Blade of p’Na

by L. Neil Smith

  “How interesting,” I observed. Not having a weapon, or any way to use it, I’d stayed in the veek, considering whether to crawl under it. “Either Misterthoggosh has a unique way of saying goodbye to visitors…”

  “We weren’t visitors, remember?” The boss shook his head. “Anyway, that’s only what we’re meant to believe. I smell a different kind of rat.”

  “Or, I was about to say, Lyn Chow’s enemies are our enemies,” I said to Eichra Oren as I hopped from the veek onto the road. “Look at this,” There was a slight dip in the surface here, and it was filled to a depth of two or three inches with water that had nothing to do with the falling rain. The hem of the boss’s tunic was drenched from having knelt in it. It gave off a distinct, not unpleasant marine odor, more brackish, my highly educated nose informed me, than really salty.

  “From the volume,” I added, “I’d guess that their veek was filled with saltwater.” It suddenly occurred to me that I was getting soaked for the third time today, and it wasn’t getting to be a bit more enjoyable.

  Pocketing his deceptively diminutive pistol, Eichra Oren nodded. “I concur, Sam. You know the road-owner’s representatives are going to be along any minute now. Let’s see whether we can discover something useful about our attackers before they start stomping through the evidence.”

  The worthies he’d mentioned—mostly security muscle—didn’t have much use for forensics. They simply wanted to keep the traffic rolling.

  “How about this, then?” I pointed my nose toward the skirt of our veek where it had been intimate with our former assailant’s machine. There wasn’t any dent, of course. The stuff a veek is made from is more resilient than that. But embedded, like a throwing knife, in the rubbery material, there was the great big claw of some kind of giant marine crustaceanoid, perhaps a foot long and at least six inches wide.

  “Sea scorpion,” we both said at the same time. The species, almost as ancient as that of the Elders, enjoy a not entirely undeserved reputation for violence. Frequently employed as security personnel, “leg-breakers”, and enforcers for shady underworld figures (possibly like Misterthoggosh), it is popularly held that they are a naturally combative species, their home culture given to nearly continuous warfare.

  Or so I’m told. I’ve known members of the same species who were poets. But I also knew somebody had died hard, before giving up this claw.

  “Let’s cover it with something waterproof,” Eichra Oren advised, “to protect it from the rain, and make sure that the road-owner’s investigators bag and preserve it for further analysis. With a little luck, we may be able to identify the individual it used to belong to.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much else left of the guy.” I had found and brought a synthetic shopping bag from the veek. I let him do the handy work, since he was the one of us with hands. Now I was sniffing carefully around the wreckage. Seaweed, iodine, a barnacle or two, but there really wasn’t any detectable trace of a driver, sea scorpionoid or otherwise. I was about to wonder aloud about the pilot of the flyer, when Eichra Oren included me in an implant call that he was making.

  “Ray’s Marine Salvage,” came the reply. The voice was cheerful. The image was unusually dark and murky, but I already knew what the speaker looked like. “This is Ray speaking. Hello, Eichra Oren. Hello, Sam.”

  “Hullo, Ray. We’ve got a job for you if you can spare the time.” There followed a flood of Eichra Oren’s memories of the attack. The emphasis was on the downed flyer. (From time to time an involuntary flash of Lornis’ pretty face and parts south appeared for a fraction of a second.) It’s always interesting to look at the world through his eyes. He sees plenty that I miss. I make up for it with my olfactory lobes.

  “Whoo! Plenty of action and adventure in the neighborhood today!” Ray said. “Yes, I can help out—I’m thoroughly bored with this job, which I’m doing for free for my idiot brother-in-law. I’ll be right there.”

  Within minutes, another flyer hovered a few feet over the spot where the first had gone down in flames. Thanks to its antigravs, the water beneath it was smooth and still. A trapdoor on its underbelly opened; the broad form of a sapient mantoid was momentarily visible, splashing into the water below. It was followed by two smaller splashes.

