Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  “Of course, the news of the sun’s death by expansion, which took only a single generation to sink in, led to another punctuated burst of evolution, and that is how we got our people this far from Earth, pretty much on rubber bands and a prayer, as my mama used to say.

  “Now, this Quinx Council of yours…?” Lucia asked.

  “It’s five thousand five hundred and fifty-five representatives of some fifteen million populated worlds of the Three Species,” I began.

  “So if they’re all that big, and that representative, they sound like they might be okay with just sixteen thousand of us?” Lucia said.

  “I cannot officially tell you anything, but it really should not be a problem at all,” I said.

  Given what they had endured and how they had prospered, I admired her and her people more than I could utter. And Scroba was correct. They would be a media sensation. She and I would have to discuss together along with the Chimp leaders exactly how to best utilize the media and the Quinx Council to get the best possible “contractual deal” for them.

  Suddenly Cecil was on-screen with Lucia, and he appeared to be chattering happy.

  “We’re all fixed,” he said to Lucia and us. “Their ship says we’re all set. We can go whenever we wish.”

  “Excellent news.”

  “Before you do that,” I said, “let us discuss how we will proceed. Our ship has forwarded all of our discussion back to our own superior at the University on Diomedes Proxima, which sponsored and supplied this expedition. At this distance it will probably be an hour before we hear back from that person. We’re going to recommend that we accompany you on your voyage, just to be certain you have no mishaps, if that meets your approval.”

  “Thank you,” Lucia said. “Let me speak with my peers here and we will get back to you soon. I will recommend your protection to them.”

  “Fast,” I said. “How do we stand?”

  “This ship accessed their files completely. Only five percent of their population have an I.Q. higher than 150, yet they’ve made remarkable adaptations in all areas of the liners, both in engineering and ergonomics. The Beryllium they have is old but pure; it’s now reactivated. Their outer structures seem solid. But I agree that as much as possible we accompany them, just in case, as you like to say. And also that we return to the Center Worlds by stages to put less stress on those liners. I’ll work out a new navigation chart which does not include Fast travel. It might take as long as ten full days to get us back.”

  I looked at Scroba, waiting for her complaint.

  “That will give us a chance to visit in person and to get to bond with some of them,” she said.

  “Fine. That bonding and communication is your task.”

  “Where shall we park them while we complete our work here with the doomed system?”

  “Not in the Epsilon Eridani system!” Tony van Jeffreys said. “Actually, people, I’m now as excited as you are by this discovery. But I don’t know about the Gamman population as a whole. They’re a pretty contentious lot.”

  As if we hadn’t noticed.

  “Very wise, Toe-knee.” The Fast Mind said what we were all thinking. “You will represent your people well in the council if you can see their faults equal to their achievements.”

  Tony then went to his air-screen, and in a few minutes, he had a solar system in view. “This is an abandoned system that I’d heard of before. It has only one habitable moon, and that moon has earthlike geography. But it also has distinctive seasons, so they could only stay a few months.”

  “A stay even that long would not be required,” I said.

  We all checked into the moonlet.

  “It’s too close to your people for a permanent colony,” Scroba said.

  “Definitely,” Tony agreed.

  “But it will do as a three- or four-day layover,” I agreed. “Give the chance for the mothers and children to stretch their limbs, perhaps while we are completing our own mission.”

  “I will remain with them on that moonlet,” Scroba asserted. “Just in case.”

  Our Fast communicated this welcome news to Cecil.

  Then, almost simultaneously, we heard from Lucia and from Janiculus-Chase-onV, my superior.

  Lucia said her peers were happy so far with the arrangements, and when she heard about Tony’s suggestion for a layover, she was even more pleased. “The children will love being out of the ships for a short while. You see,” she confided when we were alone on link again, “some humans can be very kind. The problem is we Chimpanzees don’t ever know which ones, nor when.”

  Janiculus-Chase-onV was smug.

