“It dates from when The Council of the Families decided that we needed to distance ourselves from the Federation,” he had explained to someone while Jaqui had been in the room. “The Families had to explain why we wouldn’t be privileged with the nodes, any more, and the religious explanation was the one they came up with. It was pretty effective—opposing supposed evil always is—and remnants of it still linger, here and there, although they’re worse than meaningless, these days.”
One of the things Gorsh had done when he had discovered that Jaqui had a quick mind, was to introduce her to his computer console, which he kept in his office. It was linked, he had showed her, to the machine in his living quarters, the one which he used to track the echo chips of the chattels. That fact suggested to Jaqui that perhaps the records in question could be found there, although she assumed that copies would also be in the Overseers office, although those ones would most likely be on paper, the Overseer being the sort of a man who trusted paper above all else, certainly more than electronic gadgets.
Gorsh had taught Jaqui much of what he, himself, knew about the computer—he was no technocratic genius—so she knew that there were little buttons in a carton in one of the desk drawers that could be used to copy and store information from the computer, and she was determined to use one of them to steal the data about the slave transactions, once she found them. Another computer could read the buttons, so she would be able to pass the information on to Kati’s associates at the first opportunity.
To cover her tracks Jaqui decided to do some organizing of the various files on the two computers. It would also serve to further familiarize her with the workings of the machine, which, for all its apparent age, was a smoothly operating piece of equipment. Jaqui liked using it, so organizing the files was a pleasant task for her, whereas for someone else it might have been the sheerest drudgery.
Time slipped by. She had finished with the console in the office, and had linked to the one in the Boss’s apartment, and had come to a promising-looking title, “HBusiness Transactions”, when suddenly the screen in front of her froze, and turned colour. Instead of a slate-grey background, she was looking at a red one. She stared at it as the seconds ticked by, not knowing what to expect.
Two things happened at the same time. One: the screen in front of her left its frozen state, but remained red, the words on it disappearing and a large message, “Access Denied” filling it. Two: Gorsh stumbled into the office from the back room, freshly awakened from sleep and stormy-faced.
Jaqui cowered in the seat in front of the computer.
“What the hell are you doing girl?” Gorsh demanded, when he saw her at the console.
“I thought I’d organize your files,” she responded meekly. “You know I like fooling around with the computers, and everything in them was pretty much a mess, so I thought I’d clean them up for you. But then it stopped me, froze up, and now it’s just got a message saying ‘access denied’. I have no idea why that happened.”
Gorsh rubbed his eyes.
“Hah,” he said. “You stumbled on a file that only opens up for me. And the security on it lets me know via my node when someone’s trying to get in, so I was woken up!”
“Oh.” Jaqui stared at the screen. “But it was just some business file,” she protested. “‘HBusiness Transactions’, whatever they are.”
“Every business owner has his secrets,” Gorsh said, sounding almost cheerful. “And mine are well protected.”
Jaqui looked at him curiously.
“How does that work?” she asked. “You said that its security let you know through your node that someone was trying to get in. What if I had a node? Would I have been able to go in, and organize your files then, or are you the only one who can access that stuff?”
“I’m supposed to be the only one allowed in,” Gorsh replied. “Though some of my off-world associates laughed when they heard the vintage of my system. They said that I should buy new stuff because this one’s old, and any halfway good hacker on most Federation worlds could break into it in no time. But I’m used to this system, I can use it, and there are no Federation hackers on Wayward. They were probably just trying to make some money off me by selling me new computers.”
He shrugged.
“I guess you just demonstrated how well the system works.”
*****
At the end of the meal, the group had come to a consensus about at least one thing. The Nature Spirits had to be consulted, and their help requested. Seleni had explained that they did not interfere in human affairs unless asked to; that was a principle among them. She also wanted to gain the Spirits’ protection for the members of the group, and that meant that they all had to troop down to the river valley, and show themselves to the Spirit there.
Thus, all of them wended their way to what the Hotel desk clerk called a Nature Walk when Mikal asked her about an access to the valley and the river. They proceeded in a single file along the Walk until they came to a pleasant picnic spot, complete with a fire pit, an artesian well, tables and benches, and even an outhouse hidden among some convenient bushes.
“This is wonderful,” Seleni said, looking around her in the late-day sunlight. “Looks like they know how to do things on the south side of the river. On our side I don’t think that there is any place besides my cottage, or the swimming hole that the children have created, where you can actually relax comfortably in Nature. It has all been allowed to remain wild and overgrown, which is not a bad thing from the point of view of the Spirits, but it does keep people from communing with them.”
She chose one of the round tables to sit at.
“Chrysalia, Llon, and Mikal, I definitely want you at this table with me. And Lank, do you still have the jini number two hanging about you? I could check, but it’s being a little coy, and I don’t want to intrude on your privacy, but if it’s there, come and join us at this table. And the rest of you make yourselves comfortable around us—maybe at the next table—and those of you who don’t believe in Nature Spirits, try to keep your minds as open as possible. You may be surprised by what you experience.”
Lank came over to Seleni’s chosen table from where he had been paying court to the two girls.
“The jini’s here,” he said, “and you’re right, Seleni, it’s being a bit inactive. I just figured that it was still tired from the last crisis, and let it alone.”
Shyla and Ciela had apparently decided that being the only young women in the group made them allies of a sort, and sat down together at the next table. Max, protectively, sat close to them, while Nabbish, and his recruits, Kortone and Gerr, filled the space left.
The Waywardian law enforcers looked a little bit uneasy, and out of their element; Mikal, glancing their way, concluded that they were as wedded to the normal laws of physics as he had been, a while back. He grinned to think on it, wondering how their thinking would change in the next some days.
Seleni looked at him directly, and he turned his attention to her.
