“Suit yourself.” Val shrugged. Then, to her daughter, “Tedla’s like family, Deedee. You have to share information free.”
For the first time in months, Val and Max actually sat down alone together at the dinery table for a glass of wine before dinner. They could hear a constant stream of peremptory instructions coming from the gathering room, punctuated with occasional shrieks of delight. At first Max kept glancing in uneasily.
“Are they okay?” Val asked.
“Deedee is. I’m not sure about your alien. She’s bullying it unmercifully.”
“She takes after her mother,” Val said, looking at him apologetically.
“You can say that again.” Max stretched out his legs under the table.
“Am I forgiven?” Val said, rubbing his leg with her stockinged foot.
“Don’t push your luck,” Max said, but he wasn’t serious. “You give new meaning to ‘taking your work home with you.’”
They ate picnic food for supper. While they were still at the table, Joan called to see how Tedla was doing. Val felt smugly satisfied at what a harmonious picture of family life they presented to the screen. After a few minutes of small talk, Joan asked to speak to Val privately. Val switched the call into the bedroom and went in there, closing the door.
“Mandy just called me from the clinic,” Joan said. She was frowning in puzzlement. “After we left, they got a message from WAC saying they’d noted our inquiries about Tedla Galele. They want to know if we have information on Tedla’s whereabouts.”
“Did she reply?” Val asked.
“I told her to send back a message asking who wanted to know, and why. No response yet. E.G. is very suspicious. I know it’s what we wanted, to find someone that knows Tedla—but it gives me the creeps to think they tracked us down just for asking a question. Isn’t that illegal?”
“No, but it was your proprietary information,” Val said. “You can charge them for using it.”
“Oh, sure. As if I’m going to send WAC a bill.”
“You should, Joan. It’s what keeps them from doing this more often.” Her voice was casual, but in fact, Val couldn’t remember ever having tripped off a monitor before. It meant the information was valuable.
“What should I tell them?”
“Nothing, yet. Give me the number. I’ll call them in the morning and find out what’s up.”
Deedee was full of energy and wanted to play again after dinner, but Val insisted she prepare for bed. It devolved into a longer-than-usual ritual, since Deedee had to come out to explain each step to Tedla. When she was finally washed, brushed, and in her sleepers, she crawled up on the sofa beside her new friend. Val noticed that the neuter didn’t flinch from Deedee the way it did from adults. She hoped the child was thawing the tension. Then Deedee looked up earnestly at Tedla and said, “If you’re not a boy or a girl, how do you pee?”
“Dierdre!” Val said. “That’s a rude question.”
“That’s all right,” Tedla said. “Everyone wonders, no one asks. Do you mind if I answer?”
“Only if you want to.”
Tedla turned to Deedee. “I pee the same way you do, through a hole called the urethra. Only with me, there’s nothing there but the hole.”
“I don’t have anything else but the hole, either,” Deedee said wisely. “Only boys do.”
“I think you do,” Tedla said. “You have some flaps of skin called labia, and a few other things you’ll learn about when you’re older.”
“Oh,” Deedee said, concentrating.
“Oh dear, now I can tell I’ll have to do some explaining,” Val said. Max was grinning.
“Was that too explicit?” Tedla said apprehensively.
“No, you did just fine,” Val said.
“Want to explain the rest of it?” Max said wryly.
“I would be afraid of doing it wrong,” Tedla said.
“So are we,” said Max.
Later, when everyone else was in bed and she was in her robe, Val went out to the dinery to make sure breakfast was programmed for four. Heading back to the bedroom, she paused at the studium door to listen. There was no sound from inside, so she cracked open the door. Tedla had gone to sleep with the light still on. After a moment’s hesitation, Val stepped in.
She looked down on the alien’s face. This way, in sleep, it looked very peaceful, and very young. On an impulse, she bent over and kissed the damp forehead, as she would Deedee’s. There was no reaction.
“Poor kid,” she said. “Poor lost kid.”
***
The persistent chiming of a priority message pulled Val from sleep the next morning. She lay still, waiting for Max to get it, but though his side of the bed was empty, there was no sound from the gathering room. Groaning in exasperation, she rolled out of bed and hit the preview key. When she saw it was only Joan, she answered the call.
Joan was already back at the clinic. She looked brisk and serious. “Did I wake you up? I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, that’s all right, I should be up anyway.” Val stifled a yawn, running her fingers through her thick, rat’s-nest hair.
“Well, I thought you’d want to know this. We found some information about Tedla. Mandy did, actually. She’s a perfect genius at this sort of thing. Until this year, Tedla was enrolled as a graduate student in exoethnology at the university on C4D, on an Epco scholarship. No wonder we couldn’t find any trace of our guest—we were looking on the wrong planet!”
A lot of things made more sense now.
“We sent a query to C4D for some records,” Joan said, “but all we could get was lightspeed transmission. It’ll take four days. In the meantime, we have to decide what to do. Tedla can’t stay at your home.”
“Yes. I know, Joan,” Val said. “Let me get up and start working this out.” Before Joan could cut her off she said, “Oh Joan—I’d like a copy of the recording I made there yesterday. Can you have it downloaded to my cache?”
