea when she'd slept last. She was so tired she couldn't remember exactly how old she was—what the number attached to her last birthday had been.

  She'd better pull out of it. She'd better get herself together. It didn't matter how old she was, but it mattered that she couldn't decide whether she was thirty-eight or thirty-nine. One was supposed to know these things. She could figure it out, but she wasn't sure she wanted to do that.

  When she'd looked at the scavenger's log, she'd had the damnedest reaction to the footage of the ball. She'd felt. . . disturbed by it. She'd been especially disturbed by the image of her finger touching the ball. Every time she ran it, she saw again the strange vistas that she'd imagined when she touched it. An EVA can skew you, sometimes. A bad oxygen mix, a tiny mistake by the in-suit chemical optimizer.

  Maybe that was what had happened. When she'd run the log in her office, Riva Lowe had been so tired that she'd nearly dozed off, waiting for the data to come up. Once she'd started to view it, she'd been wide-awake.

  Viewing that log was like reliving the experience. More vivid, even
. Perhaps she'd been underestimating how violently she'd reacted to the whole interval. Every time she heard Keebler's chatter, it set her teeth on edge.

  But she'd repeatedly run the log sequence during which she'd touched the ball. Over and over. When she looked at her housekeeping system, the system said that she'd run that log twelve times.

  It was almost addictive, to run the tape and watch the vista in her mind's eye. The lavender sky. The ringed planet in the mist. The big-eyed . . . She stopped thinking about it. So she was having some weird psychological aftereffects from the EVA. Happened to the overworked and over-achieving sort of civil servant now and again.

  She'd apply for a few days leave. And she'd give it to herself. As soon as this was over.

  Sure she would.

  The modeler before her waited patiently. She'd told herself that she'd come here to model the scavenger, Keebler, because the tape chatter had been disturbing. Because she needed to define action parameters for the scavenger so that she could efficiently predict his behavior.

  Now that she was here she knew that she'd been fooling herself. The person she really wanted to model was Joe South.

  What a scandalous waste of the government's time and Mickey's money. What a foolish, adolescent, thing to do.

  She wasn't going to do it. She was a trusted professional. If Mickey ever found out she'd used her modeling time on a Relic, his estimation of her would take a nosedive.

  If she let herself do it, so would her own.

  So she set up parameters for modeling the scavenger.

  She had plenty of file data on Keebler. She had speech patterns and behavior matrices. She had whole reaction grids because of the time they'd spent together on the ship.

  She fed the data into the modeler and waited.

  When the modeler had digested the physical and behavioral information on Keebler, it blinked READY.

  Lowe pressed a key to continue, and above the modeler console, a holographic image of the scavenger from the neck up appeared.

  She put her finger on the joystick and rotated the head three hundred and sixty degrees.

  Then she pressed the initializing function, and the modeler's AI brought Keebler to life.

  No longer was she looking at the holographic ghost of a face. She could see Keebler's head in all its greasy glory, complete to enlarged pores and crow's-feet.

  The image was so good, it was spooky. She rubbed her arms. She was almost hesitant to talk to this thing. If it really had been the actual disembodied head of Keebler up there, she would have felt no more hesitancy.

  She said, "Keebler, tell me about the ball."

  "It's gonna make me rich 'n' famous," leered the head.

  "How can you know that?" she asked, overcoming her reluctance to be brusque by reminding herself that this wasn't Keebler, that Keebler would never know she'd asked these questions or what answer, if any, his simulacrum gave her.

  The modeled head of Keebler said, "I seen inside it. I seen . . . what to do."

  "And what's that?"

  "Open her up. It's waitin' fer it."

  "It's waiting for what?"

  "It's waitin' fer me to open her up. Then I'll be rich 'n' famous."

  Riva Lowe leaned so far back in her chair, arms dangling, that her fingertips brushed the floor. Of course, the model wasn't a panacea. It could only draw likely responses from the base she'd given it. It couldn't tell her what it didn't know.

  "So what else can you tell me about the ball, Keebler?"

  "Only that, when I get her opened up, it's a whole new world fer me. I'm gonna be rich—"

  With an irritated snort, Riva Lowe hit the program's interrupt key.

  Keebler was frozen, mouth open, beady eyes narrowed with greed.

  This was no good. Or she was too tired to make anything of what she was seeing. She ended the sequence and the head of Keebler disappeared.

  Then, furtively, she took the data on Joe South from her breast pocket and put it into the modeler's slot.

  When she'd processed the image, it stared at her with more than human eyes.

  "Hi," she said, and felt ridiculous.

  "Hi," it said back.

  "What are you going to do next?" she asked it, because the insipid question was the only one she could think of, now that she had a model to question.

  "I have a mission," it told her.

  She knew that.

  "And then?"

