Jim Baen’s Universe
Page 18
The setting was perfect.
Following one of my cardinal rules of fine dining-always opt for the chef’s tasting menu in a topnotch restaurant-I’d forgone the conventional offerings and instead surrendered myself to Choy’s judgment, asking only that he not hold back on the portion size of any course. Getting fat is never an issue for me. At almost two meters tall and over a hundred kilos, I’m large enough that I’d be able to eat quite a lot if I were a normal man, and the nano-machines that lace my cells decompose and flush any excess food I consume.
Spread in front of me were four appetizer courses, each blending chunks of a savory meat with strands of vegetables steaming on a plate of slowly changing color. Choy instructed me to taste each dish separately and then in combinations of my choice. I didn’t know what any of them were, and I didn’t care. They smelled divine, and I expected they would taste even better.
They did. I leaned back after the third amazing bite and closed my eyes, my taste buds coping with sensations that in over a hundred and fifty years of life they’d never experienced. I struggled to conjure superlatives equal to the flavors.
The food was perfect.
What ruined the lunch was the company, the unplanned, unwanted company.
When I opened my eyes, Slanted Jack was walking toward me from the entrance.
Slanted Jack, so named because with him nothing was ever straight, starred in one of the many acts of my life that I’d just as soon forget. The best con man and thief I’ve ever known, he effortlessly charmed and put at ease anyone who didn’t know him. Maybe ten centimeters shorter than I, with a wide smile, eyes the blue of the heart of flame, and skin the color and sheen of polished night, Jack instantly grabbed the attention of everyone around him. While weaving his way across the room to me he paused three times to exchange pleasantries with people he was almost certainly meeting for the first time. Each person Jack addressed would know that Jack found him special, important, even compelling.
While Jack was chatting with a foursome a few tables away, I called Lobo.
“Any sign of external threat?” I said.
“Of course not,” Lobo said. “You know that if I spotted anything, I’d alert you instantly. Why are you wasting time talking to me when you could be eating your magnificent meal, conversing with other patrons, and generally having a wonderful time? It’s not as if you’re stuck up here like I am, too high to even have the birds for company.”
“It’s not like I could bring you in here with me,” I said, parroting his tone. “Nor, for that matter, do you eat.”
“You’ve never heard of take-out? I may not eat, but I can be quite a pleasant dinner companion, as I’d think you’d realize after the times we’ve spent together.”
I sighed. Every time I let myself fall into an argument with Lobo when he’s in a petulant mood, I regret it. “Signing off.”
I blended bits of food from three of the plates into another bite, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Jack; the food’s charms were dissipating faster than their aromas. Jack and I had worked together for almost a decade, and though that time was profitable, it was also consistently nerve-wracking. Jack lived by his own principles, chief among which was his life-long commitment to target only bad people. We consequently found ourselves time and again racing to make jumps off planets, always a short distance ahead of dangerous, very angry marks. By the time we split, I vowed to go straight and never work the con again.
“Jon,” Jack said as he reached my table, his smile as disarming as always. “It’s good to see you. It’s been too long.”
“What do you want, Jack?”
“May I join you?” he said, pulling out a chair.
I didn’t bother to answer; it was pointless.
He nodded and sat. “Thank you.”
A waiter appeared beside him, reset the table for two, and waited for Jack’s order.
“I throw myself to Joaquin’s mercy,” Jack said. “Please tell him Jack asked only that he be gentle.”
The waiter glanced at me for confirmation. Jack wasn’t going to leave until he had his say, so I nodded, and the waiter hustled away.
“Joaquin truly is an artist,” Jack said. “I-"
I cut him off. “What do you want?”
Jack took bits of two of my appetizers and chewed them slowly, his eyes shutting as the tastes flooded his mouth. “Amazing. Did I say he was an artist? I should have called him a magician-and I definitely should have eaten here sooner.”
He opened his eyes and studied me intently. The focus of his gaze was both intense and comforting, as if he could see into your soul and was content to view only that. For years I’d watched him win the confidence of strangers with a single long look, and I’d never figured out how he managed it. I’d asked him many times, and he always told me the same thing: “Each person deserves to be the center of the universe to someone, Jon, even if only for an instant. When I focus on someone, that person is my all.” He always laughed afterward, but whether in embarrassment at having said something completely honest or in jest at my gullibility is something I’ll never know.
