Blade of p’Na

by L. Neil Smith

  Hyppod considered. “You’re the man’s companion, aren’t you? His symbiote? His separable tentacle? And yet you’re a sapient in your own right?”

  My turn to nod. “Entirely by accident, I assure you. Somebody got a little careless with the gene-bashing, way back when. Call me his familiar—Canis familiaris—that’s me, all over. Now how may I help?”

  “Shrews,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “All we got was shrews.” As if on cue, one of the little creatures poked its nose out from under his armpit, then skittered down across his broad chest and disappeared behind the desk. It was quickly followed by two more. He bent forward, seized all three in his face-fingers, and put them in a pocket.

  Life is very odd. “You were saying, Mr. Hyppod?”

  Still hesitant, the big frilly-puss finally got it out. “Please inform him that we—the Investment Warren of Greater Kiflivopuws, that is—have conferred. We would like to engage his professional services as a debt assessor, not only to assess any moral debt that we may be accruing in our business undertakings with Misterthoggosh, but to investigate his activities and report to us with regard to their ethicality.”

  For once I was grateful that my eyebrows are invisible. As it was, I could feel them dancing around somewhere toward the back of my neck. “Ethicality”, was it? I wasn’t certain I’d ever heard the word before, or that it even properly existed. I would have been more than satisfied with the adjective, myself. But it was clear what he meant. “And these ‘activities’ you’ve mentioned. They would consist of…what?”

  The big burrower sighed. “That’s difficult, Sam—I may call you Sam?”

  “Sure you can—and I’ll call you Zart.” That was easy. Instant camaraderie.

  The giant rodent didn’t seem to hear me, although it was hard to tell. Personally, I like my faces with eyes, preferably great big ones. I’d thought those sunflower people were bad, but this was worse, somehow.

  I did see him blink, the movement exaggerated ten or twelve times by his spectacles. “Contractually, Sam, we are strictly forbidden to discuss the venture outside the circle of legitimately interested parties, or to supply information to anybody about it. Although I must confess, we know very damned little about it, ourselves, only that Misterthoggosh’s enterprises almost invariably bring in lots of money.”

  “That’s usually a good thing, isn’t it?” Just making conversation.

  “Yes, but our general feeling is that it may be counter-productive, to say the least, to make a lot of money like that, only to be sued for that much and possibly more for having violated someone else’s rights, or worse, being compelled to commit suicide to settle the debt.”

  I made a sympathetic noise of some kind. He leaned over toward a corner of his desk, to where a pair of tiny shrews held a sizeable cigar on end. Taking it from them with his face-fringe, and tucking it into his mouth, he let another pair of the little animals light it with a device they were holding. He took a couple of big drafts on the cigar, as the symbiotic shrews made themselves scarce once again. It was one of the oddest and most thoroughly repulsive things I’ve ever seen.

  “Very sensible,” I agreed. The concept of “limited liability” which I was aware existed in several different universes, had never been invented here, and would embarrass or outrage anyone who learned of it. In those alternities, when you invested in a company and the company did something bad, by accident or design, you, as a partner or shareholder, could be held responsible only up to whatever you had invested. Beyond that, you’re in the clear and your victims are screwed.

  Here, a weasely concept like that one runs straight into the face of everybody’s understanding that you’re ethically and financially responsible for whatever your “agent”—the company, which is not considered a person, in and of itself—may do. Your obligation, when something goes wrong, is to make the victim whole again, whatever that may require, up to and including the Assessor’s Sword, if that proves unavoidable. It makes for wiser, more cautious investors controlling higher-quality companies, instead of passing them off to hired hands; directors who may or may not be shareholders, themselves—usually not.

  In the end, I promised to get his message along to my boss, who would get back to him. I knew Eichra Oren would be happy; having a paying client would give him standing to go places and ask questions that might otherwise prove awkward. We said goodbye and I turned to my boss.

  “Gainful employment!” I announced. Of course he’d seen and heard the whole conversation. “But we were discussing other matters, were we not?”

