Not that he needed to be getting paternalistic about alien amphibians. Getting soft wasn’t a good way to succeed in André’s line of work, or even a good way to stay alive. He spared a moment to picture Timothy Closs or Jefferson Greene worrying about a coolie, and shook his head to clear it.
Getting soft wasn’t the way to get ahead in anybody’s line of work.
A moment’s thought lead him to the obvious conclusion: “Caetei?”
And that was better: this time, it scritched affirmation with one hand, then thrust the slate at him again. It hurt even more to prop himself on one elbow and accept the device, so he dropped his shoulders back against the pallet. It was surprisingly comfortable, if a bit moist. His shirt adhered to his shoulders and his trousers—with one leg cut away midthigh—adhered to his buttocks and legs. He didn’t think it was all blood or sweat or swampwater. Whatever the ranids used for bedding, on the other hand…
—Good u wake, the ranid’s slate said, as he raised it in front of his eyes. —Tide rsng.
They couldn’t be too far upriver, then. The New Nile boasted only a shallow gradient, and as far as André knew, if it hadn’t been for the mitigating effects of the rushy bayou and the paramangrove, the tides might roll miles up the broad, placid river. But those features existed, and even Greene’s World’s embarrassment of lunar influences couldn’t quite push the ocean through them. The New Nile remained an outflow channel.
The ranids must have moved him out-bayou, closer to the bay, because the tides had been minimal at the overnighting island. The move was good, a smart thing; it would make it easier for a rescue team to reach him.
“Move where?” he asked slowly, enunciating.
He couldn’t heads-up the time or a tide chart, but Caetei had no reason to lie to him. That didn’t reassure him as he metaphorically picked his way around the fissures in his mind caused by his headset. Even his hard memory was out of service, leaving an unsettling gap. He wondered how much was irretrievably lost. He had backups, of course. He was sane and careful and not as thoroughly paranoid as Jean Kroc, nor the sort to take mad risks. The backups were a vulnerability, of course, the sort that somebody like Cricket could exploit if she knew where to find them, which was why André’s were hidden, physical access only, and key-coded.
Unfortunately, that meant he had to get to them to get them back.
“I can’t move myself,” he continued, when Caetei did not reach to answer.
This time it typed quickly. —We move b4.
It reached down and tapped a stick by its foot; André, in a moment of disconnect, realized that he was lying not on a pallet as he’d assumed, but on a sort of stretcher. “I need medical help.”
—We take u grtprnt.
…whatever that was. A witch doctor? Some sort of ranid village elder? A bayou-living human? The froggie equivalent of Sitting Bull?
It sounded very significant. But he needed a doctor more than the answer to a coolie xenocultural exam. “Have you sent someone to bring help? I need an evacuation now. The leg will fester.”
Caetei might not know that word, but there was probably some kind of translation protocol in the slate. But Caetei stayed stolid and pulled the slate back. It hung it on its belt and crouched beside the shaft of the stretcher. Three more ranids hopped from the weeds. Tetra was not one of them, and all those who came up wore not vests but web belts strung with tools. André remembered that Tetra had some sort of special status in the group, a dominant reproductive and social role. Which perhaps exempted it from work.
Or perhaps it was just tired, and he was reading too much into things. Other ranids were surrounding them now, more than he had noticed waiting, so that his stretcher—his litter—was borne in the midst of a sort of hopping, weaving green honor guard. While Caetei was still looking at him, he asked again, “Where is Gourami?”
But Caetei’s hands were full, and it didn’t answer.
Gourami, it transpired, was already where they were going. It lolled in a shallow backwater, the ridges of its hips and its protruding eyes and nostrils breaking the surface. André didn’t see it until the others set his litter down on a pair of cross-braces that must have been prepared in advance. A fair amount of planning had gone into this operation.
Gourami paddled to the bank and stood, water sheeting down its sides. It came up to the litter—now a sort of crude couch—and lifted itself up so it met André’s eyes directly. It held its slate alongside its face, and blessedly constructed complete sentences containing entire words, vowels and all. —Are you feeling better, André?
