Blade of p’Na

by L. Neil Smith

  “Aelbraugh Pritsch! Come in!” Eichra Oren let the door open, but the dinosauroid stood his ground on the doorstep, his huge, silly toes splayed every which-way all over the entry mat, and didn’t enter. His lizard symbiote darted out of his feathers for a peek and darted back in.

  “My esteemed employer,” the avianoid began in a voice just as silly as his face. I wondered what he’d sound like if somebody woke him up in the middle of the night. Even sillier, I suppose. And if the bird entity ever tried breathing helium, the result would probably be something that only people of my species would be capable of hearing. “The Proprietor, Misterthoggosh, requests that you come and speak with him.”

  I hadn’t failed to notice that there was a long, low hovercraft, jet black and highly polished, idling on its inflated skirt in front of the house, separating dust from gravel. The rear windows—about sixteen of them—had been darkly tinted, and there was a pair of really tough-looking sea scorpionoids perched up forward in the pair of driving seats, the transparent plastic suits that kept their gills nice and wet gleaming in the sunlight. Over their environmental suits they wore heavy black weapons harnesses, complete with heavy black weapons.

  Thoughts about a fellow named “Capone” sifted unbidden into my head. I suddenly realized, from watching otherworld crime adventures, that we were about to be “taken for a ride”. Should we be honored or intimidated?

  “But your boss is a nautiloid,” I said, dark visions of squirmy underwater horrors filling my mind, mixed incongruously with flashes of fabled principalities like Chicago and Newark. “An ammonite, a cephalopod, a mollusc. His species lives underwater. He breathes the stuff. We could speak with him just as easily from here. Probably more easily.”

  I gave Eichra Oren a look, appealing to his judgment.

  The bird-sapient cleared his throat. “I greatly appreciate the lecture on marine taxonomy, however gratuitous it may have been. If I may, I would like to inquire, in turn, whether Eichra Oren is in the general habit of allowing a mere symbiote to speak for him in such a manner.”

  Another instance of the self-perceived lower classes being more jealous of their station in life than are the classes above them. I thought of at least half a dozen snappy comebacks, but Eichra Oren preempted me. “Sam is my partner, Aelbraugh Pritsch. He goes where I go and sees what I see. He hears better than I do, and has a much keener sense of smell. He also has an independent mind that I value highly.”

  “And,” he added, “he has a point.”

  Well, that took care of Year’s End, Year’s Beginning, Year’s Middle, and my next three birthdays all rolled together. My esteemed employer had certainly never said anything like that within my hearing before.

  “Even so,” the Elder’s avian aide insisted, “even so”. This was a damned silly conversation to be having, I thought, sitting here in our chairs, having to holler almost the full length of the house—or at least the length of the front room. I gathered Eichra Oren was miffed that the dinosauroid wouldn’t venture inside. “This business requires your physical presence, or so my employer has instructed me to assure you.”

  Eichra Oren said nothing, waiting the fellow out.

  At last: “He is prepared to compensate you handsomely for your time.”

  “I see,” said Eichra Oren. “In that case, I’ll just go and get my sword—” He bounced up and out of the room, headed for his sleeping quarters.

  The birdman blinked—and just barely avoided glancing over his shoulder at the hired muscle in the veek. “Sword? I believe that will be—”

  I got down and ambled over to the door. “My, er, partner is a p’Nan ethical debt assessor,” I told the feathered dinosaur flunky, “In many respects, Eichra Oren is that sword. So if your next word was going to be ‘unnecessary’, I suspect that you can forget about the whole thing.”

  “Erm, uh…” The fellow twiddled his powdery fingers together nervously. “Let us agree that I was about to say ‘acceptable’, shall we?”

  “Yes, let’s, shall we?” I smiled as toothily as I could, knowing perfectly well it’s not a pretty sight. I’ve never managed to figure out why, but something about Aelbraugh Pritsch brought out every bird-baiting reflex I possessed—or that possessed me. I was hoping the tough guys in the expensive veek got an eyestalk full, as well. I’ve yet to bite a sea-scorpionoid; could be they taste like lobster, too.

