But at Chappalar's interment, we had moss and trees and silence.
The thaw was four days old now. You could still see snow streaks hiding in crannies, but the open areas were clear and dry. If you pressed down hard with one foot, you could hear mud squishing under the moss. I don't know why I kept doing that.
All the Bonaventure proctors came to the funeral, of course. Plus an Oolom I didn't recognize—an older man wearing shade-mist goggles. My jaw clenched like stone at the sight of those goggles; they were worn by plague victims who'd never regained use of their eyelids. The goggles kept out dust, and preserved corneal humidity by spritzing up a wisp of mist every so often. In bright light they darkened: an artificial squint.
Simple things, those goggles. Not sinister—just a practical solution to a low-grade problem. But. They brought back unwanted memories of the Circus. A hundred and twenty white-on-white Ooloms wearing the same kind of goggles under the Big Top.
"Who's the stranger?" I whispered to the person beside me: Jupkur, an Oolom proctor who'd taken my arm as we walked to the burial site.
Jupkur followed my gaze, then let his eyes slip past to pretend he hadn't been staring. "Master Tic," Jupkur replied, barely mouthing the words. "Just arrived to replace Chappalar."
"He's a master proctor?"
"Yes."
"And they bungholed him to Bonaventure?"
"Yes."
Jupkur turned away quickly and made some lame remark about the weather to the person on his other side. I took the hint... but only for here and now. Next time I got Jupkur in private, I'd coax the full story out of him.
Here's the thing: the Vigil only granted the title "master" to a handful of people every generation—the keenest, the brightest, the best. Master proctors never got short-sheeted down to city politics, especially not to drowsy towns like Bonaventure. They scrutinized the world government and interplanetary affairs... like the trade treaty currently being hammered out between Demoth and the Divian Free Republic.
So what was a master proctor doing here? Whose wife had he been caught diddling?
Then again, you didn't blackball an exalted master just for being caught on the wrong side of a bedroom door. And your average master proctor wasn't interested in bed-hopping anyway—they were supposedly so near sainthood, you could use their peckers as night-lights.
If this Master Tic had got sent to Bonaventure, it was because the Vigil dearly wanted him here. Because there was important work for him to do.
What work? Especially with our city council on hiatus for a few weeks.
It had to be something to do with Chappalar's death. And with the only proctor who'd survived the robot attacks.
My skin got a case of the goosecreeps. I had a feeling I'd be seeing a lot more of Master Tic's goggly eyes in the days to come.
At the gravesite, Chappalar's family had already planted the roots of a snake-belly palm. It was a native Demoth tree and lightning fast-growing under the right conditions. In tropical jungles, a snake-belly would seed itself at the base of another tree, then climb that tree's exterior in a solid sheath, like a snake swallowing the host tree trunk from the ground up. With enough water and sunlight, a snake-belly could sprout up a hand's breadth every day—just a reed-thin shell around the host, letting the inner trunk sustain all the weight. Typical parasite behavior. Once in place, the snake-belly would digest the host trunk it had swallowed, little by little creating wood of its own from the outside in... till after a few decades, the host was fully consumed, leaving only a snake-belly with a solid wood core.
Down south, snake-bellies could grow around other snake-bellies, growing around their swallowed-up hosts. In the Pistolet Museum, they had a stump showing five separate snake-bellies in concentric rings round a toothpick core of original raspfeather.
In the Bonaventure Cemetery, we'd soon have a single snake-belly round a core of Chappalar.
They'd wrapped his body in a shroud of froth white silk. Half a dozen Oolom mourners had turned white themselves, though they stood on light green moss... the phenomenon of sympathetic transference, taking on someone else's color in moments of heart-deep emotion. I wished I could go white with them, to show Chappalar/his family/myself that I truly felt the grief. But I stayed lumpishly Faye-colored as the pallbearers eased the body onto a wooden support stand atop the snake-belly roots.
