Trickster

by Steven Harper

  "Not really. I've checked this one several times and it's perfectly sound."

  "Okay." Kendi stretched restlessly. "I should take a nap, especially if I'm going to do a pilot shift later, but I'm still wired. Pulling a con always revs me up. Fooling Markovi like that, yanking Bedj-ka out right from under the bastard's nose. All life, it's almost better than sex."

  "Yeah?" Ben set the cryo-unit back on the table and ran light fingers down the back of Kendi's neck. Kendi shivered deliciously at the sensation. Then Ben kissed him.

  "I did say almost better," Kendi pointed out several moments later.

  "Let me show you the exact difference."

  Four days later, Father Kendi Weaver leaned against the railing on the roof of the Varsis Building and stared out across the city of Felice. The Varsis was the tallest building in town, and Felice's thin skyscrapers and artificial spires moved out to the horizon in all directions beneath him. Ground traffic oozed over streets so far below that Kendi couldn't hear the sounds. Like Klimkinnar, Drim also put severe restrictions on air traffic, so no aircars buzzed between the buildings. Up here was just the sun and the wind and the quiet voices of the other sightseers who had come up for the view.

  Kendi looked down at the dizzying drop. The talltrees on Bellerophon had nothing on the Varsis Building, but height wasn't everything. Bellerophon was a city among the trees, built to merge with the treescape and blend with the beauty. Felice grew from the ground like a glassy cancer.

  And somewhere out there were two members of his family.

  It seemed to Kendi that he should be able to see them from up here, get their attention if he shouted loud enough. The old longings came back, more powerful than ever. His last memory of his sister, brother, and father had been of them weeping as he and his mother were led away by Giselle Blanc. He could still hear punishing electricity crackle, smell the ozone in the air as Rhys Weaver reached out to touch his wife's hand one more time.

  They were the last words Kendi had heard his father utter. And three years later when Kendi had been sold away from his mother, he had vowed to obey them. Despite many hours spent with counselors and therapists, consuming fury still snarled inside him like a rabid dingo whenever he thought about what the slavers had done to him and his family. He wept and worried about them, too, sometimes in Ben's arms and sometimes curled up by himself. And still he searched. How many false leads had he come across over the years? Now, at long last, he had a solid one.

  It was a lead he had almost lost, too. During the Despair, the twisted children of Padric Sufur had pushed almost every person in the universe out the Dream. Without the subconscious connection provided by the Dream, all empathy and caring vanished. Some sentients had fallen into a deep depression. Others had been driven insane. All of them showed a total disregard for the lives and feelings of other sentients. If Ben hadn't freed Kendi from a self-imposed Dream prison, if Kendi hadn't managed to delay the twisted children in their attempt to destroy the Dream, if Vidya and Prasad Vajhur hadn't managed to put the children's solid-world bodies into cryo-chambers--if any of these things hadn't happened, the Dream would have been destroyed forever and all sentient life in the universe would have ended within a single generation. The thought still made Kendi sweat.

  After the Despair, Bellerophon had been thrown into turmoil along with the rest of the universe. The Children of Irfan had responded to the crisis by falling back and retrenching. All field teams and operatives were to return to the monastery immediately. Some of the teams returned on their own, but many of them didn't, meaning someone had to go out and find them. Kendi, newly appointed to a command position despite the fact that he had only achieved the rank of Father, had run himself and his team ragged tracking down Child after Child. Some were assigned on planets or on stations. Others were members of teams like Kendi's and had ships of their own. The findings of Kendi's team hadn't always been pretty. Losing touch with the Dream had affected the Silent more strongly than other sentients, and several Silent plunged into homicidal rage or suicidal despair. Twelve Children with long-term off-planet positions had killed themselves, and twice Kendi's team had found empty ships floating in space, the crew's dessicated corpses floating in corridors and quarters. Through it all, however, Kendi couldn't stop thinking about what Sejal had told him just after the Despair. Every word was burned into his mind:

  After six months of scrambling around the galaxy retrieving other Children and relaying emergency messages through the Dream, Kendi had finally had enough of waiting. What if someone sold his family? What if they escaped and vanished into the post-Despair chaos? What if they died? Every day brought a greater chance that this precious lead would dry up. Eventually, Kendi had gone to the Council of Irfan. They had been reluctant to loan him a ship, despite the fact that most of the missing field teams were accounted for and most of the Children, bereft of their Silence, had little or nothing to do.