  “I’m glad you asked me that question, Sam. I’ll deal with Hyppod first thing tomorrow morning. The stuff our vegetable victim was inhaling—well, maybe that isn’t quite the word, inhaling—was nothing special, as near as I can determine. Dried and powdered flowers—not from his own species, of course—bonded into stick form so it will smolder. My own mother uses at least a ton of the stuff every year. In short, it’s nothing more than simple everyday incense.”

  “Unless you happen to be allergic.” It made me want to sneeze just thinking about it. I suddenly realized that to the sapient flower entities, it was the equivalent of enjoying the odor of smoldering flesh. Then I thought about meat roasting on a spit over an open fire, one of the most thoroughly enjoyable odors in all of the Known Universes.

  “There is that.” He drew on his cigar. I found that smell to be quite acceptably pleasant, but I’d grown used to it over many years. “I wonder if plants can be allergic.” He shook his head irritably, as if to get the stray thought out of his mind. Myself, I’m entirely constructed of stray thoughts—no doubt a product of sideways thinking.

  “And the sticky gunk that he was paddling his toes in?” I asked.

  He started to get really excited. My boss is an extremely strange being. “Ah! That’s the interesting thing, Sam. Molasses, for the most part.”

  “Yes, I knew about that. You could smell it all over, at least I could.” It wasn’t a smell that I cared for, particularly. No sweet tooth.

  “Plus,” he added, “a considerable handful of harmless minerals and vitamins.”

  “Makes sense,” I admitted. But I knew he was saving the best for last.

  “And lots of heavy metals, Sam. Lead, arsenic, uranium, cesium, strontium. I looked it up. Llossure Knarrvite’s species have an odd affinity for metals like that. The stuff isn’t good for them, any more than mercury is for tuna fish, but they soak it up like sponges. In fact, their closest nonsapient relatives are often used in industrial civilizations to clean the soil up after some kinds of accidental contamination.”

  I was impressed. “Does it kill them?”

  “I don’t think so.” He dropped his cigar ash onto the floor, where a tiny mechanical creature popped out of the baseboard to take it away quickly. “There’s some speculation that this affinity may have caused mutations that led to their evolving mobility and sapience in some universes. But the dosage in that pan of molasses was a hundred times worse than any natural occurrence or industrial accident I ever heard of.”

  I nodded, a human gesture I had learned from him. “So he was poisoned.” Who by, how, and why were questions we hadn’t been paid to answer.

  “He was poisoned—and the amazing thing is that he’s still alive. I contacted the restaurant a few minutes ago to tell them what I’d discovered, thinking it might help him if they knew. They were grateful enough, but he’s absorbing distilled water in the dark—a common form of therapy among his people—and already feeling much better. They may be compelled to prune him a little, but he’ll grow back.”

  “Damn! Tough people,” I observed.

  Eichra Oren nodded. “The toughest.”

  I had a sudden thought. “Hey, boss, what do you suppose they do with all those nonsapient flowers once they’ve absorbed as much heavy metal as they can? I imagine that burning them outdoors would only release the poisons into the atmosphere—or possibly concentrate the stuff in the ashes,
making it even more poisonous than it was to begin with.”

  “I don’t have any idea, Sam. Give me a chance to wash up—my tolerance for heavy metals isn’t that high—and we’ll find some dinner.”

  “Sounds good to me, Boss.” I thought about the plant guy and his not quite cannibalistic taste in incense. “Steak for me, and well done!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Death in the Morning

  IT SAYS HERE THAT COFFEE IS BAD FOR DOGS. THAT IT’LL make my heart beat faster, mess with my calcium level, and do all kinds of other bad things.

  I like the stuff better than the boss does—I think my implants run on it—and it’s never hurt me. Hard to imagine getting started every morning without it. We have an automated coffee maker that grinds beans from a hopper, pours hot water over them, and cleans up afterward. What I’d like is a coffee faucet, right between the hot and cold. Maybe a beer faucet, too. I’m a creature of habits, all of them bad.