“I need medical care,” he said, for the tenth or eleventh time.
—Your bone is set, the ranid answered. —Tetra did it, and the greatparent remembered-ahead for you. It will heal. You are safer here. There is too much coincidence surrounding you.
“Shit,” he said. But he wasn’t entangled. He hadn’t taken Closs up on the offer. He couldn’t be…
The hail storm. The bad fall.
Somebody was trying to kill him.
It was a wonderfully clarifying realization. A conjure man was after him. Kroc, or somebody from Rim, or another freelancer: it didn’t matter. Somebody was trying to kill him.
Good: a circumstance he knew how to deal with. And one he couldn’t do much about right now. On the other hand—greatparent. There was a word that made some sense of Caetei’s incomprehensible string of consonants. What a greatparent might be was another question, and “remembered-ahead” sounded suspiciously like conjuring. If it wasn’t superstition and sorcery. But Gourami was blinking at him intently, nictitating membranes flickering across glossy eyes, and he thought it was waiting for an answer.
“What’s a greatparent?” he asked.
Gourami chirrupped. One of the other ranids—not Caetei, he thought, but one that was in the water—picked up the noise and made it again, and again. Like clicking one’s tongue to summon a pet, almost. —old personage, Gourami typed, with amazing speed, its fingers skipping across the controls of its slate. —se remembers. I have been telling se new stories, that se may keep them safe.
A pause, as if Gourami revealed a confidence. —Someday Tetra may be a greatparent, too, Gourami finally said, and André thought it wasn’t exactly what it might have typed. —Tetra has many stories: se may grow very old. If se can give up swimming. That is always hard, and some do not.
Gourami typed more, but André did not see it. Because something was rising from the water, great-backed and amorphous, green and dripping with great strings of algae. Its back was as broad as the islet André sat on, and it seemed to have no limbs, only a glass-clean, mucous-slick fringe about its edges, pulsing softly. And eyes: not two only, but all around the rim, and under them mouths, toothless mouths from which water squirted as it rose. Ballast, and probably food, and maybe respiration…
He would have stepped—hopped—back if he were standing. As it was, he startled hard enough to rock his improvised seat.
Gourami held up a marked slate again, as Tetra—he was sure it was Tetra, the only one wearing a decorated vest—trilled to the monstrosity rising from the mud. —André Deschênes, meet the memorizeur…
The symbols that followed were musical notation, a chord progression overlaid by a quick run of simple notes. A ranid’s real name, written in the only human language that could handle them.
“Delighted,” he said, his hands flexing on the carry poles of the litter where they ran along its sides. “Please, ah. Extend my regards. Or whatever the protocol is.”
Gourami bobbled, a movement he was starting to anthropomorphize into laughter. —Se wants to meet a human, it typed. —Se has been told much about you, but has never seen one before. Please, sit up straight so se can look. I am sorry for your pain.
“It’s a crater,” Greene repeated, and despite temptation, Closs—leaning back in a chair in Greene’s office—didn’t make the chairman go back and explain it a third time. “The whole damned gulf. The Bay of Novo Haven
. That’s what Gupta thinks, anyway. The omelite deposits are around the rim—which tells us where we might want to drill inland, by the way, because while the river’s backfilled some of it, you can see where the original line would have extended—and that’s also where the recent earthquakes are centered.”
Greene was dressed with particular care, but his eyes were red-rimmed, pupils pinpricked from too much stimulant. He paced, gesticulating at the screen on his office wall with first one hand and then the other, using a light-wand to outline features on a projected detail map. He paused, tapping the wand on his fingertips, and directed a stare at Closs, as if checking to see if Closs had followed him this time.
“And the probability effects our engineers have been struggling with for the past year?” Closs asked, to make Greene say it out loud, to get it into the discussion.
“Strongest at those sites, yes. And radiating out. But are you seeing the implications, Timothy? Gupta’s map suggests that the omelite is the side effect of an explosion.”