A single Oolom child toddled forward and splashed soupy brown juice on the plant at Chappalar's feet. Jupkur whispered that the liquid was fertilizer, laced with a mix of growth hormones. In a week, the tree would have swallowed Chappalar up to the ankles. By fall, the whole corpse would be wrapped in a snake-belly sheath. In thirty years give or take, my friend Chappalar, the man who died saving my life, would be entirely absorbed by the tree.
Even his bones. Ooloms have such precious lightweight bones.
Around us, no ornamental landscaping, no headstones, no crypts—just a forest of snake-belly palms, each one the height of a person.
By the end of the burial service, every Oolom was sympathetic white... all but Master Tic. That irked me: a peevish indignation on Chappalar's behalf. I'd turn white if I could; why didn't Tic?
To be fair, it wasn't Tic's fault: Oolom color changes aren't consciously controlled. For Tic to turn white, he'd have to be overcome with grief—not likely, considering he'd never even met Chappalar. Tic had come to the funeral out of courtesy, showing polite respect... who could ask more?
I could. Seething-steaming-indignant.
Whenever I go to a funeral, there's always something that makes me furious.
Ooloms don't do tea and sympathy after a funeral. Instead, Chappalar's family and the Oolom proctors glided off to the cemetery chapel, where (Jupkur said), "We'll pray for just hours and hours. The priests' major source of income is selling knee pads."
Jupkur hated to speak seriously about anything; but he wasn't the only Oolom who turned jokily offhanded when the subject of religion came up. Ooloms didn't talk to humans about what they believed—none of them did. Maybe that was an article of their faith, keeping mum in front of outsiders. An article of all their faiths, I should say... because whatever their religion was, it had three major denominations, plus various splinter groups. Each sect identified itself by a gobbledygook name that no one ever translated into English.
Secretive bunch, those Ooloms.
So the Ooloms went off by themselves, leaving me to walk home alone. A couple hours on foot through the countryside. Of course, the other human proctors offered me rides; but I hadn't trekked through open tundra in years, and the quiet of it suddenly called to me. Being out among the trees, breathing the wet smell of spring, I'd been grabbed by a bubbly heartache for girlhood—for times long ago in Sallysweet River, where you could follow the Bullet tracks five minutes out of town and feel all alone on the planet.
Solitude. The rustle of trees. The pip-pip of crawler-birds slinking over the forest floor.
Just me.
Just me and my link-seed.
Okay. I can almost hear you groaning, Where's your head, woman? Three days ago some slip-wit tried to kill you, and now you want to isolate yourself in an empty forest?
Good point.
I could make up excuses. I could put on the blather, how Demoth was a peaceful planet where assassinations didn't happen... not often, anyway. Women didn't need armed escorts to spend a therapeutic afternoon walking through the woods. What happened three days earlier was a fluke, the once-in-a-lifetime act of a crazed fanatic who'd soon be caught by the cops.
I could surely lie to you. But damn my link-seed, I couldn't lie to myself.
Here's the thing: deep down, I wanted to give the killer another shot. To see what would happen. It was another freckles-and-scalpel thing.
So I walked alone. Just to see.
I avoided the road—the woods were dry enough for walking, both the carpet-moss parts and the spots where yellow-grass could get a foothold. (Yellow-grass always grows close to water. Seen
from a flying skimmer, every lake and river on Great St. Caspian has a lemon-colored fringe, like fatty buildup on the wall of an artery... but the yellow stretch fades to the frost green of carpet moss the farther you go into deep forest.)
I didn't fret about getting lost—I could track myself by the sun. And come evening, there'd be the lights of the city to spot by the glow. This was a tundra forest... not thick stands of timber blocking the sky, but individual bluebarrel trees, well separated from each other. Any seed that rooted too close to an existing tree just wouldn't grow. Wouldn't get enough light, wouldn't get enough nutrition from the gaunt soil.
In my mood, that seemed like a metaphor for something.
I dawdled away the afternoon. Nothing to see but stunted bluebarrel trees and lumpy-bumpy moss interrupted by the occasional upthrust of stone.
