On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted

by Helena Puumala

  “When we reach the island that we’ll be going to, can I get in touch with you? I’m told that much of the island’s vegetation is gone, but I thought that perhaps you might be one with the waters of the ocean, too, and I could use the sea to sense you and call on you. Am I right?”

  “Ah, the ocean—” the Spirit seemed to intone. “The Ocean Spirit is not me, but also is me, is my sister, but also a part of me, or I am part of it, or we both (along with other portions of this planet) are parts of a whole which is bigger than we both (and we all). Call on my sister, the Ocean Sister and she will hear you and help you, along with me. Yes, yes; I am letting her know, am introducing her to you, and the other newcomers to our World. She understands that you will help to rebalance the world, help to heal the sickness that has been infecting its body. She will help you, because she wants her islands to flourish again (as do I). She will hear you wherever you are on the island, for she exists in the islands, even as she does in the water surrounding them.

  “And I will rouse my special humans, the ones you call Klensers, to your cause; should you need their help, just ask me or my sister.”

  *****

  “Well, well, well,” Kati muttered out loud, after coming back into the park where Joaley was watching her with a somewhat worried countenance.

  “Are you okay, Kati?” the red-head asked. “You were gone a long time.”

  Kati looked about her. Yes, Joaley must be right about that. She was surrounded by the full light of the morning, not the first splashes of sun just come up. She must have been entranced for more than an hour.

  “I don’t think that it was my conversation with Vorlund that took the time,” she said, trying to figure things out. “It must have been the communication with the Forest Spirit. It was good, but it must have happened in sort of slow motion. You were right, our friend is connected in an intimate fashion which I couldn’t quite understand, with what it called ‘my sister, the Ocean Spirit’. And this Ocean Spirit now knows about us and what we are trying to do, and it will help us while we’re on that Island Estate of the Margolises; I only need to ask.”

  “Good,” Joaley said, dropping onto her feet from the Vultairian-sized bench. “If you got that out of the session it was well worth the time spent. We may need all the help we can get.”

  “Agreed.”

  Kati followed Joaley’s example of getting off her butt, and stretched her arms and her back before starting the return walk to the Inn.

  “Well, let’s hope that the guys are up and washed, or whatever,” she added. “We’ll have to eat, clear our stuff out, and pay off Nelli, before making our way to Uncle Kelt’s flyer to start the next adventure.”

  “Are our associates on their way to meet us?” Joaley asked.

  Kati noted that Joaley, too, had adopted a careful manner of talking about what they were doing, even when there were no spy-eyes anywhere about, and no curious locals in sight.

  “Yep. Left before dawn. And the others, our non-associates, left in the night, too, in a very crowded flyer, apparently. I’d like to know what that was all about, but even if the disembodied lady knows something, she’s incommunicado right now. Has to look after two very uncomfortable bodies on that flyer.”

  “Oh dear,” Joaley murmured.

  “Indeed. That’s nasty stuff that they’re pumping into them, as I know from personal experience.”

  Joaley glanced at her.

  “Should we be taking along something that might help them wake up, once we have them?” she asked.

  “Water,” Kati replied promptly. “But I suppose that there’s fresh water on the island, since there are people living on it. Other than that, what healing skills I have, and the help of the Ocean Spirit. Master Healer Vorlund would come in handy, but he happens to be unavailable.”

  *****

  Jock got them into Uncle Kelt’s Parking Garage without incident, and Kati wrote a note of thanks addressed to Kelt Carmaks, on a sheet of lovely Ithcar-made paper, and tacked it onto the bulletin board at the refreshment stand. She promised to return the flyer at the end of two six-day weeks “at the latest”, and hoped that he would enjoy the music inside his other flyer and the flit, in the meantime.

  She gave the other Team members a chance to add to or delete from her effort, but no-one suggested any changes. Jock grinned at her encouragingly after reading it, but only said that he thought it was a “nice note”. Joaley and Lank filled the water bottles that they had taken from the cart which, along with the runnerbeasts, had stayed at the Inn’s stables. Nelli was not charging them much for the service, basically only for food and bedding for the animals. The fact that they had left the beasts there was a pretty good indication that they would be coming back to the Inn. Kati fervently hoped that this really was so.

  “I think that we should stop somewhere uninhabited before we head for the Margolis Estate,” Jock said, once they had their necessary gear and food stowed inside the larger of Uncle Kelt’s flyers, and all five of them had climbed in and shut the hatch. “I want to introduce each of you to the controls of this machine and give you a few lessons in its operation—just in case.”

  “That’s a really good idea,” Kati seconded.

  “It won’t take long,” Rakil said. “These are easy vehicles to fly. We use this class of flyers on Borhq, because they’re sturdy, inexpensive, and simple to operate. However, each one of them does have its own little quirks, so it’ll be good to fly a little practise run.”

  “Great,” said Jock. “You’ll get the first chance at the controls after me. Anyone else have experience with these machines?”

  “Granda has,” Kati replied. “But I think I’ll do my own flying this time, thank you. I’m only giving the old Monk control of my body under the direst of circumstances.”

