Template: A Novel of the Archonate

by Matthew Hughes

  “How could he?” Jenore said. “If the acquisition were not appropriate it could not occur.”

  “I do not see how it could be prevented. Are there guards?”

  She signaled that the concept was preposterous. “An inappropriate acquisition is referred to by a rude word. I will whisper it to you.”

  She did so. The term meant nothing to Conn.

  “If someone performs a...” – she fluttered a hand to indicate the obscenity – “he loses whatever status his handedness has earned him. No one will deal with him again. He is discluded, forever outcast. His family disavows him. The best he can receive in Shorraff is pity from those struggling to overcome revulsion.”

  “Does it happen?”

  She looked away. “Rarely. It is not talked about.”

  Conn contemplated the picture she was drawing in his mind. It was bizarre. “But normally everyone knows exactly what he is entitled to and acquires it accordingly?”

  “I said we were governed by the sin of pride,” she said. “We know to a minim our exact worth. It is usually no farther from our minds than a Thraisian’s knowledge of how much or how little jingles in his purse.”

  Conn saw a thought occur to her. “Remember,” she said, “what Ren Farbuck said about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing?”

  “Yes.” He did not say that he was still unsure what the Hauserian had meant.

  “For Shorraffis, it is the opposite,” she said. “We can judge our own and others’ value down to the fineness of a hair. But of prices we know nothing.”

  “Ah,” he said and now he caught the shape of the idea. It was outlandish but he saw its symmetry.

  “Of course,” she went on, “we do not see our culture as rooted in a mortal sin. We consider our ethos a virtue, expressed in the common Shorraffi saying: What are we here for if not to help each other?”

  A buzzer sounded. They were approaching the whimsy that would throw them toward Firenz, the Grayling’s first port of call. The other passengers rose without delay and departed the lounge.

  “We should go,” Jenore said. “On a freighter, we will not receive the repeated warnings we heard on the Dan.”

  They rose and returned to their cabins. Before they entered their separate quarters Conn asked a question.

  “When you first passed through a whimsy, did you have a sensation that you had done so before?”

  Her eyes widened. “Not at all,” she said.

  “Have you heard of such a thing?”

  “Never. Was that your experience?” When he signaled that it was, she looked thoughtful. “Your earliest memories are of Horder’s sporting house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then perhaps we should assume that you were brought there, not from some indigent Bay City family, but from another world.”

  “It is an assumption that leads to many questions,” Conn said.

  She stroked the delicate line of her jaw. “The answers to which could be revealing. I have been telling you that you are unusual.”

  A strident alarm sounded, cutting off Conn’s reflexive protest before he could voice it. His last thought as he lay on his bunk and reached for the medicine sac was that perhaps she was right.

  The trip was uneventful. At Firenz they wandered about the orbiter inspecting the goods offered to transients. These tended toward fabrics knotted into allegedly useful arrangements, though Conn could not easily envision their end uses, along with jewelry and decorative objects fashioned from the slag which was to be found in great heaps across the planet’s second moon.

  Apparently an impossibly ancient space-faring species had mined the moon for a rare mineral, bubbling it out of the crust with an unknown energy that cooked the overburden into dark crystals with interesting prismatic qualities. The nature of the energy, the identity of the mineral and the fate of the species were all matters for scientific speculation or mystical wonder.

  Jenore was taken by a pair of eardrops. “I have no funds,” she told Conn. “Would you buy these for me? Actually, they are for my younger sister, Corali. She would love them. They are rare on Old Earth.”

  “What would you or your sister do for me in return?” Conn said. When he saw the sentiments that his question evoked he explained, as if to a child, “The transaction must balance. Otherwise it is chaos.”

  “Have you not heard anything that I or Farbuck or the Walladers have said to you?”

  “I have heard it all. I accept that things are peculiarly different in other cultures.”

  She rested her small fists on her waist, elbows angled out. “Well?”

  “I am not of those cultures. I am of my own,” he said. “I understand that you wish me to give respect to those foreign ways, though I find them...” – he sought an inoffensive word – “outlandish. Equally, should you not give respect to my culture by not expecting me to act in ways that are contrary to my sense of the appropriate?”

  She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and contracted her brows then said, “That is fair. What can I do in return for the crystals?”

  He remembered the vehemence with which she had rejected his assumption about her friendship with Hallis Tharp and put aside the first thought that occurred to him and that would have sprung into the minds of most healthy Thraisian males. “You said your calling was to be a dancer.”

  “You wish me to dance for you? Here?” She looked up and down the orbiter’s commercial concourse then shrugged. “I suppose there’s no reason why not. Can you carry a tune?”

  “Do you require one?”

  “Dancers without music can be indistinguishable from persons afflicted by nervous disorders. I would not wish to cause a commotion. Sing me your favorite song.”

  Conn did not have one. Music had never been more to him that a sometimes interesting mathematical sequence. “But Hallis Tharp used to sing a song while we played paduay,” he recalled. “It was when I was very young.”

  An air of loss and regret fell over her. “Sing it,” she said.

