The One-Eyed Man

by Modesitt,, L. E. Jr.

  “Poor bastard. Didn’t want to see everything taken.”

  “Maybe he was the bastard. It does happen that way.”

  “Anything’s possible. No pre-contract?”

  “He may have been so involved in his work that he never saw it coming.” She laughed softly, ironically. “Or he’s the type who believes in true love. Or he upset her so badly that the only place he’s safe is off-system and years into her future.”

  “Either way, that’s trouble.”

  “But for whom?” She walked toward the office door. “The multis here know where we stand. No one in the Arm who cares about the ecological consequences will even be holding office, if they’re still alive, when he or his report arrives back on Bachman. Even if he does find out something, and that’s highly unlikely for an offworlder—what could he do?”

  “There’s always something to discover.”

  “Precisely. And I’ll need to leave to pick him up from the dropport in a few stans.”

  “So soon? Usually you get messages earlier than that, when the ships are a day or so out, if not farther.” The man frowned.

  “This was a sealed comm, not through an intermediary. Those are always the last sent because they’re the responsibility of some junior officer who has too much to do and who figures that something sent years before couldn’t be that urgent. Vergenya had no one to spare. Besides the apparent political impartiality, that’s another reason why they had to send Verano, rather than a Survey Service assessor.”

  “That suggests…”

  “It does indeed, unless it’s actually an honest contract.”

  “That might pose even more problems.”

  “We’ll have to wait and see.” She stood. “I’ll need to make arrangements. He’ll likely have equipment of some sort. It might even include updates and new tech that we could use. As a contractor, he’s obliged to share that with us.”

  “At our expense.”

  “It’s more than worth it, and you know it.”

  “I suppose so. What does he look like?”

  “Vergenya sent his bio and image, just in case.”

  “None of the multis would go that far, would they? Not those upstanding conglomerated legal entities that want nothing on Stittara to change?”

  “Your biases are showing.”

  “And yours aren’t?”

  “I imagine he’s like every other consultant. Vaguely good-looking and competent. A shade taller than average, I’d judge. You can see for yourself. I’ve allowed you access to it.”

  “Most kind of you.”

  “Practical … as you know.”

  The man frowned as the door closed behind her.

  9

  Not quite four days later, the Persephonya locked to the umbilical of Stittara’s lone and small orbit control station. I didn’t rush, although I did pack all my gear. The local orbit station personnel would take some time to process everyone, although it was largely a formality for most travelers, since Ceylesian Transport vetted passengers thoroughly before they embarked. The one aspect of clearance that wasn’t a formality was a check to determine if any passengers had been past visitors to Stittara or former residents. It was scarcely unknown for those deemed undesirable, either for political, criminal, or civil reasons, to leave a world before their misdeeds were uncovered and use trans-space travel to try to escape their past and then eventually return to their home world. Sometimes, it worked, especially if there had been a significant change in government—or a revolution. Then, that also worked against travelers who had been “desirable” under previous governments … and who found themselves considerably less so under a “nouveau regime.”

  In all the time coming in-system, I’d continued to talk to the other passengers in standard accommodations, and even to the grande dame Constantia Dewers, when she deigned to visit the “standard” salon. Both Rob Gybl and I were convinced her shipboard name was totally pseudonymous. Aimee Vanslo wouldn’t commit, one way or the other, and said it was Constantia’s business, not ours. Of course, I didn’t learn much about Aimee’s dining with the grande dame, either, except Aimee did reveal that she had noted one of the bracelets “Constantia” wore was Ansaran in origin, and had doubtless been anything but a bracelet, given differences in anatomy … and dated back at least several hundred millennia.

  On one level, that indicated either great wealth, or a gift from someone with great wealth, but the fact that she was traveling first class meant she wasn’t exactly impoverished. What it also indicated was that Aimee knew Ansaran artifacts … and wanted me to know that she knew them.

  The other thing I did once we linked to orbit control was arrange for the transfer of my ship-carried funds to Stittaran Planetary. I knew I’d take a loss on the time-conversion, because there was no interest compounding for personal funds in transit, but I didn’t like the idea of not having more than expense funds. The expense funds had been taken care of separately, in an escrow account under my name, and were there for me to draw on. I knew, because I’d checked.

  Clearance on the orbit stations varied little from station to station, and before long I was standing in line in a gray composite chamber with the other standard-class passengers, waiting for a multipoint DNA sampling, scan, and comparison. The interior of the few stations I’d visited was gray, and others had relayed the same experience. That made perfect sense, for a number of reasons, but mainly because gray aged better and was less offensive to most people than any other color. The fact that it was also depressing hadn’t seemed to have mattered throughout history, human history, anyway. Most human stations were indeed gray, although I’d heard that the Farhkans preferred a dull red, and some scientists insisted that the forerunner culture had a disproportionate number of violet walls. But then, maybe whatever coloration the forerunners had preferred had simply faded or shifted over eons, given that the color was part of the structure, rather than additive.