  “Since I think I could figure out the innards of this machine in no time,” said Lank, “I expect that flying it will present no problems. But, as Rakil said, individual machines can have their own personalities, and therefore a practise flight is a good idea for anyone.”

  “Hey, if the Borhquan apes can fly this vehicle, I should be able to, too, with a little bit of practise,” Joaley interjected with a wink at Rakil. “Although the ones we used in The Second City, when we used them—which wasn’t often—were a much newer, streamlined type.”

  Jock eased the flyer out of its parking spot on its wheels, and steered it along the driveway which led towards the larger hangar door. Apparently the machines weren’t taken directly into air through a roof hatch the way Kati recalled seeing flyers taking to the skies on Lamania—the few times that she had seen them used.

  “This is a much older model,” The Monk informed her when she put the question to him. “Its engine creates vibrations around it when it alights from the ground, and the vibrations could be destructive to other machinery nearby. So, these flyers and flits have to be taken out before getting airborne.”

  Well, that explained the parking garage outside the runnerbeast race track. It had looked a lot like the parking garages on her home world, complete with ramps leading to upper levels. There had been nothing like that on Lamania. It had seemed a strange structure on a world which used flyers and flits for transporting the ruling class, and relegated the lesser folks to travel by foot on land, and by steam, or sail on water.

  “I’m assuming that you have a place in mind for our exercises,” Kati said to Jock once he had the flyer airborne and above the city streets.

  It was getting on to mid-morning but the air was still empty of other flyers. The Capital City Exalted were not early risers.

  “I do,” Jock answered. “We’ll be heading for the Eastern Coastal Islands which aren’t all that far from here by flyer. There are a lot of them, and most of them are uninhabited, and have stretches of bare flat rock, which are nasty places in the middle of winter, but at this time make great landing strips. Uncle Kelt flew me over the area once, and pointed out a few possible spots, but since our movements
were being traced, he simply mentioned that in the summer the islands were a good place for surreptitious picnics, if one happened to be seeing a woman who, for whatever reason, was not marriageable.”

  “But you don’t think that we’ll run into any picnickers today?” Joaley asked.

  “Hah.” Jock chortled. “Most Exalted don’t have to hide their affairs from anyone including their spouses. You heard how the Desote couple was behaving. If a man is having sex with women other than his wife, it’s a given that the wife is into her own dalliances. If she’s Exalted, that is. If an Exalted marries an Ordinary Citizen, the low-born spouse doesn’t get to sleep around, but has to accept whatever behaviour his or her spouse dishes out.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Joaley commented, wrinkling her nose. “Why would any regular person marry an Exalted? I sure wouldn’t.”

  Jock shrugged.

  “A good-looking commoner may decide to trade his or her looks for a few years of life more luxurious than the one he or she would lead otherwise. And every now and then, the child of such a union gains Family membership among the Four Hundred. Gaining Elite status for your child can seem to be worth a lot of sacrifices.”

  “Why don’t these children gain family status automatically?” Rakil asked. “On Borhq, if you don’t have a Tree Family of your own, you become the member of your spouse’s Family the moment the two of you register your union.”

  “You Borhquans are much more inclusive, then, than the Four Hundred are.” Jock flashed a broad grin at Rakil, and shook his head. “Such civilized apes! Here, the Government likes to keep track of Family Membership. And they worry about ‘genetic dilution’, as they call it. They claim that if the strain gets too thin, the benefits of the Exalted class—which actually are bestowed upon them by the translation nodes—would disappear, and therefore they have to deny Family membership to many half-bloods. I’m actually a case in point. My mother was an Ordinary Citizen, and my Father had to fight with the Government to gain me acceptance as a Carmaks. My sister was, quite simply, just shut out. I remember that when I was implanted with my node as a teenager (when it was clear that I wasn’t a Klenser), I was furious to discover that the whole genetic story was a lie, and Rihane would be denied the privileges of class for no good reason.”

  “So they created another revolutionary?” Lank suggested.

  Jock laughed again.

  “Right. But that’s part of the reason I want to find an Exalted woman to marry, one who isn’t related to me but also isn’t nuts. I don’t want to have to fight for my children’s rights, and since my bloodline is already questionable, if I married an Ordinary Citizen, the Oligarchs would consider it quite within their rights to deny my children Family status.”

  “I imagine that they’d try to keep the Carmaks Family as small as possible,” Kati mused. “That may have some bearing on their refusal to have your sister recognized.”

  “Indeed. The Carmaks Family has suffered attrition over the years. We’ve been trying to pass the nodes down in the family as much as is possible, but they will do their disappearing trick after a few lifetimes, and we have to demand new ones from the Government Heredity Control Office. And that’s one stingy Office!”

  “I’d like to know what the Vultairian government is buying with the nodes that the people are supposed to be getting,” Joaley said. “It has to be goods from the Fringe planets, since they can’t be traded within the Federation.”

  “Gorsh seemed to have a plentiful supply of the nodes when Dr. Guzi implanted the Granda into my neck,” Kati muttered. “And what Gorsh was peddling was human beings.”