“An impact? It came from space?”
Greene shook his head, hands fanning wide, the tip of the light-stick leaving a dazzled streak across Closs’s vision. Something wrong with his connex; there should be antiglare protection. “Gupta thinks the explosion was ground level.”
“A tanglestone mine. Blew up. An alien tanglestone mine.” Closs tried to get his brain and his tongue to wrap around the concepts at the same time. “A ranid tanglestone mine? You’re telling me they had, what, a technological society? Industrial mining?” It was hard to imagine worse news for Charter Trade. Not that Rim had encountered one yet, but there were rules in place for dealing with technological societies.
And they did not involve colonizing their planets.
“Omelite mines don’t just blow up. I’m telling you they had a production facility. Whether it was the ranids or some other alien species, hell, maybe colonists here before us. Maybe there was a dominant land species…it doesn’t matter. The omelite is a…a by-product. Of whatever they were doing. Of the explosion.”
“There’d be an archaeological record,” Closs said, very slowly. “If there had been a technological species on Greene’s World.”
“There might be. Someplace we can’t get to it.”
“Spare me the Chinese puzzles, Jeff.”
Greene took a breath. Closs tensed: he knew that expression. “I have to tell you something about Greene’s World. Something important, that almost nobody knows.”
“This is going to keep me up nights.”
“And how,” Greene said, seeming as if he nerved himself. “When I say it’s secret, you should know—I mean a proprietary secret. Covered by your nondisclosure clause. Some of the coincidence engineers and physicists are aware. Dr. Gupta is one of them. Other than that, just my grandfather’s descendants. And whoever spilled the story to Lucienne Spivak. Not even my wife. Do you understand?”
There was no end to the things Greene’s wife didn’t know about him, but this didn’t seem the time to mention it. “It’s that hot?”
“The hottest. Greene’s World is potentially unique in the universe.”
And other planets aren’t? There was something about Greene that made biting your tongue harder than it might be under other circumstances. “Explain, please.”
Greene dropped his chin and looked up at Closs through his lashes. “What do you know about the theoretical phenomenon of forking?”
“Like alternate histories?”
“Sort of. I’m not the guy to explain it well—that would be Gupta—but…There’s one multi-universe theory that postulates that the timestream is constantly forking, and rehealing—so things come back together again, and refork, and rejoin. So time is like a braided rope where strands keep getting switched around. Except maybe sometimes, after a really catastrophic event, it forks completely. And never reheals.”
“Parallel dimensions.”
“Sure.”
“So?…”
Green sniffled a bit and rubbed his nose. “So an early survey team postulated that Greene’s World is partially forked. By which I mean this, this catastrophe…”—he waved vaguely at the lighted map—“almost shook the planet into another dimension. But not quite. There are two of them, in other words, and they…sort of overlap. A quantum bifurcation. And if whatever caused the catastrophe wasn’t destroyed in it—”
“It’s on the other branch.”
“Yes.”
It might be early, but Closs suddenly found the idea of a drink supremely attractive. He stood and went to the stand in the corner, but poured himself a cup of coffee instead. “You just explained where tanglestone comes from.”
“It’s not my explanation.”
“What could…cause something like that?”
Greene winced. “There’s a reason we don’t put Slide facilities on planets, Tim.”
On second thought, maybe it wasn’t too early for a little whiskey in his coffee. He added cream on top, stirred it meticulously, and turned back to Greene when he was sure he had his face under control. “A Slide failure.”
“A prehistoric one. We theorize.”
“Can those aliens get back here?”
A shrug. “The probability storms are getting worse—”
“No shit.” The coffee was strong, sweet from the whiskey, scalding hot. Closs drank down half the cup in three slow swallows and wiped his mouth against the side of his hand. “The dimensions are…what, pulling apart?”
“Or remerging, as we consume the omelite. If it’s the first, pretty soon, no tanglestone. If it’s the second—”
Morrow’s aliens. What if they didn’t come from…somewhere else, exactly? But right here, right…alongside? He poured and stirred, aware of Greene coming up beside him, holding his own cup.