Joan hesitated. “You know about patient confidentiality, don’t you?”
“Of course! I won’t use it without Tedla’s permission.”
“All right.”
Val stumbled into the bathroom, then threw some clothes on. No one seemed to be home. When she got to the dinery, she noticed the message light blinking. She hit it.
“Hi there, you lazy bum,” Max said. “We couldn’t wait around for you to wake up. We’re going down to the playground. See you by lunch, if you’re not still asleep.”
She could only assume “we” meant Tedla, as well. She ordered a cup of coffee and went into the studium to use her console there. The bed was made up, meticulously neat. First, she checked her cache for the interview recording; Tedla’s image filled her screen, talking softly. She was so pleased she kissed her fingers and touched them to the screen. Then she stored the recording and set out to get some questions answered.
Her first step was to look up some background information on Gammadis. What came up was oddly scanty. She chose an article labeled “Gammadis—Exploration.”
The story started, as most exploration stories did, back in the Second Diaspora, when the scattered offshoots of humanity had reached out across space to locate one another. Capella One had been the motherworld of the questships. Never again, in all likelihood, could any planet afford to make such gloriously elaborate machines, and send them out searching for life on a mere speculation. There had been dozens of questships. At first, discoveries had been common. But as the centuries had passed, and near space was explored, communications from the questships had grown fewer and fewer. Now, no one knew exactly how many were still out there, or where they were bound. They did not communicate until they found something.
The last questship to report a discovery had been targeted at an ordinary G-type star, Gamma Disciplis. When, over a hundred years ago, the monitors on Capella Two had intercepted the message reporting an urban civilization on the third planet, WAC had bid for the right to assemble an expeditionary tea
m, gambling that the monopoly on patents, copyrights, and discoveries would repay the expenses. The explorers made the trip from Capella Two via coherent lightbeam transmission to the wayport on the ship. They spent fifty-one years en route, traveling at the speed of light—which, in fact, they were until reassembled into organics at journey’s end. They brought along a state-of-the-art paired-particle communicator, which allowed some limited instantaneous data transmission, but not, alas, instantaneous travel.
Everything had gone smoothly at first. Xenologists, geologists, biologists, economists, and industrial chemists had fanned out across the planet they christened Gammadis, short for Gamma Disciplis. They were welcomed by the inhabitants, who still kept alive traditions of their own spacefaring past and were delighted to be reunited with their kindred in the stars. And yet it soon became apparent that they were only semi-kindred. As with other isolated relicts of the human diaspora, the Gammadians had taken their own unique evolutionary path, and had formed their culture around it.
The period of goodwill had lasted only two years. Then, a critical misstep by the researchers had so enraged the Gammadian elites that they had expelled the entire scientific contingent and declared the planet off-limits. Here, the article was irritatingly vague. “Much of the information gathered by the investigators was impounded by Gammadian authorities, and the rest remains proprietary,” the article stated in its own defense.
Nowhere was there any mention of Tedla Galele—though an Alair Galele was listed as an ethnographer on the original expedition team. Thinking she might have found a hint, Val sent a query for Alair Galele’s current address. The reply came back, “Deceased.”
It was time to call in the heavy artillery. She placed a call to Magister Gossup’s office. He had been her graduate advisor, and was now her principal ally on the UIC faculty.
Kendra, his assistant, answered. “He’s busy right now, Val,” she said. “I’ll tell him to call you, but it may be a while. Did you hear? He got nominated to the Magisterium.”
“Wow. Tell him congratulations.” There had been rumors for months, but now Val realized what it meant to her. Members of the Magisterium had little time for chats with magisters minor. With sinking expectations, she said, “Well, let him know I’ve got some information he’ll be interested in.” On a hunch she added, “Say it’s about Tedla Galele.”
“He’ll know what that means?” Kendra asked.
“I don’t know. See if he does.”
She went to get another cup of coffee, but had scarcely poured it when the terminal chimed again. To her utter surprise, Magister Gossup’s cultured Vind face filled her screen.
He was the picture of controlled intelligence. Every hair on his head was cut to the same even length. His honey-colored skin was unmarked by either frown or smile lines, despite what had to be an advanced age. There was a half-serious joke in the xenology section at UIC that he had traveled so much, his molecules reconstituted so many times, that he had begun to lose definition. The only culture-specific touch about him was the carnelian caste-stone anchored in his forehead, disconcertingly like a third eye. Perhaps it was; no one but Vinds knew their exact function.
“I was pleased to hear that you called, Valerie,” he said quietly. That meant nothing; he did everything quietly, from dressing to dressing down his students. Val instinctively smoothed her hair. He always made her feel helter-skelter.
“Did Kendra give you my message?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “It was...intriguing.”
That meant there was something valuable about it. Val was very alert by now. “I have an interesting houseguest. From Gammadis.”
Anyone who didn’t know him well would have thought he had no reaction. Val saw the tiny movement of his eyebrow, and knew what intense pressure he must be under. “Tedla Galele is at your house?” he said.
“Yes.” She paused, waiting to see what he would offer for more information. She owed him stunning amounts of money.