In one slab of rock, I found a house-sized rectangle cut straight into the stone. At one time it must have been two stories deep, though now it was three-quarters full of dirt and weeds. A leftover from pre-Oolom settlements some three thousand years old. Demoth never evolved intelligent species of its own, but aliens from the League had visited now and then in the past—setting up outposts for a while, then moving on when they lost interest in our poky little planet.
Great St. Caspian had hosted thousands of such visitors; their householes were everywhere, mostly filled in and earthed over now, with whatever had spilled into them during the past three millennia. The aliens dug mines and tunnels too. In Sallysweet River we used to play "Archaeologists Bold," excavating the nearby holes to find rusty metal junk of all shapes and sizes. We'd badger our parents to call the Heritage Board, convinced that we'd dug up priceless alien artifacts... but nothing ever came of it. The board had long ago surveyed a handful of sites and found nothing of interest. Nothing worthy of publication in a good academic journal. So now the Heritage Board ignored the ruins—dismissed anyone who wasted time snooping about in them.
Mistake. The Vigil would never have allowed such book-blinkered sloppiness. But the Heritage Board answered to the Technocracy, not local government, so it was beyond our scrutiny.
Mistake, mistake, mistake.
Sunset was coming on purple and peach when a skimmer flew over my head. It wasn't the first I'd heard in the day, but the others were distant hums tracking the ocean coast or the Bullet tracks to the interior—probably families off on an outing, playing hooky now that the thaw had come. This new skimmer was sailing straight over the treetops of barren forest... and it had Outward Fleet insignia painted on its side.
Queer thing, that. The navy had only one base on Demoth, way down by the equator near Snug Harbor. And navy personnel seldom found cause to venture out to the rest of the planet; the base was mostly a dormitory for safety inspectors who met incoming starships at our orbitals.
A loudspeaker boomed from the skimmer's belly: "Faye Smallwood?"
Damn. So much for a quiet walk in the woods.
Steeling myself, I did the obvious—stoked up my link-seed and contacted the world-soul. Has the Outward Fleet filed flight plans for craft in the Bonaventure area?
The world-soul didn't answer with words; but my brain suddenly knew for a certainty, no plans had been filed. Some other time I'd worry how creepy that was, having knowledge planted straight into my head. For now, the skimmer was my immediate problem. Either the Admiralty was running a secret op with my name on it, or I was on the verge of being ambushed by a wolf in fleet clothing.
"Faye Smallwood!" the loudspeaker called again.
"Who's asking?" I shouted back.
The skimmer was hovering now, its engine wash vibrating the bluebarrels around me. Their fat, hollow trunks began to resonate, producing deep growly notes as pure as a forest of bass viols.
The skimmer's side hatch opened. A man wearing gold fatigues leaned out with something in his hand.
Yet another pistol. Not a jelly gun this time; a hypersonic stunner, like Explorers use in fic-chips.
In the chips, stunners make an edgy whirring sound. I didn't stay conscious long enough to hear it.
Headache. Muddy. 6.1 on the Hangover Scale. What you get from mixing wine, tequila, and screech.
I'd had worse. And this time I woke up alone, with no beer-breath stranger lying comatose on my arm, cutting off the circulation.
A tastefully darkened room. A soft cot beneath me. No smell of vomit anywhere.
Compared to the bad old days, this was bubble-bath luxury. Not to mention, I still had clothes on... no need for a head-throbbing pantie search, terrified the other person might wake up before I got out the door.
I stood up. Not all that shakily. More than twenty years since my last debauch, but the rough-and-ready reflexes still kicked in: mining-town girl.
"Would you like something for the pain?" a male voice asked. It came from nowhere—a speaker hidden somewhere in the darkness.
"You call this pain?" I scoffed. "Ya big mainstream crybaby." I could tell this guy was mainstream from his accent: an oh-so-civilized Core-World featherweight who'd shrivel up dead if he ever caught a genuine hangover. "So what's the point of kidnapping me?" I demanded... keeping my voice loud so my captors wouldn't think I was some fragile flower on the point of collapse.