  “Relax, boys,” said a voice in our minds. “Ray’s Salvage is on the job!” We soon began to see pictures in our heads, as well as hearing voices.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Garden Club

  I NEVER DID GET MY EVENING WITH NATSROMY OR MY bolhabaissa. Morning found us both at Lyn Chow’s home, high in the hills above the museum she ran, which you could see, looking like a clutch of giant eggs, from the edge of her lawn, where the terrain suddenly dropped off.

  The curator’s home appeared to be made of adobe brick, like nearly everybody else’s in the area, topped with a red tile roof. But it was different, too, its door and window frames made from dark hardwood. The steeply-pitched roof curved upward slightly at the corners, with carved beams to complete them. There was a wide front porch with mild force-fields to keep the insects out, and on either side of the broad steps that led up to it, stylized pottery lions that were about my size.

  I’ve been told this architecture and decor followed the manner popular up in the northeast quadrant of the Great Continent. It was okay.

  We were greeted at the door by one Rebul Grop Thiekul, a small (for a sapient) spider of one of the jumping clans. At first, we took her as a nurse, but it turned out she was Lyn Chow’s one-time college room-mate, professional associate, and best friend, who had arrived by ballistic rocket from the upper Island Continent where she operated a museum centered on arachnids of all sizes from everywhere else in alternity. Her symbiote was a spider, too, an enhanced red-legged tarantula.

  “Please call me Reeb—nearly everybody does. This is Rosie.”

  Rebul was very nearly as pretty as the client who had engaged us—it seemed now like a hundred years ago—to ferret out her missing betrothed. Her fur was banded, light gray and dark gray, from the nape of her cephalothorax to the spinnerets at the tip of her abdomen. Her legs and palps were upholstered tastefully the same way. Her eyes were shiny black, all eight carried in a row around the front of her head.

  I like that in a spider.

  She smelled good, too.

  She led us into the house under whitewashed and timbered ceilings, where a big bed was set up in the middle of what appeared to be the living room. I could see a lot of medical devicery tubing and cables underneath, and machinery for lifting and lowering sections of the bed. There was a handsome, brick-lined fireplace, a working desk in a corner under a window, and the walls, for the most part, were covered with bookshelves, a distinctly old-fashioned but warmly comforting touch.

  Most of the books they housed were rectilinear, with printed leaves or pages, something thousands of known cultures have in common. Some were scrolls of various designs. Others were more exotic than that. I stopped counting after my implant recognized the fiftieth language.

  Sitting in a farm-grown chair near the fireplace, with a slim, streamlined canine at his knee, a man came to his feet as we entered, waiting to be introduced. His clothing looked expensive and he was faultlessly groomed. He had been examining one of Lyn Chow’s many books. It was in Grumlian, the product of large, sapient bear-like creatures.

  “Lyn,” Rebul spoke softly, touching what appeared to be her dozing human friend on the forearm with a gentle palp. “Your pair of handsome rescuers have come to see you.” The curator’s color was better today than it had been, and she looked rested, but still tired. The medics had said she’d lost about as much blood as a human being can without dying.

  Lyn Chow opened her eyes, looked at us, and smiled wearily. “Thank you, Reebie.” The head end of the bed began to tilt upward, probably by implant command. “Please sit down, Eichra Oren, Sam. This fellow is Helmore Bracken, Chairman of the Directors’ Council for the Otherworld Museum. Helmore, these are Eichra Oren,
the famous p’Nan debt assessor and his colleague Sam. Handsome rescuers indeed. Would any of you like something to…drink?” That much conversation seemed to have worn her out. We declined. Eichra Oren found a chair. I looked around the room.

  “We hate disturbing you so soon, Lyn Chow,” the boss said. “But we need some questions answered, the first being who attacked you and why.”

  “We were just discussing that,” Bracken answered. “It has always seemed unnecessary and absurd to me to have such a security camera system. Who, after all, would think of robbing a museum, especially one as…esoteric as ours? But it seems that I was wrong. And it appears that the darkness limited the usefulness of the museum’s system.”