“We haven’t seen each other in, what, thirty years now,” he said, “and you haven’t aged a day. You must give me the names of your med techs-" he paused and chuckled before continuing, “-and how you afford it. Courier work must pay far better than I imagined.”
I wasn’t providing private courier services when I last saw him, so he was telling me he’d done his homework. He also looked no different than before, which was to be expected: no one with money and the willingness to pay med techs needs to show age for at least the middle forty or fifty years of his life. So, he was also letting me know he had reasons to believe I’d done well since we parted. I had, but I saw no value in providing him with more information. Dealing with him had transformed the afternoon from pleasure to work, and the same dishes that had been so appealing a few minutes ago now held absolutely no interest for me.
“How did you find me?”
He arranged and slowly chewed another combination of the appetizers before answering. “Ah, Jon, that was luck, fate if you will. Though we’ve been apart for quite a while, I’m sure you remember how valuable it is for someone in my line of work to develop supporters among the jump-gate staff. Some of my better friends here at Mund’s gate agreed to inform me when people of a certain,” he looked skyward, as if searching for a phrase, “dangerous persuasion pass into the system. Traveling in a Starlon-class battle wagon earned you their attention, and they were kind enough to alert me.”
I nodded and silently cursed myself. During a recent run-in with two major multiplanet conglomerates and a big chunk of the Frontier Coalition government, I’d made so many jumps in such a short period that I’d abandon
ed my previously standard practice of bribing jump-gate agents not to notice me. Break a habit, pay a price.
I ignored the bait about Lobo and tried to wrest control of the conversation away from him. “Jack, answer or one of us leaves: what do you want?”
He leaned back and looked into my eyes for a few seconds, then smiled and nodded. “You never could appreciate the value of civilized conversation,” he said, “but your very coarseness has also always been part of your appeal-and your value. Put simply and without the context I hope you’ll permit me to provide, I need your help.”
Leave it to Jack to take that long to give an answer with absolutely no content.
“When we parted,” I said, “I told you I was done with the con. Nothing has changed. You’ve ruined my lunch for no reason.” I stood to go.
Jack leaned forward, held up his hand, and said, “Please, Jon, give me a little time. This isn’t about me. It’s about the boy.”
His tone grabbed me enough that I didn’t walk away, but I also didn’t sit. “The boy? What boy? I can’t picture you with children.”
Jack laughed. “No,” he said, “I have not chosen to procreate, nor do I ever expect to do so.” He held up his hand, turned, and motioned to the matre d’.
The man walked over to our table, reached behind himself, and gently urged a boy to step in front of him.
“This boy,” Jack said. “Manu Chang.”
Chang stared at me with the wide, unblinking eyes of scared youth. With shoulders slightly wider than his hips and a fair amount of hair on his neck, he appeared to be somewhere between ten and twelve, not yet inhabiting a man’s body but beginning the transformation into one. His broad mouth hung open a centimeter, as if he were about to speak. He wore his fine black hair short, not quite a buzz cut but close. Aside from the copper hue of his skin nothing about him struck me as remarkable, and even that skin tone would be common enough in any large city. He stood still, neither speaking nor moving, and I felt instantly bad for him, stuck as he was in an adult situation beyond his ability to understand.
“Are you hungry, Manu?” I said as I sat.
He nodded but didn’t speak.
“Then please eat with us.” The matre d’ was, predictably, ahead of me: two waiters appeared, hustled the boy into a chair, and composed a plate of food for him from the remains of the appetizers and two new dishes they brought. After I took a bite of mine and Jack did the same, Manu followed suit.
I turned my attention back to Jack. I realized he was almost certainly manipulating me, because he knows no other way to interact with others. I also knew the odds of my later regretting this question were high, but I was curious. “Why do you want my help?”
Though I was certain that inside he was smiling, all Jack permitted his face to show were concern for the boy and appreciation at my interest. “My answer will make sense only if I give you some context,” he said, “so I have to ask you to grant me a few minutes to explain.”
“Go ahead,” I said, “but, Jack, don’t play me.” As I heard my own words, which I meant and delivered seriously, I realized how well he’d hooked me. I was speaking nonsensically: Jack isn’t capable of saying anything to anyone without having some angles at play.