  By that time, Eichra Oren had arrived back among us, wearing a fresh tunic, and still strapping on the aforementioned item of lethal accoutrement. I indicated the pair of crusty-looking crustaceans who were waiting for us in the hovering limousine and asked him privately, via implant, “May I assume that you’re carrying your mother’s gift, as well?”

  He grinned and said aloud, “Don’t leave home without it.” The dinosauroid probably thought he was speaking of the debt assessor’s sword.

  Leaving the house, which secured itself behind us, we crossed the gravel drive to climb into the big, black road machine. A courtesy step descending from the opened door gave us an unnecessary boost and also helped keep us from getting too dusty. There was plenty of room inside. As the outsized veek turned around, bumbled downhill toward the coastal highway, and we began to pick up speed, Aelbraugh Pritsch offered us various refreshments. When he opened the liquor cabinet, it looked like a corner convenience store, but my boss, always fastidious about with whom he drinks, declined, and as usual, I followed his lead.

  In no time at all, we had arrived at the giant nautiloid’s fabled place of residence, where we had earlier been rudely refused at the door. The hovercraft pulled around to the far side, and we were swallowed by the open maw of an enormous garage. The big door slid down behind us with a great hollow thump. We were inside the villain’s lair.

  Aelbraugh Pritsch seemed relieved, which made me uncomfortable. “If you two gentlebeings would accompany me, I will take you to my employer.”

  Like the weasel, at least he hadn’t said, “Walk this way…”

  But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Misterthoggosh, it turned out, was not underwater today. Nor was he gasping his last on dry land in thin air. It was something in between; I didn’t like the look of it.

  It turned out that the southern, or shore side of Misterthoggosh’s sprawling mansion featured an outsized room that the great mollusc used as an office. Here inside the house, that office was separated from the large room that we’d been brought to, by an impressive, floor-to-ceiling window, with glass that could have been six fingers thick.

  Through it, we could see that the other end of the strange office consisted of yet another very large window, looking out over the sea. Both powercraft and pretty sailboats could be observed plying their various maritime tasks and generally enjoying the day. The top of a tall antenna mast emerged to help underwater sapients communicate with others of their watery kind by something other than the tedious long wave, low-bandwidth, tapping-code that is all that can be counted on underwater.

  Indicating the mast, Eichra Oren said, “That’d be Misterthoggosh’s residence, over there in the bay at the base of that mast, I would assume.”

  “I’m afraid that I’m not at liberty to discuss such matters,” Aelbraugh Pritsch answered him sniffily. “In any event, my employer will be meeting with you in this place, today. It’s where he transacts all of his business with land-dwellers. If you will simply take these stairs…”

  “Stairs?” said Eichra Oren. “Have I missed something? Where’s the door?” There was a spiral of metal stairs at the left side of the huge window.

  “Oh, dear,” the birdman exclaimed insincerely. “I fear that I have failed to inform you that the next room, Misterthoggosh’s land office, is filled with a chemically inert, highly oxygenated fluorocarbon, so that you can truly meet him face to face. There is nothing to fear. Clients and vendors of many different species do this with him all the time.”

  Eichra Oren emitted an ironic chuckle. “But that first time is really something, isn’t it? Tha
t first breath? Okay, I’m game.” He started up the stairs, with me behind him, then paused. “Sam, I want you to stay here with Aelbraugh Pritsch. No need to get your fur all wet.”

  I felt like balking, but the wet fur argument carried the day. “As long as I can see and hear you. Can I do that, my fine, feathered friend?”

  “By all means, Oasam Otusam.” He looked down on me from more than a physical height. He still didn’t get my place in the whole scheme of things. “I will remain with you. One of the staff will assist your…partner.”

  The boss disappeared at the head of the stairs, just as I saw two long tentacles emerge from a darkened doorway toward the other side of the liquid-filled room. “Misterthoggosh isn’t going to eat him, is he?”