  We got rolling a couple hours earlier than usual: when Ray has a job, he starts his operation at dawn. He’s a sapient mantoid, related to sharks and skates, but with a big, powerful brain between his eyes. In their original state, his people were filter feeders, meaning they strained plankton—tiny plants and animals—out of the water they swam in. As these things go, it’s a relatively easy way to make a living, allowing plenty of spare time and energy for thought, which is one way (mortal stress being the other) that a species ends up being sapient.

  Sapient, civilized mantoids filter the water within their homes mechanically—it’s considered barbaric to have food floating around everywhere—and they tend to like soups of every imaginable kind. Whenever we find something new, the boss and I take a sample for Ray to try out. What he likes best is chicken broth with sesame oil, bamboo shoots, wood ear mushrooms, day lily buds, white pepper, and tofu.

  So do I.

  So on the way to the long pier where he berths his amphibious flying machine, we stopped by a place we knew well and bought Ray a gallon of hot and sour soup, another crosstime delicacy courtesy of many cooking programs received from other worlds, meaning courtesy of Misterthoggosh and his friends. After our visit, the restaurant would have to make a whole new batch to get them through the day. Ray is big—twenty-five feet, “wingtip” to “wingtip”—and has an appetite to match.

  There’s nothing quite like dawn along a shoreline. Any shoreline. Everything looks and feels and smells fresh and clean. The rising sun throws orange reflections and the dew is still glistening on the saltgrass. The birds and bees and clams and crabs are starting a new day, and the water is often glassy smooth, like a slowly undulating mirror. Overhead, the seagulls circle and make noises, looking for breakfast.

  But by the time we were a mile from Ray’s, we knew it would be no ordinary morning. In the calm air, a smoke column arose from what had to be the old shed at the end of his pier. Eichra Oren talked the veek into putting on more speed; we got there faster than we really wanted to.

  Our fears heightened as we pulled up beside a dozen emergency hovercraft—fire insurance, commercial security, medical, all of them completely useless after the fact—parked at various angles at the foot of the pier, their colored lights still swirling, their former occupants milling around, seemingly without purpose. Out of our veek, the boss displayed his sword-of-office to those few who didn’t know him, exchanging professional grim looks and nods with those who did.

  Captain Stomos Revyek, a human we both respected and knew well, approached us, wearing the protective livery of a fire insurance company. His symbiote, a handsome Dalmatian named Bandegrel, followed sedately—with his notoriously excitable breed, it’s an acquired art.

  “Eichra Oren!” Stomos, a tanned, dark-haired individual, usually clean-shaven, but already with five-o’clock shadow this early in the morning, pulled a heavy glove off and shook hands with my boss—and then with me. “You fellows want to be witnesses? We’re just about to extract the data from Ray’s implants, maybe even get a look at his killer.”

  We followed dog and man down to the pier.

  That’s how we learned that Ray, himself, was now beyond fear, or much of anything else. Mantoids are aquatic, but they can “breach”, leap completely out of the water, like porpoises do—even higher than porpoises, because their winged, flattened bodies form natural airfoils.

  We found a coveralled technician, humanoid, kneeling over our dead friend, filling little vials with various organic samples, observed by his companion, an enormous cybernetically enhanced feline. The man had curly hair and penetrating blue eyes. What was left of Ray was lying lifeless on his back across the pier, dangling off of both edges, just this side of his weathered equipment shed, both of his squid wrapped tightly around the plastic stock and forend of a massive automatic speargun.

  Both squid? Every individual among the Appropriated Persons seems to have a different preference when it comes to a symbiote. I’m one of a rare few who possesses sapience of his own—Eichra Oren had wanted a companion and assistant. Our friend Ray, like other marine sapients lacking hands, chose squid—enormous, leopard-spotted, larger than I am—controlling them with his implant, using all twenty tentacles as fingers.

  Land sapients sometimes employ monkeys in the same way. I have never cared much for monkeys. They’re evil-minded and have filthy habits.