  I stood behind Rob Gybl, who snorted gently. “It’s the same thing everywhere. Hurry up and wait while they look for people who made a mistake and want to come home.”

  “That’s a mistake in itself,” I replied. “Time changes everything. The river’s different each time you step into it.”

  “Too philosophical for me,” he replied dryly. After several minutes, and two passengers in front of us being scanned—the couple headed to work for Syntex—he added, “Seems to me that every place isn’t that much different from any other, once you get beyond the furniture.”

  “People are the same pretty much everywhere, but the patterns differ,” I pointed out.

  “No. They just repeat, shuffled into different configurations.”

  Before I could reply to that, he was first in line, and the pleasant-faced woman in a gray singlesuit, the shade of which somehow clashed with the gray of the composite walls, motioned for him to step into the scanner box. After less than a minute, she waved him on, and it was my turn.

  I tendered my Unity ID, and she slipped it into the scanner.

  “Paulo Verano?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Purpose for visiting Stittara?”

  “Consulting assignment for the Systems Survey Service. It should be on file.”

  Her eyes flicked to the screen. Then what felt like jabs of air sampled my bare skin in random places. “Put your right hand on the scanner.”

  I did. Perhaps forty seconds passed.

  “You’re clear, Ser Verano. Next…”

  As I stepped out of the scanner, I could see that Lars Lenstren was next, followed by his wife. Of course, he’d go first … and she’d let him.

  The corridor beyond the scanning room led to the drop shuttle, and there I was pointed to the cocoon next to Sinjon Reksba, who I’d barely talked to onboard.

  He immediately offered a smile too broad for his narrow face. “Paulo … we had so little chance to talk during the trip. How did you like the Persephonya?”

  “I’ve only made a few trans-spa
ce trips, none but this recently. How could I compare? What do you think?”

  “The Persephonya is hardly the finest vessel of those proffered by Ceylesian Transport. Ah, but her name is singularly appropriate, traveling always in the darkness trying to make her way into the light and never being able to remain there for long. The accommodations are adequate, the crew and staff generally accommodating, and to a destination such as Stittara, I doubt we could do any better … or any worse.”

  “You never did say why you were coming here.”

  “Nor did you, as I recall.”

  “I’m a consulting ecologist on a contract assignment.” I suspected all Stittara would know in hours after the drop shuttle landed. “You?”

  “The proverbial black sheep … ram, really. Or prodigal son, if you will. It appears as though I’ve inherited the family lands. I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I’ll be taking them over from the trust that’s administering them in my absence, assuming that there’s anything left to administer. There is something to be said about returning to one’s roots. What that might be, or whether it’s even a good idea, is another thing altogether. I take it that you’ve never been on Stittara before?”

  “No. Until I was briefed, the only thing I knew was that it was the largest source of anagathics for the Arm and that it has skytubes that people still argue over as to whether they’re intelligent.”

  “Intelligence is overrated by any species that has it, and that’s provable by the fact that all intelligent species are outlived by a factor of a hundred to one, if not a thousand to one, by nonintelligent species, who don’t have the brains or perversity to destroy themselves or their environments.”

  “You’re originally from Stittara,” I pressed gently. “Do you think the skytubes are semi-intelligent?”

  “How could they be, up in the air like that? Brains are dense, in both senses of the word. Even if there were the possibility, and that’s been proven otherwise, I believe, how can any species evaluate another, except by its own criteria, and who would ever want to be evaluated by human criteria? Do you, really?” countered Reksba. “Hades, I’ve never thought of myself as judgmental, but I wouldn’t want me judging me, not impartially, anyway. Nice and competent as you might be, Paulo, it’d even be a risk to have you judge me … and as for most of the ladies on the Persephonya … no, thank you.”

  “You don’t like the ladies?”

  “I love ’em all, and lust even more, but the only time they’re sentimental is over small helpless creatures and occasionally their own children, but only before puberty. Men can be sentimental, now and again, but it’s usually over the wrong things, like women … or daughters.”

  I managed not to wince. I hadn’t seen the last word coming, and it made me wonder exactly how much Sinjon Reksba knew about me. “Not sons?”

  “Hades! Every man ever had a son knows the son wants to do him one better. Hard to be sentimental about that, and it’s not good for the boy, either.”

  “You ever had any sons?”

  “Not a one. Not any daughters, either. Being a son was enough to cure me. Might have to change that now.” He looked toward the blank wall of the drop shuttle. “Be nice if they had ports or viewscreens, but this is Stittara.”

  That did tell me he’d done more than his fair share of traveling … under varied circumstances.

  After that, it was only a few minutes before the last passengers were cocooned, and the shuttle dropped away from Stittara orbit control.