  "Everything is too chaotic," replied Grandmother Adept Pyori. "Governments and economies are collapsing. We need all our people close to home in case something happens."

  "That makes this the best time for me to go," Kendi shot back. "It takes a lot of time for galactic governments and mega-corporations to collapse. I need to get out there before everything falls apart completely and my family vanishes forever."

  The blank faces of the Council, however, said they were still unconvinced, and in the end Kendi fell back on emotional blackmail.

  "I saved the lives of every single person in this room," he said. "I saved the lives of your family, your friends, and every living creature in this universe. All I want in return is a single ship and a crew to go with her. How can that be too much to ask?"

  The Council had agreed, but with limitations. When they laid down the time limit, Kendi wondered what he would have had to do to get a ship for longer than two months. Create a new universe from scratch?

  "We are not doing this to be difficult, Father Kendi," Grandmother Adept Pyori said, as if reading his mind. "Every Silent who can still reach the Dream is precious beyond measure. Have you considered what will happen to us in the next fifty or sixty years? The danger we are in?"

  "I don't understand, Grandmother," Kendi replied.

  "No new Silent are entering the Dream," she said solemnly. "And one day the remaining Silent who can enter it will die."

  A cold chill slid over Kendi's body at her words. He had been so busy over the last six months that this hadn't occurred to him. The Children of Irfan was an organization that existed only because of the Dream and the communication it provided. If no Silent could enter the Dream, the Children would disappear, swallowed by history.

  The breeze from the top of the Varsis Building continued to wash over Kendi. He felt bold and alive, filled with optimism despite his problems. He would find his two family members on Drim, and perhaps they would know something about the others. Then together they could keep looking. Kendi was also looking forward to introducing them to Ben and telling them about--

  "Father?"

  Kendi tapped his earpiece. "I'm here, Lucia. What's going on?"

  "Ben's found something on the newsnets that you'll want to see. Can you come down to the suite?"

  "Is it something you can upload to my implant?" Kendi asked, already heading for the elevator doors at the other end of the observation deck.

  Pause. "Not really."

  Kendi's stomach tensed as he entered the lift and told it he wanted the eighteenth floor, one of eight floors that made up a hotel within the Varsis Building. The lift obediently dropped. Was the news good or bad? Had to be bad. Otherwise Lucia would have told him something about it.

  The Varsis Hotel hallways were plushly carpeted and thickly wallpapered, hushing every sound. A holographic waterfall rushed over stones at an intersection, filling the air with the sound of gushing water. It even smelled of moss. The hotel was on the expensive side, but Kendi saw no reason not to get comfortable digs. Ara would have told everyone to live on the s
hip, but Kendi found it annoying to go through the spaceport every time he wanted to do something in the city, and had decided the Children could pay for a hotel. He was glad to have insisted on a huge purse of hard-currency freemarks from the exchequer. Without Silent to handle the transactions in the post-Despair galaxy, very little interplanetary banking was taking place, and the population of a fair number of planets, including Drim, was in the middle of a "don't trust the banks" frame of mind. There was also a very real dread that some currencies would collapse. Many financial institutions had closed their doors, fearing bank runs. As a result, physical money had quickly become the norm again. Kendi liked that. It used to be that the decent hotels and restaurants looked askance at anyone offering hard cash instead of electronic transfer, meaning undercover Children either had to set up electronic accounts under false names--risky--or patronize the sort of places that didn't care how you paid as long as you paid--distasteful. Nowadays, Kendi could pay hard freemarks to the fanciest place in town and be just another cautious socialite.