  “Because the system was so damned cheap,” observed Lyn Chow.

  Bracken cleared his throat but didn’t reply.

  Rebul added, “Which is probably why the intruders, whoever they were, were careful to open up the circuit breakers, putting out all the lights. During a power failure, opaque black is the security default mode for the museum’s polarized outer shell and office partitions.”

  “You’re certain there was more than one intruder?” I asked.

  Bracken answered, “Almost certain. It appears that too many things were happening in the place at one time to be the work of a single individual.”

  “Like what?” Eichra Oren wanted to know.

  Lyn Chow stirred, “The cameras can see into the infrared…”

  “They didn’t take anything,” said Bracken. “They didn’t break anything but the front door. But it appears that they were everywhere, examining everything. Whatever they wanted, I don’t think they found it.”

  Lyn Chow insisted weakly, “The cameras…infrared…”

  Eichra Oren got out of his chair and approached the injured woman. “What about those cameras, Lyn Chow, what is it you’re trying to tell us?”

  “I get it,” I said. “She’s trying to say her guests weren’t hot enough to register in the infrared.” Several sapient species are not warm-blooded.

  “Yes,” sighed Lyn Chow with obvious relief. “Yes.”

  Bracken looked as if he were feeling her pain. “It’s clear, my dear, that we are wearing you out. If you don’t mind, I’ll speak my piece, then go away and let you rest.” He stood, tugged on his clothing as if to make it fit better, and addressed my boss. “Eichra Oren, to suffer this outrage, this indignity, is simply unsupportable. The other members of the Directors’ Council and I discussed this through the night, and have come to a conclusion. With the consent and approval of our Curator, it is our wish to engage you professionally in this matter.”

  “By which you mean…” Eichra Oren let it dangle.

  “Discover who these people are, make them aware of the moral debt they have incurred, and persuade them, as you p’Nan Assessors do, to pay.”

  The boss looked down at Lyn Chow. “And this is all right with you?”

  She nodded.

  “Very well, then,” he said. “I have another client, another investigation I’m committed to; I don’t see why we can’t handle them together.”

  The number of alternative universes, or alternate realities, if you prefer, contained within a theoretically vastly greater super-universe of all there is, is considered infinite by the few physicists and philosophers conversant with the topic. I think there may be eleven.

  The same physicists, and some of the philosophers—you know philosophers—recognize three laws with regard to alternative universes. First, whatever universe you happen to inhabit, you perceive it as “most normal”—representing the highest probability—from which all other universes, to a greater or lesser degree, diverge.

  Second, all of the traits, attributes, characteristics, and so on, that make your universe seem unique, are distributed, throughout the other universes, along a sort of five-dimensional bell or “normal” curve.

  Pretty hard to imagine.

  Third, the relative difficulty—for which read the amount of energy necessary—of getting from your universe to any other is a measure of how far away that other universe happens to be from the bright center of “normality” that your universe represents. To put it another way, the less likely a universe appears to be—the lower the probability of its existence—the more energy it requires to get there.

  In the universe that Eichra Oren’s people originally came from, this has come to be known, by the descendants of those H. sapiens who were not rescued by the unethical Elders, but simply survived the deluge, as “Williamson’s Law”, after the philosopher who postulated it.

  There is a “universe next door” that may vary from yours only in the placement of a single grain of sand on some alien beach somewhere, light-years away from the planet your species evolved on. (In fact, nobody knows what creating such a divergence requires.) But in that universe, an individual exactly like you is living a life exactly like yours.

  You probably wouldn’t like him much.

  Law three-and-a-half is all about character. If you tend to “go with the flow”, live your life like the little ball in a pinball machine, driven from point to point solely by external forces, then it’s likelier that the “you next door” will be somewhat different from the one you know, his character having been formed—molded—by his reactions to purely random events over the decades, or by the acts of others.