  10

  When the hatchway opened on the drop shuttle I filed out after most of the others, and right in front of Sinjon Reksba. Stittara turned out to be a purple-gray world, just as all the briefing materials indicated, but mere words and screen and link presentations aren’t the same as the reality. Not for me, anyway. As for why that purple-gray was so intense, rather than dull, I couldn’t have said. Oh, I could have presented reason after reason, and they’d all make perfect sense, beginning with the translucent always-airborne microorganisms that absorbed certain frequencies of visible light. The meteorologists have their measurements, their analyses that confirm those reasons. For them, that solved the problem. For me, it didn’t. An old, old physicist once told me that labeling anything had nothing to do with solving a problem. Neither does explaining how something works. As far as I was concerned, the meteorologists had just analyzed and labeled the planet’s atmosphere, and let it go. There were reasons for letting it go, and I suspected that what lay behind those reasons might be why I was there.

  Well … not exactly. They were why the Unity’s ecological arm, the Systems Survey Service, had posted that freelance consulting assignment that I’d jumped at just to get away from Bachman and Chelesina, except it had been dangled right in front of me, and I’d jumped at the bait like every other consultant who thought a proposal had been written exactly for his or her experience and abilities. And I was fairly certain this one had. What galled me the most was the feeling that I was part of a multimillion-duhlar political throwaway vote-getting gambit … that the experience that the Survey Service was paying for was only midlevel camouflage and that the results of my assessment would change nothing. Except … I’d known that the assignment wouldn’t likely change much. Every consultant knows that ninety percent of what they do is to either give cover to doing nothing or to support a decision already made. In the case of Stittara, it was more than clear which was most likely.

  Now … I was wondering just how good an idea it had been to take the contract, given that I was stepping off an antique half-winged/half-lifting body shuttle, carrying a modest duffel, in addition to the two crates in the shuttle’s cargo bay. I’d had a look at the planet from the viewers on the orbit control station, and while the atmosphere looked hazy, I had been able to make out the outline of the continents and the comparatively narrow oceans that separated them. From space Stittara hadn’t looked all that different, just another water world, with less water than many, except the veil of stars that was the Arm was far narrower, and the blackness on each side much wider … and there had been a shading of purple, but the view from outside the atmosphere had given no idea of the intensity of that purple-gray … or the fact that the sun was not a circle hanging in the sky. Rather the microorganisms in the upper troposphere diffused—and diminished—its illumination so that almost a quadrant of the sky was intensely luminous. Part of that was because Stittara’s sun was an F class, but Stittara wasn’t as far away as it should have been to be in the habitable zone because the atmosphere reflected more heat than did that of most T-type worlds.

  Once I was down the ramp and clear of the shuttle I looked around, past the faded low greenish gray stone structure at the edge of permacrete tarmac to the west, looking around to see who from the local Survey Service was there to meet me. I couldn’t pick out anyone in particular from the thirty or so individuals standing near the blockhouse-like dropport terminal, but I did see a pair of men in what appeared to be security singlesuits, along with a woman, greeting Aimee Vanslo, while a single functionary met Holly and Georg. The others before me had merged into the small crowd.

  Once I looked away from the passengers and their greeters, the next thing I noticed was the grass, brownish purple-green, that seemed to cover everything, leaving no bare ground or rocks. The next was that there were no trees, not anywhere I looked, and the clumps of bushes that I did see were domelike and barely a meter tall. Nor were there any sharp shapes or jagged peaks, even of the hills or mountains in the distance. All that presented a landscape with an almost surreal and streamlined appearance, and in colors that would have seemed dull, monochromatic, had it not been for the intensity of those colors themselves.

  Then … there was the sky, or what was in it. Stittara didn’t have clouds. Well … not clouds in the way anyone from a standard water world would consider them. What struck me immediately was the complexity and the intricacy of the skytubes, that and the intensity of their purple-gray, a shade that didn’t
stay exactly the same in one place for more than moments. Yet I couldn’t actually see the shift in color and intensity, but that might have been because the skytubes I saw were far to the southwest.

  I kept walking, my eyes on the sky because all the briefing cubes in the world couldn’t have conveyed that vibrancy … and yet, as I looked at the skytubes, they were somehow both intense … and just plain dull purple tinged with gray. The sky was a lighter gray, tinged with purple, also intense, just not so intense as the skytubes themselves.

  “Gets you somehow, doesn’t it?”

  I looked away from the skytubes to see walking toward me a pleasant-faced woman of indeterminate age, not that I expected anyone on Stittara to show obvious age, given that it was essentially the source of cosmetic and physiological anagathics for the Unity. She smiled, obviously waiting for me, since she wore the gray-blue singlesuit of Systems Survey, if one in a style long since abandoned on Bachman, conservative as it was compared to styles on Eduardo or elsewhere in the center of the Unity.

  “Aloris Raasn,” she added.

  “Paulo Verano. I’m the—”

  “—the ecological assessor sent by the Unity, more precisely under the direction of the Assembly’s oversight subcommittee,” Aloris finished for me.

  That an oversight committee had been involved didn’t surprise me, but that I hadn’t been told and that she had told me that she’d clearly received a beamed message from the Persephonya, which had reached her more swiftly than I had, for all that it had traveled with me, there being nothing faster for practical interstellar communication transmission than a ley-liner. Even so, she’d had to have acted quickly. “What do you do with the Survey?”