  Kendi passed the waterfall and thumbed open the double door to the suite he had rented. The place was bright and airy, with a large outer sitting room, two well-appointed bathrooms, and four bedrooms. Enormous windows looked out over the cityscape. Although the suite sported its own holographic generator which allowed guests to add artwork or chunks of outdoor scenes, no one had been able to agree on a decoration scheme and Kendi had finally shut the system off entirely. As a result, the place was rather plain, done in simple greens and browns.

  Ben had appropriated part of the sitting room as a work area, and he had hooked up his own computer to the hotel's network. The man himself was hunched over the keyboard, clothes rumpled, red hair tousled. In other words, looking perfectly normal. Lucia stood behind Ben's chair, one hand on the Irfan figurine around her neck. The holographic display above the desk showed text and pictures.

  "What's going on?" Kendi demanded without preamble.

  Ben hesitated. Lucia looked perfectly calm, but Kendi felt his whole insides screw up with tension. Bad news, that's what it was all right. Otherwise they'd come right out and say it.

  "Well?" He strode to the desk. "Just tell me. Or do I have to read it for myself?"

  "It's bad," Ben said finally.

  "I'll go see what Gretchen is up to," Lucia murmured, and quietly withdrew into the room the two of them shared. Kendi's legs went weak.

  "Ben, what is it?" Kendi asked. "I can't handle suspense. Just say it. Did you find them? Are they . . . are they dead?"

  "I don't know," Ben replied. He reached up and took Kendi's hand. "Ken, I found a series of news stories. A firm called DrimCom--the Com is short for Communication--encountered a . . . loss. It used to own twenty-odd Silent slaves, but only two of them came through the Despair with their Silence intact. One's a man, the other's a woman."

  "My family?" Kendi asked.

  "Yeah. I have their holos. Want to see?"

  Kendi leaned forward despite his fear. "You know the answer to that."

  Ben tapped a key and the text vanished. The head of a woman in her mid-twenties appeared. She was beautiful, with large brown eyes, skin darker than Kendi's, and sharply-defined features that included a firm chin. Kendi touched his own chin when he saw her. "Martina," he breathed.

  Another hologram appeared beside the first, one of a man in his thirties. The resemblance to Kendi was unmistakable, except for the striking blue eyes. Sejal had similar eyes, and Kendi had once suspected Sejal--wrongly--of being Utang's son. Kendi's throat thickened. The last time he had seen his brother and sister they had been fifteen and ten, respectively. Now they were adults.

  "I managed to break into their medical records, including their DNA scans," Ben said. "I ran a comparison. All three of you have the same mitochondrial DNA, which means you're siblings. It's definitely them."

  Kendi's heart was racing and he tightened his grip on Ben's hand. "You said there's bad news."

  "Yeah." Ben ran his free hand through his hair. "Ken, they've both disappeared."

  For a moment Kendi could only focus on the fact that Ben was calling him Ken, a nickname he didn't allow anyone else to use and one Ben used only rarely. Then he said, "Disappeared?"

  "Kidnapped. Someone broke into the slave quarters and snatched them both away. No clues, according to the news reports. They're gone."

  Kendi's knees turned to water and the room darkened. Eventually he became aware that he was sitting on the floor with his head between his knees. Ben knelt next to him, an arm around his shoulder. Kendi felt like he was spinning.

  "Just breathe," Ben said. "Slow and steady. You'll be okay."

  "What is wrong?" came Harenn's voice. "Is he injured?"

  "He almost fainted," Ben told her. "The news was a shock."

  Kendi looked up and the room swayed. Harenn's unveiled face--All life, it still looks strange to see her, he thought incongruously--was looking down with concern. She was rather pretty, with rounded cheeks and care lines around her mouth. Although she had stopped wearing the veil, she continued to cover her hair with a translucent scarf.

  "When?" Kendi asked hoarsely.

  "When what?" Ben asked.

  "When did it happen? When were they kidnapped?"

  "Two days ago. The day before we got to Drim."

  Harenn looked abruptly stricken. She backed away, her skin gone pale. "Oh god."

  Kendi closed his eyes.

  "What's the matter?" Ben demanded. "Harenn, don't you faint, too. What the hell is wrong?"

  "Two days ago," Harenn whispered. "They vanished two days ago. If we had first come to Drim instead of going to Klimkinnar to get Bedj-ka, we might have arrived before . . . " She trailed off.