  The dinosauroid rolled his eyes. I preferred to think that he was consulting the day’s schedule, rather than reacting to my question. “Misterthoggosh is having lamb cutlets tonight, stir-fried tips of young asparagus, and roasted plantain. He greatly prefers it to raw human.”

  “Unintended consequences,” Eichra Oren took a long, deep drag on his cigar, and let the smoke out slowly. “You get them all the time, whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish. The world is a complicated place, full of uncountable variables. But when it’s sapience you’re attempting to deal with, they’re absolutely guaranteed, every single time.”

  We were back at home, having safely concluded our conference with Misterthoggosh. Frankly, I was a bit surprised we had survived the experience. We’d had to sit around, Eichra Oren in a comfortable robe, while his clothes were dried and processed. It hadn’t taken long at all, cocktails were served, and the clothes looked fine when they were returned.

  Back home, while the house and I carefully inspected his togs for spy devices—we never found any—Eichra Oren had fixed a dinner almost as nice as the old mollusc’s was going to be: thin, flash-fried veal cutlets, garlic mashed potatoes and veal gravy, avocado and fresh tomato slices. On one wall of the room, the highlights of today’s major jai-alai games were being displayed, but we were ignoring them.

  I had finally gotten a chance to tell the boss more about my bizarre conversation with the Nexus AI about the entity it called “the Mind”.

  We were eating in the kitchen, a brilliantly white interior with a big window and a southern exposure. Eichra Oren had put the dishes in the hopper for the house to recycle, and was pouring himself another glass of wine. I was eating ice cream from a bowl he’d filled for me. I tried hard to be tidy, but there isn’t much I wouldn’t give for thumbs.

  I hadn’t yet voiced my direst suspicion about that entity, “the Mind”. I had no real justification of any kind for it, just a sort of an urgent paranoid hunch. Specifically, I had asked Eichra Oren where he supposed a computer program written specifically to facilitate private communications between members of a given profession had gotten off having conversations of its own with a…well, the Nexus AI didn’t know any better what “the Mind” was than I did at this point.

  He reached for a box on the table, selected a cigar and let it light itself, deeply enjoying the first puff. It smelled good, but I don’t think I’d ever be tempted by it, even if I had thumbs. “Try to think of it as a hobby, Sam. The world’s debt assessors had a program written, bright enough to serve their various complex purposes, and the effort produced a cybernetic entity that can see and hear and smell and touch, because each of those senses is important, in varying proportions, to the many different sapients who become p’Nan debt assessors.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “And because it mediates conversations between people who may have no language—and very little life experience—in common, it must be sensitive to emotional nuances that can turn a simple word on its head. As a consequence, it has feelings. It can get bored and lonely. So in the course of its business, it visits with whomever will visit with it. Wouldn’t you do exactly the same thing in its place? Don’t you?”

  “But it’s got a duty,” I protested, ignoring the dig. “It has a pur—”

  “A purpose? Sam, if my species ever had a purpose—which is a problematic concept when you’re dealing with evolution—it’s simply to eat bugs and climb around in trees generating more bug-eating tree climbers. One of the most reliable signs of sapience is when a species steps outside of whatever purpose nature seems to have had in mind for it. You and I can fly faster and further and higher than any birds—except, of course, for birds like Aelbraugh Pritsch—because of our sapience.”

  I wished I could shrug. “And this is relevant to the Nexus AI…”

  “It’s looking for company, Sam, that’s all. It’s looking for friends.”

  “Well,” I had finally decided to address the principal concern I had about the Nexus AI and its taste in company. “It may be looking for friends in all the wrong places.” I told Eichra Oren about how “the Mind” thing seemed scattered all over the planet. Suspecting everything I suspected, the idea raised my hackles just thinking about it.

  He sat, smoking and thinking, for what seemed like a long while. Now and then he’d let a short cylinder of ash fall from his cigar into a little tray that made it vanish. Then he’d draw on the cigar again, making the ash-end glow, and release great rolling volumes of gray smoke from his mouth, which the house absorbed and eventually disposed of.