He leaned conspiratorially closer and lowered his voice. “I know you’re aware of Pinkelponker,” he said. “Everyone is.”
“Yeah, of course I’ve heard of it,” I said. “It’s quarantined.”
Pinkelponker. The name shook me more than Jack’s appearance. I did my best to hide my reaction from him. I was born there, and I lived there with my sister, Jennie, an empathic healer, until the government took her away and forced her to heal only those people it deemed important.
Pinkelponker occupies three unique niches in human history. It’s the only planet successfully colonized by one of Earth’s pre-jump-gate generation ships, though the ship crashed and stranded the entire population until humanity discovered the series of jump gates that led to the single-aperture gate near Pinkelponker. It’s the only place where radical human mutations not only survived but also developed trans-human talents, such as my sister’s healing abilities. And, it’s the only planet humans have ever colonized that is now forbidden territory. It exists under a continuous quarantine and blockade, thanks to a nanotech disaster that led to the abandonment of all research into embedding nano-machines in humans.
What no one knows is that the rogue nano-machine cloud that led to the planet’s forced isolation came into existence as part of my escape from Aggro, the research prison that orbited Pinkelponker. More importantly, to the best of my knowledge no one alive knows that I’m living proof that nano-machines can safely exist in humans-and I want it to stay that way. Any group that learned the truth about me would want to turn me into a research animal. I’ll never let that happen again.
I realized I wasn’t paying attention and forced myself to concentrate on what Jack was saying. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d lost focus for a moment.
“… hasn’t been open to travel in over a century and a quarter,” he said. “If you haven’t spent much time in this sector of space, you wouldn’t have any reason to keep up with it, though obviously even you know about the quarantine.”
“Who doesn’t?” I said as casually as I could manage. Jack held my attention now, because I realized that far more relevant than my past was a disturbing question: was he telling me all this because he’d learned more about my background than I ever wanted anyone to know?
“It’s tough to avoid,” he said, his head nodding, “particularly for those of us who always need to plot the best routes off any world they’re visiting.” He smiled and lowered his voice further, speaking low enough now that without thinking I leaned forward to hear him better. “But have you heard the legends?”
“What legends?” I said. Playing dumb and letting Jack talk seemed the wisest option.
“Psychics, Jon, not grifters working marks but real psychics. Pinkelponker was a high-radiation planet, a fact that should simply have led to a lot of deaths. Something about that world was special, though, because instead the radiation led to useful human mutations-something humanity has never seen anywhere else. The legends tell of the existence of all types of psychics, from telekinetics to healers to seers.”
Jack sat back, his expression expectant, waiting for me. I’ve seen him use this technique to draw in marks, and I wasn’t about to play. As I now feared Jack might know, I hadn’t come to Mund simply for Choy’s cooking, as amazing as it was reputed to be. Mund was one of the worlds with a jump aperture to Drayus, the only planet with an aperture to Pinkelponker-a blockaded aperture, one no human had
successfully passed through in a hundred and thirty years, but an aperture nonetheless. I visited this sector of space periodically, each time wondering how I could get back to Pinkelponker and see if Jennie still lived-and each time realizing with a gut-wrenching sense of failure that there was no way I could reach her, no chance I could save her.
I could only lose by giving away any of this knowledge about my past, so I waited. Manu chewed quietly. I eyed the food but couldn’t make myself eat.
After a minute or so, Jack realized he’d have to keep going on his own. He leaned closer again and, his eyes shining brightly, said, “Can you imagine it, Jon? In all the colonized planets, not one psychic-until Pinkelponker.”
Jack was as dogged as he was slippery, so I knew he’d never give up. I had to move him along. “You said it, Jack: legends. Those are just legends.”
He smiled again, satisfied now that I was playing the role he wanted me to fill. “Yes, they’re legends, but not all legends are false or exaggerated. In the less than a decade between the discovery of Pinkelponker’s jump gate and the permanent quarantine of that whole area after the nanotech disaster, some people from that planet naturally visited other worlds. Some of those visitors never went home. And,” he said, leaning back, “a very few of those who stayed away were psychics.” He put his right hand gently on the boy’s back. “Like Manu’s grandmother. Though she died, and though her only son didn’t inherit her powers, her grandson did.