  "Oh," Ben said.

  Kendi opened his eyes. "Harenn, don't you feel guilty. I need you to be yourself right now. It was my--" he swallowed "--my decision to go to Klimkinnar, not yours. It's my fault."

  "Hey!" Ben grabbed Kendi's hand again. "It's not your fault, Ken. You had no way of knowing. The people who kidnapped your brother and sister--it's their fault. The people who enslaved them in the first place--it's their fault. Not yours, not Harenn's. Mom would pitch a fit if she knew you were thinking that way."

  Mom. Mother Ara. All life, she would have known what to do. Kendi felt like he was floundering, drowning in a frothy sea. What was the next step? What should he do? He had no idea. And then for a moment it felt like Ara was standing over him.

  "Yes, Mother," he muttered.

  "What?" Ben said.

  "Nothing. Help me up. Then get Gretchen and Lucia in here. We have a kidnapping to solve."

  "Look, I've gone through this with the police twice already," complained the woman. She was dressed in scarlet from head to foot, with a scarf twisted through night-black hair. The small hologram hovering near her collar gave her name as Linda Tellman and her title as First Manager. She had an artificial sort of beauty that told Kendi's practiced eye she had been to a fresh-up at least once.

  "I know, ma'am," Kendi said, slipping the fake police ID back into his pocket. "But you know how this sort of thing works. Every time you go over it, you may remember some detail you left out before."

  "Well, you cop-guys are thorough, I'll give you that," Tellman muttered. She gestured at a chair near her desk. "Have a seat, Detective."

  "Actually, I haven't seen the crime scene yet," Kendi said. "Could you go through what happened while we walk down there?"

  Tellman sighed. "Somewhere in here I do have work to get done, but it can wait, right?"

  Kendi didn't answer. He merely followed her through a series of corridors and down two flights of stairs. The DrimCom building, located on the outskirts of Felice, was low and sprawling, with lots of steel and blue-tinted reflective windows. Many of the offices they passed were empty, recent indications of DrimCom's recent loss of revenue.

  As if reading Kendi's mind, Tellman said, "If we can't get these two back, the company's going to go under. Th
ere isn't much of it left as it is. We had twenty-six Silent--"

  "All slaves?" Kendi interrupted.

  Tellman nodded. "But after the Despair, only two of them were able to enter the Dream. We held on to the others as long as we could, hoping their Silence would come back, but eventually we had to sell them. We raised our communication rates for the two Silent we had left, just like everyone else is doing, but then this happened. Our only source of revenue--gone. DrimCom's dying on the vine now."

  "You don't seem overly upset," Kendi observed.

  "I've got my savings--unlike a lot of people around here," Tellman said. "And I have prospects. My uncle works for Sufur Enterprises, and he says they have positions open, if you know who to talk to."

  They reached an area that reminded Kendi of the Varsis Hotel. Numbered doors faced a quiet hallway lit with yellow lamps. Tellman selected one of the doors and thumbed the lock. It clicked open for her.

  "These are our slave quarters," she said, entering ahead of Kendi. "The woman's name was Violet. This was her room."

  Kendi stepped into the room. It was plainly furnished but bright, with yellow walls and a beige carpet. A light smell of perfumed body powder hung on the air. Several pictures--pen-and-ink drawings, not holograms--hung on the walls. Kendi almost gasped as he recognized Outback landscapes. Unable to help himself, he moved closer to one. A falcon skimmed high above a rocky cliff. At the base of the cliff wall sat a kangaroo. It was leaning back on its tail and staring up at the sky. In the bottom corner, the name "Martina" had been worked into the roots of a bush. Kendi's throat closed. This indeed belonged to his sister. She had eaten and slept and held onto her name in this very room. Her scent still lingered. With a trembling hand, he reached out to touch the glass of the frame.

  "Is there something about her drawings?" Tellman asked behind him. "A clue?"

  Kendi pulled his hand back and swallowed hard to get his voice under control. "Maybe. Why don't you tell me what happened and I'll look over the room."