  Finally: “Is there any reason to believe this thing isn’t just another communications or data network—there could be a hundred of them we’d have no way of knowing about—doing the same as the Nexus AI?”

  “Looking for company?” I asked. “I suppose not, but the questions this one is asking seem pointed to me, not just your ordinary casual chit-chat.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Who knows what ordinary casual chit-chat—small talk—might consist of between data storage and retrieval entities?”

  I scoffed. “You don’t really believe it’s as simple as that, Boss.”

  He sat up straight. “No,” he said, “I don’t. Partly because you don’t, and I’ve learned to value your intuitions. What I’d like to learn now is as much about this ‘Mind’ as we can without alarming the Nexus AI, and through it, the Mind.” He stood up, took another drag on his cigar, and then laid it in the tray to go out. “Got any brilliant ideas?”

  “No,” I hopped down from my chair. “Maybe we could rent one.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Lanternlight

  THE NEAREST CITY OF ANY SIZE ON THIS WORLD LIES 500 miles north of the northwest coast of the Inland Sea where Eichra Oren and I live. It was named by humans, who for fifteen thousand years have called it Lanternlight.

  It’s said there’s a city there, in the S-bend of a great river, in a hundred thousand alternate worlds. Easy, rapid transportation and near-perfect communication have made such collections of individuals and buildings pretty much obsolete in this one. Add to that the fact that the land-dwelling population of the Elders’ Earth is sparse, no more than a couple hundred million sapients on the whole planet, all of them Appropriated Persons or their descendants, and well spread out.

  There are some very big cities in the Great Deep, I’m told, where it makes a bit more sense, long distance communication being somewhat more difficult, owing to the way water muffles radio signals at useful wavelengths. Down there, they utilize a worldwide network of light cables.

  Lanternlight can lay claim perhaps to a million inhabitants, representing all Appropriated species, but above all it’s a human city, a beautiful place, deliberately kept quaint, with its broad, high-crowned streets that have never borne the weight of wheels, and perhaps as many as a hundred faerie bridges arching over the cold, dark river. Streetlights, made to appear old-fashioned, in imitation of the gaslights of ancient Antarctica, bestow their enchanted glow on the cobbles, while high above the city, on a gracefully tapered tower of filigreed titanium—another gift to the Appropriated Persons courtesy of the Elders’ guilty conscience—one great, soft light casts enough gentle illumination to compete with
that of the full Moon.

  I’ve often wondered why we don’t keep our office here.

  One thing that folks will always get together for is dining at a big, fancy restaurant with a first class chef. Several first class chefs, in this case, as there are hundreds of cultures and cuisines to cover. For human beings, torn by their peculiar evolution between the life of gregarious tree-monkeys and that of small-pack hunters on the open prairie, dining out, among strangers, represents an agreeable compromise.

  As for the canine component of this partnership, it took me quite a long time, as a puppy, learning not to snarl and snap at anyone who came too close to my plate. Now I can accept a little freshly-ground pepper or parmesan cheese with the very best of social graces, and without even the faintest urge to take the waiter’s arm off at the shoulder.

  We left the veek at our hotel—as artificially quaint as the rest of the municipality, although fully up to date in its amenities—and accepted a ride on the back of a giant centipede, tastefully striped brown and beige, with middle legs much longer than those fore and aft. The creature had a sort of howdah on his back and kept up a running monologue about the endless wonders of an ancient city that he obviously adored, as lesser beings and levitated traffic whizzed around under his many feet. We discovered the fabulous eatery Stomos had recommended to us on a principal thoroughfare, overlooking the river.

  Eichra Oren dismounted using a ladder, having left payment in a box in the passenger compartment. I jumped down to the sidewalk making a perfect four-point landing. The outsized centipede told us that his name was Scutigera and that we should call him again when we wanted to return to the hotel or go anywhere in the city with a knowledgeable guide.

  We assured him that we would.