“Does WAC know?” he asked.
“Not yet, but they’re getting close. I’m giving you first chance at this information.”
“I appreciate that, Valerie. The information is very valuable to WAC, and I expect them to be generous. Shall we say, five thousand?”
Val was speechless. It was a windfall beyond her wildest expectations. Five thousand units would send Deedee to school for a year, and free Max to pursue his life again. She caught herself on the verge of accepting gratefully. If the stakes were this high, a gamble might have an even bigger payoff. Glad that Max wasn’t listening, she said, “Actually, Magister, I’d prefer an in-kind exchange. You let me in on what’s going on, and why WAC’s looking for Tedla, and we’ll call it square.”
From the way he paused, she knew her instincts had been right: She had asked for something more valuable than five thousand units of money.
“I would prefer not to talk over a public connection,” he said. “There are some diplomatic problems involved. Can you meet me at the sand fountain outside the Court of Induction?”
If diplomacy was involved, something big had happened. Val said, “I’ll be there in twenty-five minutes.”
***
Marep to Overcon to Paratuic—each waynode on the route was a seat of learning, and an enclave of imported culture, in its own right. No other planet thrived on the new like Capella Two. Knowledge was its principal export, and its only major industry. Once, Val had protested the commodification of information along with Max and the rest of the radicals; but she could no longer afford purist principles. Information, as the saying went, was the only truly transportable commodity. It was what had supported the exploration of near space for the past few centuries—and without exploration, what good were xenologists?
The Court of Induction was an indoor plaza in a new section of the university, built from the proceeds of many lucrative research contracts. The stories-high glass ceiling was supported by tracery arches, and the court itself was full of sunlight and varied textures of stone, glass, and metal. Val caught a glimpse of herself in an architectural mirror, and realized that the surroundings made her look underdressed and undergroomed. Her thin, pointed face looked alert, like some small, wily animal’s, under her black cap of hair.
She spotted Magister Gossup from across the plaza, waiting at a cafe table near the sand fountain, sipping maté. As she crossed toward him, the bells marking the Twelve Harmonies went off—a courtesy to the Choristers, whose enclave was nearby. She nearly collided with a jingling Chorister who had stopped in midmotion to perform a tuning devolution.
When Val slipped into the seat opposite Magister Gossup, she realized that the background noise of falling sand made it impossible for anyone to eavesdrop. “Thank you for meeting me,” Gossup said evenly. He offered her some maté. She shook her head and ordered espresso from the automenu. As if continuing a casual conversation, he said, “I am curious to hear how Tedla came to be at your house.”
His face grew very grave as she told the story. At the end, he looked preoccupied. “Suicide,” he said. “And I thought this couldn’t get more complicated.”
“Magister, what is going on? You’ve got to let me in on it now.”
He paused. “How much do you know about the history of our relations with Gammadis?”
“Only what the public can find out,” she said.
“Then there are a few things you need to know.” He sat back, his normally serene face a map of concentration. “Gammadis is quite a puzzling anomaly. An extremely earthlike ecosystem, genetic stock far too similar to be anything but terraformed; yet the world shows all the evidence of quite ancient settlement, and the inhabitants themselves have no tradition of earth origin. Their social and material technologies have enormous sales potential. All in all, WAC was anticipating a windfall from knowledge acquired there. If the team had imagined how suddenly the Gammadians would turn against them, they might have sent back more information, despite the inconvenience of PPC transmission.
But the expulsion took them completely by surprise. Most of their research was confiscated. WAC’s losses were enormous. Now we have only the interim reports—enough to tantalize us, not enough to profit by.”
His use of “we” when referring to WAC didn’t escape Val.
“When we were forced to vacate the planet sixty-three years ago, we naturally left the questship in orbit, tended by its AI. We left the wayport and the paired-particle communicator ready to activate again, in case the mattergraves and electors should change their minds.”
“Do you remember this?” Val asked.
“Yes, I was on Capella Two at the time.”
No one at UIC knew exactly how old he was; rumors said that he had spoken knowingly about the original colony on Capella One.
He continued, “All the Gammadians had to do was send a radio message to the AI, something well within their technological capabilities. The AI would then transmit the message to us instantaneously via PPC.”
“And did they?” Val asked.
“Apparently we underestimated their capabilities, or their tenacity. In the years following our evacuation, they not only communicated with our AI; they found a way to subvert it. Perhaps it malfunctioned. At any rate, they learned a great deal from it without our knowledge. Eventually, they managed to get to the orbiter by mechanical means.”
“Rocket technology?” Val asked.
Gossup nodded resignedly. “Once they had access to the ship, of course, they had access to the wayport on it, with lightspeed transport to Capella Two. Twelve years after our evacuation, they sent a two-member delegation to investigate us and demand redress for their grievances. They arrived three days ago. You can imagine our surprise.”
There had not been a hint of this news on the nets. “There is a delegation here from Gammadis?” Val said. “Now?” It made her appreciate WAC’s powers of information suppression.
“It presents us with a delicate diplomatic situation. WAC is extremely anxious for a resumption of contact.”
“What about the Gammadians? Do they want contact, as well?”
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