  "Try to get another one."

  This, too, was useless. She was too tired. She asked the modeler to save the image. She had plenty of time left on Mickey's clock. She could come back after she got some sleep.

  Carefully, she returned the modeler to its standby mode and left, making sure the room was exactly as it had been, and that all its locks engaged as she thumbprinted out.

  She'd had the strangest urge to tell the model of South how uneasy she felt about the ball that Keebler had at spacedock. But what good was telling the model?

  By the time she'd reached her apartment, she was determined to tell South about this odd feeling.

  South should have a chance to view her log of the EVA with Keebler. She shouldn't send him into this without a proper briefing. Even though she couldn't evaluate the data yet, he had a right to be aware of it.

  Or so she told herself, when she wasn't telling herself that she was just making up an excuse to call the Relic pilot in the middle of the night.

  She put the apartment on a cleaning cycle, took a shower, and argued with herself: She'd go straight to bed; she could call South in the morning.

  If she insisted on briefing him right now, he'd think she was as crazy as a Relic. Or else he'd think she was a lonely woman pulling rank to get some company on a lonely night.

  She could have gone to one of Mickey's banquets, hobbed and nobbed her way through a full-dress crowd of heavyweights. But she was so busy, and so tired. . . .

  She was so disturbed by that EVA log.

  She was disturbed because she was tired. She was tired because she was disturbed.

  She got out of the shower bag and the bathroom dried her with solicitous, warm breath.

  Somehow, she found herself sitting by the vidphone on her bed, in her white robe, waiting for her paging system to find South and connect them.

  When it couldn't, she realized that South might already have left for spacedock with the scavenger. She verified that this was the case and then sat back, disappointed and yet relieved.

  She'd probably dreamed up this whole mini-crisis, complete with weird intuitions, to justify calling the Relic pilot in for briefing at this ungodly hour. If she'd found him, she would surely have given him her home number.

  Since STARBIRD, South, and his passenger had already left, according to Traffic Control, she wasn't in danger of making a fool of herself. At least, not tonight.

  She snapped off the vidphone, then got into her bed, still in her robe, and tried to go to sleep. But she couldn't.

  When the phone rang, she was so sure it was some sort of trouble about Keebler, South, and that accursed ball that her heart raced.

  Very unprofessional.

  So she tried to sound as if she weren't in bed, and she tried to seem like the good professional she was: "Riva Lowe here."

  "Director, this is Dodd from Secretary Croft's office. The Secretary asked me to call to inform you that Ms. Forat and Cummings III are not in their quarters, and we'd like your service to keep a collective eye out for them."

  Dodd was such a little twit. He delivered his bombshell with about as much urgency as he'd have displayed telling her that the vegetable for tomorrow's luncheon menu would have to be changed.

  "Whoa, Dodd. What's this 'quarters' stuff? I thought they were in custody."

  "Cummings, Junior, arranged with Mickey for the kids' bail on the drug charges. His lawyers are making a case that we don't have one—a case, that is. Technicalities, you know. So Mickey let them go over to the Cummings Building."

  "And they
're not there?"

  "Not at the moment. No one's really too upset yet. They're probably just out painting the town. But do alert your people. If they should try to leave, they're to be detained and this office alerted. We'll return them to the Cummings Building. Very gently. Very politely."

  Painting the town. Where did Croft get these guys? All passive voice and passive aggression. "If these kids aren't in the father's apartment, if they've snuck off somewhere and are out dancing and drinking, you'd better make sure that some very polite and very gentle Medinan hitmen don't get them before we do, Dodd. Now get off this line. I've got calls to make."

  It wasn't Dodd's fault that he was a born bureaucrat. It wasn't Lowe's fault that, when she gave the alert, nobody came up with anything resembling a sighting of the two adolescents.

  She instituted full security screening everywhere and started to get dressed. Sleep just wasn't in the cards tonight.

  Lowe was going back to the office, just in case the kids tried to get off Threshold in the next few hours. When you needed to handle something very delicately, it was best to handle it yourself.

  As for her feelings about Joe South and the scavenger's ball . . . both of those would have to wait.

  CHAPTER 21

  A Reason to Quit

  Reice always got the nasty jobs, the dangerous jobs, the jobs that the brass would have done themselves if they had the stones. It was almost enough to make him want to quit the service.

  You couldn't leave the task of finding the mullah's daughter and the NAMECorp heir to just anybody, he consoled himself. This was sensitive. That's why you needed somebody like him.

  "Find those kids before the mullahs do," were his orders. Remson the Great had come down from Blue Mid to brief him personally at ConSec HQ in Blue South. "Medinan law dictates the death penalty. Nobody wants a spark that could ignite full-scale violence among our visiting pilgrims, not with the conference still going on."