A door in the wall opened silently, letting in a dagger of bright light. Two men entered, and the door slid shut again, no noise. Both newcomers wore glittery gold-fabric uniforms; it made them easier to see in the returning darkness.
"You haven't been kidnapped," one of the men said. "You're voluntarily helping us with important research."
"What research?"
Neither man answered straightaway. I wished I could see their faces—whether they were looking at me like a person or a piece of raw meat. That might have helped me guess if they were real navymen or killers who had nabbed me for interrogation. Ready to torture me for information on the Vigil, to help them murder more proctors.
And speaking of information...
Protection Central! I called over my link-seed. Kidnappers...
It was like shouting into a pillow. Muffled emptiness. Mentally I yelled, Respond!
Nothing. Silence.
Something electronic beeped in the far corner of the room. Something that must have been listening for radio transmissions from my brain.
"Ah," said one of the gold-suited men. "You've finally tried to use your link. So you realize it's not going to help."
"We're jamming it," the other one added. "This entire house is insulated from the datasphere."
That shouldn't have been a great surprise. Anyone who'd studied the Vigil would know to take precautions. "Well then," I said, "what do you want?"
A light sprang up in the middle of the darkened room. It began as a pinprick but fast expanded to a life-size hologram of two androids, a Peacock's Tail, and a fear-eyed yours truly... a first-rate mock-up that had to be based on the download from my brain. The holo images were projected across my body, across the cot beside me, across the two men who'd come through the door; I happened to be standing half-in/half-out of the female robot. Stubbornly, I stayed where I was—flinching would have made me look like a nelly.
One of the men stepped forward...
Hold on a second. I need some breezy way of distinguishing my two captors—calling one Tall and one Short, something along those lines. But they were both of identical height, both wearing identical uniforms, both sporting identical haircuts: as close to twins as people can get when they don't actually look the same. All I can think to call them is the Mouth and the Muscle... because one couldn't stop yapping while the other mostly loomed quiet as a hoar falcon biding its time.
So the Mouth stepped forward. He made a point of walking straight through the hologram of me, briefly disrupting my laser-projected image into a random scramble of pixels. Then he aimed his finger straight at the peacock tube. "Do you know what that is, Ms. Smallwood?"
"No."
The Mouth sneered in disbelief. Not many men can actu
ally manage a sneer—they might glower or grimace, but they don't have the degree of self-involvement required for an out-and-out sneer. The Mouth looked as if he'd practiced sneering in a mirror till he got something he really liked. "This," he said, pointing to the peacock tube, "is a miniature Worm field. Colloquially called a Sperm-field, or Sperm-tail. Do you know what that is?"
"We use Sperm-tails as transport sleeves to our local orbitals," I answered. "They're also used in starship drives."
I stared at the peacock again. "But the Bonaventure sleeve is white."
"Sperm-fields look white when they're stabilized," the Mouth said, "like planetary transport tubes, or a starship envelope after it's properly aligned. But with an unanchored Sperm, you get flutter around the edges. Makes a characteristic diffraction pattern." He pointed again to the peacock tube.
"Okay," I shrugged, "it's a Sperm-field. So what?"
"So what?" the Mouth repeated, as if I'd only asked the question to antagonize him. "So where did it come from? There's no Sperm-field generator in the picture!"
"None that we can see," the Muscle put in. "It could be miniaturized."
The Mouth glared at him. This was obviously a point of contention between the two men... and a precious petulant contention at that. Mouth took a slow and deliberate breath, the picture of a man exercising colossal restraint in the face of grievous tests to his patience. I bet he practiced that look in the mirror too. "The point is," Mouth told me, "current Technocracy science could not create a Sperm-field in the situation you see here. It came out of nowhere..."
"Nowhere big enough to see," the Muscle muttered.
"It came from no discernible field generator," the Mouth said testily, "it immediately shaped itself into a smooth arc without any apparent control magnets, and it ended in a well-defined aperture that held its position for 1.6 seconds without any equipment to anchor it in place!"
He stared at me triumphantly, as if he'd just scored some telling knockout in a political debate.
Vigiant Page 9