  “Human beings, guaranteed to be untraceable by their home worlds,” Jock snarled. “They would have been worth a handful of nodes each, to certain of my compatriots. Who would have received the nodes in recompense for being good Exalted boys and girls.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  They landed on a windswept flat rock which was the highest part of an island, in an archipelago which skirted the eastern shore of the Main Continent. Jock had kept the flyer high in the sky during the flight, not descending until they were above the island chain.

  “Best not to be seen, if we don’t have to be,” he had explained. “Someone might wonder about a flyer which is not traceable, if it is flying around at tree-top level. High up, we’ll be less noticeable.”

  “I can’t see any evidence that anyone lives on these islands,” Joaley said, once they were descending, and she was peering down curiously with node-enhanced sight.

  “This part of the archipelago isn’t inhabited,” Jock explained. “That’s why we’re here. The most northerly of the islands are populated, but the number of inhabitants diminishes as one travels south, until, here, in the southern one quarter of the islands, there’s nobody, except maybe a hermit or two on the run from the rest of humanity.”

  “Why is that?” Lank asked. “Don’t Vultairians care for island living?”

  Kati was reminded of the fact that on Tarangay, Lank’s home world, everyone was an island dweller; there were no continents at all, only chains of islands in an ocean which covered the whole planet.

  “Fisher-folk like island living just fine,” Jock replied. “However, this is a thinly-populated world and has always been. There are lots of places that could support human life but remain empty. Our rulers have not exactly encouraged people to go forth and multiply.”

  “I have to admit to having mixed feelings about population growth,” Kati said, speaking slowly. “Having grown up in a pretty empty part of a world which, nevertheless, teemed with billions of people, I’m not sure that encouraging people ‘to go forth and multiply’ is a good idea. There’s a lot to be said for living in harmony with nature.”

  “Assuming that you are, in fact, living in harmony with nature,” Jock sniffed. “Most of our Oligarchs are not.”

  He brought the flyer down on the rocky expanse which had water on one side, and lush vegetation on the others. Kati smiled as she looked around. Here, she was close to both the Forest Spirit and its Ocean Sister. No wonder the Forest Spirit had been vague about the identities; probably the two did merge seamlessly, at least in a place like this!

  “This is beautiful,” Lank murmured, turning his head this way and that. “On Tarangay this would be considered Paradise.”

  “I don’t see any sand beaches,” Joaley protested jokingly. “Doesn’t an Island Paradise always have sand beaches?”

  “Some do and some don’t,” Lank answered. “But look at those trees.” He pointed ahead, at a riot of smallish trees, some of them heavy with bright blossoms. “Many of them are fruit trees! You could live here without working! Just fish in the ocean, and pick fruit in the forest, and your needs would be taken care of!”

  “And you’d be bored silly in two weeks,” said Rakil. “Assuming that there are no predators which would consider you a tasty tidbit, and that you didn’t arrive during the stormy season—there has got to be a stormy season.”

  “If our hypothetical ‘you’ was Kati or one of the Klensers, she could while the time away in conversations with Nature,” Lank argued cheerfully. “No opportunity for boredom then. Probably the Forest Spirit, or the Ocean Spirit, whichever rules the roost here, could keep Kati informed of what’s going on all over the planet. All she’d have to do is close her eyes and ask a few questions.”

  “Your fantasy is lovely, Lank,” Kati objected with a laugh, “but I don’t have time to lie around on an Island Paradise, beaches or no. We’re here to practise flying; let’s get on with it.”

  *****

  When the word came to Josh, the Cruiser pilot, that the surveillance around the ship was down for thirty minutes, Mikal and Malin were ready. Mikal had used the relaxation techniques which he had learned during his training, to sleep through much of the night. How Malin had managed, he had no idea, and had not asked; the Paradisans were a proud, self-reliant bunch, he knew from his earlier involvement with the world, and he intended t
o stay on good terms with this one whom Fate had turned into his partner for the duration. Malin seemed very healthy, and very capable—very good looking too—so Mikal rather suspected that he was one of the Paradiso K’s, a man with some enviable genetic advantages over run-of-the-mill males like himself. He very likely had the stamina for the foray, whether or not he had slept the night.

  Master Healer Vorlund was awake and on the Bridge as well. When Mikal arrived, Vorlund said that Xoraya and Canna had finally been bundled into a small flyer which would take them to the Margolis Estate. Xoraya’s communication had been a quick one; she had wanted to return to look after the women’s bodies, since they had been carelessly tossed into the vehicle.

  “Better mention that to Kati when she communicates with you next,” Mikal told Vorlund. “I assume that she hasn’t been in touch since she told you about the flit that’s to come to the cart-maker’s to pick us up.”

  “Some fellow by the name of Marston is supposed to meet you on the tarmac,” Josh said.

  “Marston,” Mikal repeated while searching for where and when he had heard the name. “Ah, he’s the fellow the contact on Lamania told Kati to look up once she got to Port City. We’ll be among friends.”

  “I will let Kati know that the two of you have left when she contacts me next,” Vorlund rumbled, looking a trifle anxious. “I wish I was coming with you two; that way we could stay in touch with Kati. As it is you’ll be heading onto the planet, more or less blindly.”

  Mikal smiled.

  “It’s okay, that’s what operatives are always doing.”