  “I said you were the right one for this mission, didn’t I, Syzygy? Young as you are, you’ve made several spectacular discoveries already that are certain to cause comment all over the University system and make your name in Academic circles. Now, tell me, how is your companion working out?”

  I held my peace for only a short time. “As it turned out, Superior, Scroba was the perfect companion for this trip,” I said. “You were right again.”

  “It’s called instinct, my boy. Follow your instinct. Now get that new species set up for the meanwhile, and then finish your scientific mission. You will all receive Quinx Commendations upon your return. And yes, the Gamman youth looks fine so far. Bring him directly here when you are done.”

  I was the discoverer of a new species. It only just dawned on me.

  “I hope the Fast gets a commendation too?” Scroba said, a recognizable edge in her voice.

  “Why not?” Janiculus-Chase-onV said, undaunted. “Of course it will get a commendation. It’s part of your team.”

  “Do you see, Young Toe-Knee,” the Fast Mind now asked our guest, “why it will be advantageous to be part of the Third Republic? Tolerance is truly universal.”

  “Well, the three species and the machine minds did once have their problems,” Scroba reminded us.

  “A minor conflict,” the Fast Mind agreed, “a thousand years ago, and now mostly forgotten.”

  “You people know so much,” Tony said, “but I wonder if you know what humans on Earth said and wrote when they witnessed a star like Sol, our birth Sun here, expanding like this will do, and then collapsing on itself and going nova?”

  We didn’t know.

  “It was a Chinese scholar. In our year 1042 anno domini, and he wrote, ‘We have a guest in the heavens tonight. He is very brilliant!’”

  “And so similarly may some primitive scholar we do not know ourselves, witnessing your Sol-Terra going nova from a distant planet, also write that,” I suggested.

  “We are ready to begin the layover mission,” the Fast Mind said. “Everyone prepare.”

  Swear Not by the Moon…

  It wouldn’t have happened that way at all, except that Detective McGraghiu came by that afternoon to pick up a gift his wife was giving her niece. Me and Stella know the McGraghius going on twenty-four years, and after that long I’ve learned never to ask him about his business and he certainly never asks about mine.

  “A hundred dollars!” he fumed as he pulled out the checkbook. “You’ve got a regular racket going on here, don’t you?”

  “I don’t do charts anymore. Except for friends,” I, of course, replied.

  “I thought there were computer programs and such like to do all the calculating?” he went on.

  “There are. So?”

  “Have you tried using one?”

  “Eff. Why. Eye. I use three software programs. Classic, Vedic, and the Uranian School. And they’re all updated too. At considerable expense, I might add.”

  As I said before, we know each other over twenty years and I won’t back down with him no matter how fancy a policeman he may think he is.

  “What’s Vedic?”

  “Indian Astrology. Jyotish, they call it. They dismiss the use of the precession of the equinoxes. You see, in Astronomy, the solar system…”

  “Stop. Okay? I don’t need a lesson in it.”
r />   “Well, Vedic is a whole new flavoring, so I use it too.”

  “With curry and coriander.”

  I ignored that as beneath the two of us.

  “I e-mailed Darla the charts and the interpretations today.” Darla’s his wife. A lovely lady. What she’s doing with him…?

  McGraghiu signed the check, handed it over, then waited. “That’s it? Don’t we even get a piece of paper with the fancy colored-pencil circles and all? Christ, it’s a racket. In the past at least you got something to hang up on the wall.”

  “I just said, I e-mailed it…Not you, certainly?”

  “Not me,” he admitted. “But you know, for girls—and such,” he added lamely.

  “Sit tight, I’ll print it out for you so you can see you’ve gotten your money’s worth. Colored pencils are a little…1974,” I added.

  I turned and tapped the laptop, fiddled with various printing options. In the other room my multi-laser turned on and got to work.

  I handed it to him all printed out—in colored inks, not pencils—for the niece’s birth and this year’s birthday horoscopes, and he grunted in satisfaction. I also found an old, pebbled, aqua-colored paper folder to slip it into and clasped it shut.