  Hallis had said the song was ancient beyond all memory – about a young man going off to join an army and his mother knowing that she would be dead before ever he returned – and the melody was mournfully simple. He sang it only loud enough for them both to hear. She listened to the first verse, said, “I know this,” then began to move with the second. Again he saw the natural fluidity that was hers in any motion, but now it was the not the diluted liquidness of the everyday Jenore, the way she raised a cup or turned her head to listen; now it was the full concentrated liquor of flowing form. She glided. She spun. She rose and subsided, opened and closed. Somehow she caught the song’s sadness, steeped it through her limbs and torso so that it emerged transformed into moments of resignation set against a soft chorus of undying affection.

  Conn watched and sang and as he did so sensations passed through him, feelings he could not name, faint and formless longings, wisps of wishes long forgotten. And with them came a sense of connectedness to Jenore Mordene that he had not felt before for any person.

  He broke off the melody and she stopped. “Is it not to your taste?” she said. “Perhaps a more lively song?”

  “It was fine,” he said and heard a sound in his voice that he covered with a clearing of his throat. “Let us buy the eardrops.”

  He reached for his credit instrument and made the transaction. Jenore held the darkly sparkling gems in her palms and regarded them for a moment, then slipped them into an inner pocket. “Thank you,” she said.

  He nodded and turned back toward the Grayling’s dock, setting a brisk pace. She hurried to accompany him. “Are you all right?” she said.

  “I am fine.”

  “You seemed... upset.”

  “I was not. I am not.”

  They hustled along. “I believe I owe you an apology,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “On the Dan I browbeat you into playing thrash against your inclination, to help Clariq Wallader. By
your lights, it was an unseemly act for you to do something for nothing.”

  They reached the dock and were admitted to the ship by the same officer who had welcomed them aboard at Holycow.

  “It was not for nothing,” Conn said when they were seated in the lounge. “I enjoyed the contest once I was engaged.”

  “Still,” she began.

  “Put it from your mind,” he said. “I was not discomfited.” He did not tell her that there had indeed been a transaction, and that he was well satisfied with his payment for routing Willifree: Jenore had stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

  The station at Dusoulier waved them on, there being neither goods not persons to take on board. The next whimsy was not far and Conn was barely over the effects of the medication before it was time to plunge back into unconsciousness. This time, however, he waited again, letting the first waves of irreality pass through him, while he forced his disciplined consciousness to stand back and take note of the sensations. He went farther than he had on the Dan and again was convinced that he had experienced this before.

  When they were out of the whimsy and falling toward Bashaw he approached the young officer who had seen them aboard. “I have a question about passage through the whimsy,” he said.

  “You will not be the first,” the man said with a smile. “Ask on.”

  “Are infants also medicated?”

  “They are. The dosage is reduced, of course.”

  “What about unborn fetuses?”

  The smile faded and the open face took on the look of a man trying to recall a fact that had slipped beyond memory. “I am not sure,” he said after a moment. “I have never seen a pregnant woman on a ship. Perhaps they are advised not to travel.” He brightened again. “Let us consult the ship’s physician.”

  They did so. It confirmed that women with child were advised to forgo whimsies. The placental barrier prevented the medications from passing all the way through to the fetus. Anomalies could occur.

  Two sleeps after, Bashaw grew in the forward observation port. They did not put in at an orbiter but descended to a surface refit facility in the canton of Narv. The passengers were offloaded then taken by surface transportation to an unassuming hotel and advised to be in its lobby and ready to reboard the Grayling the following evening.

  The small crowd dispersed in pursuit of its members’ various goals. Conn acquired a map of Bashaw and said to Jenore, “By this chart the canton of Trintrinobolis is a short flight to the east. Let us see if we can find Flagit Holdings or anything about Chask Daitoo.”

  “First we should alert the authorities in Trintrinobolis that you are acting as an auxiliary police official.”

  “Is that necessary?”

  “On Bashaw, it is advisable,” she said.

  The hired aircar was spartan in its appurtenances. It flew low over the low-rise cityscape of Narv, an aggregation of rectangular structures painted or stuccoed in shades of gray and white. Conn saw no curves, no ornamentation, none of the flair for colorful detail or eye-pulling embellishment that characterized Bay City. The vehicles on the roads and in the air about them were likewise sedate in style and paintwork and the people who sat in them or rode the pedestrian slides were similarly bland in aspect.

  “It seems an uncommonly dull place,” he said to Jenore.

  “To the contrary,” she said. “It seethes.”

  Before they departed the hotel she removed the rank and status insignia from his collar and told him to keep them in his pocket. She would not explain but bade him wait until he had met a Bashavian or two.

  Conn encountered his first at the squat and foreboding police prefecture near the center of Trintrinobolis. The building was as colorless as any other in the canton but wore an aura of uncompromising conviction that Conn ascribed to the small, heavily barred windows along its foundation. A drably uniformed officer at the reception desk pointed them to the office of Subinspector Fonseca Smit.