  Ray had a “clasper” rooted on either side of his face, a thick, boneless limb intended by Auntie Evolution to sweep plankton into his mouth, as well as to hold onto lady mantoids at whatever serves their species as the Supreme Moment. I don’t really want to know. He thought of them as arms, stationing his domesticated cephalopods at the end of each.

  It looked pretty odd, but it worked. Like separable tentacles, he could also send the squid off on errands. I’ll bet that Ray was a lot of fun at parties—especially if somebody manufactured an underwater piano.

  At last, the technician stood with his kit, degloved, tugged his coverall into shape, gathered his feline symbiote, nodded to Stomos, and took his leave. My guess was that the squid had expired from a massive neural overload when the sapient they were linked to had died violently.

  The barrel-shaped magazine of Ray’s speargun—a formidable weapon and one of the more interesting applications of antigravity technology I knew about—normally carried a couple hundred long wire darts. The device lay emptied, now, its actuator handle locked back in place. If I knew Ray, somebody had left this pier looking like a porcupine. But they had taken care about being identified. Where Ray’s implants—and brain—had been, was now a big, bloody, rough-edged hole.

  At least a dozen seagulls wheeled and squealed overhead like the oceangoing vultures they are. Bandegrel growled. He was a dog of few words.

  “Well,” said our fireman friend disgustedly. “So much for that. Cold-blooded and crafty, whoever did this, destroying the evidence afterward. I knew Ray and I liked him. He certainly didn’t deserve this.”

  “Nobody does,” offered Bandegrel. Like I said, few words.

  Eichra Oren shook his head. “Not necessarily all that crafty. Have your men search in a tight spiral, the pier and the spaces beneath it and adjacent to it, starting here at the body. That’s a laser wound. Lasers kill by converting water in the tissues to steam, causing an explosion—”

  “I get it!” Stomos nodded. “Very well, firefighters to me!” The milling crowd suddenly seemed purposeful, all of them streaming in our direction, the air-breathers would carefully search the shoreline, as well.

  The search, for as long as it lasted, was out of our hands. Stomos had called in a squad of sea scorpionoids, water breathers, with a trained collection of highly-educated non-sapient octopi—like a pack of underwater bloodhounds, straining at the leash—to scour the seabed underneath and all around our late friend Ray’s former place of business.

  Eichra Oren and I took our temporary leave.

  Nobody I’ve ever known—or at least respected—believes, when they breathe their final breath
, that the world dies with them. Or ought to. Poor Ray, who had been fuller of life than most people, least of all.

  Although we weren’t exactly unaffected by the mantoid’s violent and messy death—without having to rely on my implant, I could feel Eichra Oren’s resolve to deal with our friend’s murderer or murderers—we still had a gallon of perfectly good breakfast soup, cooling off in the back seat of the boss’s veek, that we were in no way going to waste. We still hadn’t had breakfast, a fact becoming more and more evident as my empty stomach began growling and Eichra Oren’s made it a duet.

  Give the Antarctican points for practicality. He directed the veek to find its way back to the local headwaters for hot and sour soup, a place called “Noddle’s Noodles”, where we had just been about an hour ago.

  Noddle Sarn belongs to an insectoid species that descended from something like a praying mantis. In their version of reality, they occupy the entire planet, pole to pole. They have good electronics, good transportation—including interplanetary space travel—and excellent medicine. Many of those Appropriated from their world are physicians.

  The proprietor of Noddle’s Noodles was considered something of an eccentric by his own people, and something of a genius by everybody else. He enjoyed preparing and serving meals to as many different sapient species as possible, employing recipes gleaned from the media of other worlds. He specialized in a variety of human food called “Asian”.

  The proprietor met us at the entrance, where a lighted display announced that today’s special would be mashed aphids in locust gravy. Eichra Oren and I decided we’d pass. As the boss explained why we were back, I gave the insectoid restauranteur a thorough looking-over. He had gigantic beige-colored eyes that wrapped around his head, giving him a 360 degree view of his surroundings. The exoskeleton bulging behind them housed an extremely competent brain. The rest of his face tapered abruptly to a complicated set of deceptively delicate-looking mouthparts.