  However, if you make your own way through life, directed by a strong, internally consistent and purposive nature, then there will be more individuals out there—more different versions of you—along the bell curve, in a wider range of positions, who are identifiably you-like. Go a little further out on the curve, in any direction, and that otherworld version of yourself employs his other hand to write, or likes a different kind of cheese, of has differently colored eyes, or died in childbirth, or in a veek collision, or—well, you get the picture.

  Relatively minor variations.

  Further out, and the person in that universe who is most like you, living in your space and time, is a simian of some sort. Or perhaps a sapient avian-dinosauroid like Aelbraugh Pritsch. Even further out, and it’s a sapient elephantoid with three trunks and a prehensile tail.

  Pushing it to the ridiculous, say to an alternative universe where the dominant species on Earth are cream cheese bagels, requires more energy to reach than even the Elders are capable of generating. By comparison, most of the worlds they have collected sapients from over a thousand millennia are of roughly the same degree of probability as theirs.

  All of this was uppermost in my mind as Eichra Oren and I stood at the doors of what was probably the oddest restaurant on the planet. Several planets, as a matter of fact. The customers’ road machinery in the parking lot looked a lot like the kind of equipment employed to refinish ceilings, or decorate a jai alai fronton for the holidays. It was clearly built for tall individuals incapable of sitting down. As with all public establishments in the Elders’ version of reality, a small device over the doorway generated a simple, tasteful sign in the mind’s eye of anybody nearby who had a computer thumbtacked to his forebrain.

  PRELBISH SOLATARIAN RESTAURANT

  Neither of us had an idea who or what a Prelbish was. We’d guessed about the “solatarian”. The boss had put on a pair of dark sunglasses in preparation for the coming ordeal. So had I—we’d had to pick them up at a specialty shop on the way here. I thought I looked like a cartoon.

  Now we passed through the door to be greeted by a…headwaiter? A tall person with whiskers that made me jealous and extremely short brown-gray fur. He was descended, I suspected, from naked mole rats. The guy was very polite and wore a tailcoat, probably to cover up his tail.

  I wondered if he was Prelbish.

  Or maybe a Prelbish.

  Before I could use my implant to look him or this Prelbish up, he spoke. “May I assist you, gentlebeings?” he asked through the vocal synthesizer in his lapel. “We don’t get a lot of humanoids in here, nor canines, for that matter. Which one is the sym
biote, if one may ask?”

  “One may,” I stepped in before the boss could reply. “On the other paw, one may not necessarily expect an answer that one will regard as satisfying.”

  The not-so-naked mole rat superciliated at us and started to look indignant, but Eichra Oren spoiled the effect. “We’re expected,” he said. “we’re here for lunch with Llossure Knarrvite, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Ah!” replied the maître d’hôtel or whatever. At least the guy recovered quickly. “In that case, please come with me.” He had an odd, rolling gait that had me revising my first guess. Probably an otter of some kind. I was grateful that at least he didn’t ask us to “walk this way”.

  Whatever he happened to be, we followed him into a main “dining” area that somehow managed to feel as big as the whole outdoors. Even with my silly sunglasses, the light inside the place was blindingly bright. The entire top of the building was transparent—consisting of a single gigantic lens of the kind that’s engraved with thousands of concentric grooves—and concentrated light from the sun and sky onto the strange room’s hundreds of occupants eighty or ninety feet below.

  In the center of the room stood a forty-foot conical structure, entirely covered with mirrors reflecting the roof light to the room’s walls. These slanted backward, like a square-sectioned funnel, or an inside-out pyramid and had moveable reflective surfaces, so that every square inch of the place provided light that might otherwise have gone to waste. Meanwhile, more than a hundred heavy air cooling vents and misting conduits kept the whole place from turning into a giant solar cooker.

  No sense, I thought, in baking the paying customers.

  Not surprisingly, the establishment smelled like a greenhouse or hydroponics setup. There was music of the variety some people call “classical” playing throughout the room. I remembered reading somewhere that plants supposedly grow healthier listening to boring stuff like that. Dark “resting rooms” said a sign, were available for a modest fee. I also remembered reading that periods without light are as important for plants as taking in all the photons possible at other times.