  Smit was a narrow man, thin of chest and face. He gave an impression of great energy ruthlessly repressed as he minutely inspected Conn’s identification and the letter Hilfdan Klepht had given him before bidding them sit in the rigid chairs that fronted his desk of painted metal. The subinspector’s own chair was no improvement on the hard seating offered visitors. He weighed Conn with a policeman’s long and direct gaze then dismissed Jenore with a cursory glance.

  “How may I help you?”

  “We are making inquiries into three murders and an attempt,” Conn said. “I was the object of the latter.”

  “You are investigating an attempt on your own life?” Smit said. “That seems a touch dramatic.”

  Jenore broke in. “We happened to be passing this way and the authorities on Thrais asked us to stop in. Our ship is undergoing maintenance so we have time on our hands.”

  Some of the stiffness went out of Smit’s posture. “Ah,”he said, “so the fact that you are both victim and investigator is merely a coincidence?”

  Conn read the message in Jenore’s eyes and said, “Yes, entirely a coincidence.”

  “The prefecture would be pleased to offer all possible assistance,” Smit said. He activated his integrator and made inquiries about Chask Daitoo and Flagit Holdings. After a moment’s examination of the data he said, “The company appears to have been only minimally active until fairly recently, although it kept up its regulatory requirements.”

  “What is the nature of its business?” Conn asked.

  Smit scanned the entries. “Buying and selling, it seems, though without a particular adherence to category.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It is a trading house. It deals in anything that can be bought or sold: property, financial instruments, scientific apparatus, contracts for consulting services, construction supplies.”

  “Who owns it?”

  A look of shock froze Smit’s thin features then his mouth made a grim line.

  Jenore spoke quickly. “My colleague has spent his life on Thrais with little exposure to other cultures. He means no offense.”

  Smit gave Conn a hard look. “It is advisable to learn the basics concerning a world’s mores before flinging oneself amongst its population,” he said. “On Bashaw, ownership is a deeply private matter. One discusses one’s holdings only with one’s intimates.”

  Conn made an apology. “What can you tell me about Flagit without straining propriety?”

  Smit went back to the data. “It was inactive for a long period. Trading resumed a few months ago and has been brisk.”

  “Does that signify anything?”

  “It might indicate a...” – the subinspector lowered his voice – “change in possessorship. That, by the way, is the term to be used in polite company.”

  “Has there been any trading in indentured service contracts?”

  “No, nor would such be allowed. On Bashaw, possessorship of a human being, even through the legal fiction of indenture, is an unthinkable obscenity.”

  The subinspector was growing uncomfortable at the nature of the discussion, Conn could see. He switched subjects. “What about Chask Daitoo?”

  Smit called up the information and read the screen. “He has never been on Bashaw, at least not under that name.”

  Conn handed over the identifying information on Daitoo that Klepht had supplied. Smit ran it through a reader and gave the resulting information a policeman’s confirmatory nod. “Daitoo was, of course, a temporary name. Indeed, he has had so many aliases it is doubtful he even recalled the syllables of his naming day. Certainly, we don’t know it, though he seems to have originated on Old Earth.”

  “He was a professional criminal?”

  Smit hummed an equivocal response. “He inhabited the gray penumbra between licit and illicit. Sometimes a mercenary, sometimes a secure courier, sometimes a figure in the shadows when someone met with an injury or mysteriously vanished. Occasionally questioned, never charged, always encouraged by police forces along The Spray to take t
he next ship off-world. If he is dead, I will add the information to the file and transmit it to other agencies.”

  “He is dead,” Conn said.

  “Under what circumstances?” Smit said, as he made notes.

  “He died trying to kill me.”

  Again, Conn saw Smit sudden stiffening and the warning in Jenore Mordene’s eyes.

  “You were fortunate,” Smit said, his voice tight.

  “Yes, I was,” Conn said. “Discriminator Klepht was to hand at just the right time.”

  Smit relaxed. He returned Daitoo’s identifying materials and gave them Flagit Holding’s address. They bade each other good day in the restrained Bashavian manner, Conn mimicking Jenore’s example.

  When they were aloft in the aircar, Conn said, “I seemed to be often on the verge of outraging the subinspector, though I do not know why.”

  “As he said,” Jenore replied, “it is well to understand the ways of a world before going abroad among its citizens.”

  “But what was my offense?”

  For answer, she spoke to the aircar. “My companion is not knowledgeable about Bashavian culture. How would you describe your world’s way of life?”

  The aircar said, “We are simple and unassuming. We make no vain displays. Know that and we are easy to get along with.”

  Jenore thanked the vehicle and pressed the privacy control. “The prevailing ethos on Bashaw is modesty. The good citizen’s goal is to draw no attention to himself. Thus whenever you even hinted at any superiority of innate ability or accomplishment he bridled. To have worn your player’s beads would have been like slapping him across the face.”

  “But every culture makes distinctions,” Conn protested.

  “As do Bashavians. But they do it in subtle and tactful ways that you and I would scarcely notice. The difference in tailoring between Smit’s uniform and the desk officer’s, for example.”

  “I noted no difference,” Conn said.

  “Indeed, but they do. To them such tiny variations loom as vast as mountains.”

  Conn made a gesture of mild incomprehension. “What a waste of energy.”