  “Well, now this at least looks like it’s worth something,” McGraghiu mumbled. Not a hundred dollars, was the next statement, the one I didn’t hear said aloud.

  Then we cracked open the strange old brandy someone brought me as a gift a while back and he began speaking about what was on his mind, that case that’s just been in all the papers.

  I never asked about it. I never do ask. I never probe. And if he ever said I did, he lied. He’s got a double constellation with Neptune and Mercury with some Personal Points that’s set up for lying when it means nothing important. So he lies about little shit all the time. After a long time you get used to it, in a good friend.

  McGraghiu: “The really crappy thing is, he’s out there. We know he’s out there. But he seems to operate out of such a wide, slow field, we all but forget about him and then he strikes again. And he’s so damn methodical that if there’s a clue left, it’s utter bullshit. So we know he’s playing with us…If we could just predict when he would next strike…and you know, at least be a little ready! Instead of so goddamned embarrassed all the time.”

  Me: “Maybe you can. Maybe I can,” I amended it.

  Stupidly, I admit it now.

  The trouble was, I’d done a bang-up good job of Darla’s niece’s chart and birthday update. His wife had oohed and aahed in her e-mail back to me—“Injury via large animals—she had a horse accident last year. Fractured a wrist. And their yacht ran aground in Rararatu—so that’s ‘the shipwreck!’” I’d felt “hot” doing the interpretations, knowing little or nothing about the young lady to begin with, and then getting so many weird things like those two right on the dot. I was the slave of my own ego. So sue me.

  “What do you mean?” McGraghiu asked. “That whorey business you idiots do?”

  “Horary!” I corrected. “It sounds like you’ve been talking with some others in my avocational area of expertise.”

  “Oh, please,” he scoffed.

  “Well, what do I know who’ve you got these days in a station house? Psychics? Table rappers? I’ll never step foot in one.”

  “You wish.”

  “No. I know. And no, it’s not horary either.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, surely by now you’ve got an entire field of patterns…incidents that happened or nearly happened? Dates? Even times?”

  “We’ve got enough dates and times to choke a horse. So what?” he asked back.

  “I might be able to look at them and…”

  “Four squads have looked and still are looking, ongoing, and analyzing them. The big boys in Quantico, for Chrissakes, with giant computers. You actually think you’re going to find some crucial pattern their humongous Crays and Enivacs working twenty-four hours a day missed?”

  So that was when and how McGraghiu dared me.

  “You certainly seem frightened enough that I will find some pattern their Big Boys with humongous Crays missed,” was what I dared back.

  And I added, “I’m sure I could get what I needed out of the newspapers, or even online…If I looked hard enough…If I cared to do so…Which I don’t one bit.”

  “C’mon, Mike. I’ve been slipping in your drool since I walked in the door, you’re so hot to hear particulars on this case.”

  Mac may be born with his Sun in Pigheaded with Stubborn rising, but he’s gotten through thirty years in the LAPD, rising slowly and steadily while “the geniuses” have gone down the tubes, ended up in prison or in retirement villages all around him. He’s got something on the ball.

  “Somebody’s nervous,” I taunted. “Good thing you weren’t outside looking in on this dialogue through those one-way mirrors you’ve got at the station, or you would have seen how you just all but shredded that left shirt cuff of yours, you were so eager for me to ask about it.”

  He looked at the messy cuff. Hid it. Then:

  “We’re not going to actually bet on this, are we?” he asked.

  “Why not? You’ve got a birthday coming up. Which one? Hundred and five? Hundred and six?”

  “Very funny. Fifty-one, as you well know.”

  “And so do I. One week later. As you well know.”

  “So…? A big dinner out?”

  “Us and the wives,” I finished it for him.

  “Deal,” he said, without asking what exactly the birthday would cost or entail. “What do I send you?”