“If the Slide theory is right, we can manufacture omelite.”
There wasn’t enough whiskey in the inhabited galaxy for this conversation. “By blowing up a planet.”
Greene’s shoulders rose and fell. “It doesn’t have to be an inhabited one.”
But what if it did? What if you needed…observers on both sides? What if it only worked if you had, say, the ranids and the mysterious theoretical technologists?
Closs put his coffee cup down again. He rubbed his palms over tight curls and turned to Greene. You looked a man in the eye when you admitted a mistake. “Deschênes has dropped out of contact,” he said. “I think we have to prepare ourselves for failure on that front.”
Cricket could have run. But she was inside Nouel’s house, at the mercy of his expert system, and she hadn’t had the foresight—or the equipment—to wire this place to blow. So she put her back to the sealed door, folded her arms across her chest, and waited. Nouel stood up and turned to her. “Fisher,” he said, shocking her. “I’m sorry; you weren’t here, and I couldn’t contact you to let you know I was bringing Maurice home. Maurice Sadowski, this is Fisher.”
Not even a hesitation to hint that it was a brand-new name. Cricket let her brow crinkle, and her first stuttering panic recede. There was, obviously, more going on here than the evident. She stepped forward and extended her hand, and Maurice stood as well.
“We’ve met,” he said, only a crinkle at the corner of his eye—half smirk, half wink—betraying any amusement at her change of name. “Virtually speaking.” His hand was warm, broad-palmed, the grip certain. “I’m not here for Rim.”
“Of course, if you were—”
“I would say the same thing.” He had a good, flickering smile. “Honey, there’s one way I know I can prove I’m on your side. I can tell you what was in the file I gave Lucienne.”
She really shouldn’t have been so surprised. It had to have come from somewhere. Somewhere close to Closs or Greene, specifically, or somebody who had stumbled across the information. But—
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
And Maurice clucked his tongue. “Lucienne took a risk to meet with
me,” he said. “I took one to meet with you. Take a risk yourself: this is too big not to.”
Nouel stood back. Cricket studied Maurice instead, watching his eyes, the corners of his mouth.
Rim, she thought, would just have killed her. The way they had killed Lucienne. They didn’t need to talk to her. Unless they somehow thought she could lead them to a bigger fish, but that hadn’t been a concern in the past. Quick, ruthless, but not prone to long-term strategy—that was the Charter Trade Company.
“Do you have any proof? Anything we can use to force the media to follow up?”
He glanced at Huc. Huc, jowled head lowered, seemed not to notice. “I purged the file once I transmitted it. You don’t keep something like that in your head. I can promise, however, that the tracker didn’t come from me, or with that data.”
“You say that as if it was good news.” Cricket snorted. “It also doesn’t help us sell this to Com.”
“People love conspiracies.” Huc, without raising his head.
“They also,” Cricket said calmly, “tend to think they’re full of shit. Tell me something, Maurice. What could Lucienne have done with your information that an archinformist couldn’t?”
“Give it provenance,” he said. He rubbed his palms together, fiddled a gold bracelet. “I could connex it. But not without revealing myself—and we’ve seen how that works out.”
“Lucienne?”
Maurice’s eyebrow went up. He glanced at Nouel, who was still simulating withdrawal. “Well,” he said, “I guess it’s okay if I tell you now. Lucienne was an agent.”
“Oh, no,” Cricket said, gulping against bitter nausea. She hadn’t trusted anyone, not since Patience. Not since Moon Morrow’s confidential secretary had turned out to be not so confidential, after all. “Core? Not Rim, or Rim wouldn’t have killed her. What, infiltrating the insurgents?”
“You are not analyzing the evidence,” he said. “Think again.”
She did so, paused, staring at the back of her hands. “Holy shit. Unified Earth.”
“Yes. Apparently some senator or another actually thinks bringing down a corrupt Charter Trade Corporation might just be a ticket to reelection.”
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