  “Have your next in line, what’s her name, the sexy one, Detective Alvarez? Have her e-mail me and I’ll tell her all of what I need.”

  I knew this would be a provocation. Olga Alvarez had arrived in his office around the same time that a Mars/Cupido midpoint was coming due with Mac’s Aries axis. Mucho attraction. And a long-term marriage. Purely occupational, natch. He’d claimed that she would be there for a month and then move on. She was still there, going on year four and some.

  “How come she already has your e-mail address?” McGraghiu asked. “You two having an affair behind my back, you and Alvarez?”

  “If you were a halfway good one, you’d know we are. Actually, we’ve got a new kink: We’re having a three-way with that pretty new guy you hired in September.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  “Oh, and by the way, your wife’s niece’s chart showed that her second aunt’s husband is running his way toward a heart condition. Running. Not even walking.”

  McGraghiu said he would make an appointment for a medical checkup sometime—i.e., in the next century.

  “Your wife already did. On your day off, next week.”

  As he scowled and muttered, I rousted him out of the chair and saw him out the door. “Drive safely.”

  “Why?” He suddenly turned on me.

  I smiled. “I’m just fucking with your head, Mac.”

  Det. McGraghiu uttered something unprintable.

  Like I said before, we know each other a long time.

  *

  Olga Alvarez had naturally blond hair, a snub nose, and pale blue eyes and looked more or less of East German or Slovakian descent and was unmarried. With that name! Go figure, huh?

  She’d sent me the material I’d requested from McGraghiu, neatly organized, and now, two days later, on a Saturday, she arrived in person to discuss it. I immediately put my 90 Degree Uranian wheel in motion and looked for any Moon/Ascendant constellation figures going on. Nothing special showed up, so I figured she just wanted some dope on her boss, who was due in ten minutes from now and who would be joining her for a preliminary consult on whatever I’d found so far on the serial guy.

  “What I’d like to know is,” she asked, “could you do a chart for someone? Without them knowing? For me?”

  “Full one or just how their chart matches your own?”

  “How it matches later.
Right now I’m just interested in who he is.”

  “I see. Okay, give me the date and place. You don’t have a time? No, I guessed you didn’t.” Meaning she’d snitched off a personnel record in the office and it was a colleague of hers. “He have a name?”

  “Dennis Fisher.”

  I did a fast natal chart on the basic computer program for noon that day and it came up Sun in Scorpio—no surprise if he was an investigator—Moon solidly in Aquarius. First thing I noticed was Mars and Venus were exactly sextile, their midpoint only a few degrees from his birth Sun—this person really liked himself and took care of himself, and looked good to others. It was also conjunct Neptune. Uh-oh!

  “This is a guy, right?” I asked.

  “Dennis usually is.”

  “He seems very attractive. How interested are you in him?”

  “How interested is he in me?” she asked back.

  “He doesn’t do drugs, right?”

  “Just the opposite,” she said. Confirming he was a cop in her unit. Mac can smell a drug user a mile off. So the Neptune in that pleasure midpoint was not coke and crystal but glamour.

  “He looks at least bi, more than likely gay.” I added, “But not really interested in publishing it.”

  “Who would publish it in a police precinct?” she asked. “Well, good.”

  “Good?” I asked.

  “Good that I don’t make a jerk of myself,” she said. “You get anything yet on our serial?”

  “Dennis Fisher is the new guy who came into your unit this September?” I asked her re: the chart I’d just done.

  “What, Mac tell you all our business?”

  “Mac already knows about him,” I said, remembering the joke I’d made and how he hadn’t defended him against my slur. “Without doing his chart.”

  “Fuckin’ men’s club! Even the gays are in it!” she said. “Some day I’m going to get you guys.”

  That’s when Mac came in—without ringing the bell, as usual.

  I had them reconfigure themselves in chairs I have next to side tables around what I like to call my “astro desk,” the Lord and Taylor Queen Anne table topped with triple monitors so I can look at three different computerized astrology programs at once.