“Mikal, I want you to help me lead this effort,” she said. “The Planetary Spirits seem to have fallen in love with you, so I suspect you’ll have more influence with them than any of us others.”
Her comment drew a giggle out of Shyla, who thought the notion of the Spirits falling in love with Mikal was sort of absurd, but understandable. Max gave her a stern glance, and she quickly desisted, placing a hand over her mouth. Mikal took a second to wink at her, before nodding to Seleni.
“Certainly, Wise Woman Seleni, we’ll try it,” he said. “I’m assuming that the other sensitives will follow in our wake.”
“Exactly. They will hang on to our proverbial coat tails, and add their strength to ours. In other words, they’ll add gravitas to our requests.
“Now, everyone, including the second table: concentrate on the nature around you. Think on the trees, the grasses, the flowers, and the little animal lives around you. Close your eyes if you wish; keep them open if that feels right to you.”<
br />
Mikal closed his eyes, and concentrated on his senses of smell and hearing.
The sounds of Salamanka’s traffic did not penetrate this deep into the river valley, apparently. What he heard were the buzzing, and the hum of various insects, and the chirping and singing of unfamiliar birds. Occasionally there was a scampering sound as some small creature, mammal or not, scuttled across some nearby patch of ground. The odours that wafted into his nose were mostly the pleasant ones of flowers and grasses, sometimes the aroma of some particularly resinous tree. It was middle of the summer; there was little hint, yet, of the smells of ripening, and decay, which would arrive later in the season.
“Ah, you do find my valley beautiful, don’t you?” the consciousness that had surrounded him, asked.
“I do,” he replied. “Every time I get immersed in it.”
The Nature Spirit, whose feel he recognized from the times he had contacted it before, on the other side of the river, seemed to him to be studying him, while keeping a portion of its being focused on those who were backing him, Seleni foremost among them.
“But you are disturbed about something,” the Spirit added. “You have been disturbed the whole time I have known you, although at first, much of that was overlaid with your delight at breaking free into your physical being, and out of the cellar in which you were imprisoned. You want to ask for my help, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
Mikal collected his thoughts while the Nature Spirit wove its presence around him and the other sensitives, and took note of the group at the second table. Of those, Shyla it recognized from the altercation in the lakeside bar, and the others, except Ciela, were Waywardians, its own people.
“I want to, first of all, ask for your protection for all of us here in this picnic place in your lovely river valley,” Mikal subvocalized to the Spirit. “We have come together to perform a possibly very dangerous task, and we need all the help we can get.”
He began to create a visualization of the situation that existed on Judd and Milla Gorsh’s properties, insofar as he understood what was going on. The other sensitives at the table began to fill the image in with their knowledge, and, to Mikal’s surprise and amusement, the Spirits themselves got into the act, filling in an image of the cabin on Milla’s Estate, for example, which none of the people at the table had seen.
He made a point of emphasising the dangerousness of the weapons cache in the Citadel cellars, and drew aside when Chrysalia began to explain about the old man, Chrush, who had lived far past his natural life span, by what means, no-one knew.
“Your people think that he must die,” the Spirit told her. “Maybe that would be best. All things physical must die, sooner or later. The old must give way to the young; that is the way of living things. Perhaps he can be nudged into the afterlife, eased somehow out of this existence into the next.”
“Trouble is that I don’t think he’ll go willingly,” Chrysalia subvocalized. “He’ll fight back, killing others if that is necessary for him to stay alive.”
“We will give what protection we can to whoever tackles him,” murmured the Spirit, “as we will do our best to protect all of you here, in the endeavours that you have undertaken.”
*****
“You have drawn the attention of the Nature Spirits to this place,” the entity which was imprisoning Kati snarled, when she settled into the light trance to communicate with it again.
“Is that so?”
Kati tried to hide her elation. How had that happened, she wondered. The Planetary Spirits were generally quite neutral in their attitude to human affairs, and the Nature Spirits of Wayward had seemed to have been toeing that line carefully. What had changed?
“It is so. I could sense the Forest staring at me, studying the cabin, as if it wanted to pass an image of it to someone.”
The murk creature sounded absolutely petulant. The tone of its communication made Kati think of a teenager who was angry at his parents for snooping in on his social media habits.
“The Forest Spirits have no right.”
Kati had to control herself. She wanted to burst out into giggles. The situation was utterly ridiculous, she thought, and yet, it was extremely serious for her, like it, or not.
“I guess the Forests Spirits will do whatever they choose to do,” was all she responded.
“Maybe I don’t like hiding things from them,” the murk entity suddenly sent.
Well. What was happening here?
“Well, why do you do it?” she asked.
“Cause the grandpappy thing who can cut my whole into parts which can be taken to places, wants me to. It’s the price. The price of getting to leave the cellar and go elsewhere, like this place, or the flyers and the space ships which other parts of me inhabit. If I don’t hide things and block thoughts, I don’t get to go anywhere.”
“Ah. The grandpappy thing?”
“It’s a human like you are. Only it’s nothing like you are. You’re nice, and you’re young. Grandpappy is old and mean. I don’t think he likes anything or anyone; whereas Papa at least likes you. You’re very likeable. But I bet if grandpappy met you, he wouldn’t like you.”
Kati wished that she knew something about dealing with nonhuman sentience. Well, maybe she knew a tiny bit, what with having dealt with the Planetary Spirits of Vultaire, but not much of what she had learned on that planet seemed transferrable to this situation. Except maybe her experiences with the Cellar Child underneath the Prison Complex. This fragment of the creature that haunted the cellars of the Citadel seemed to have a childishness similar to that of the Cellar Child on Vultaire. Could that childlike quality be useful to her some way?
“Aren’t you the child of the Nature Spirits of this planet?” she asked. “Don’t they give you your life energy?”
“I don’t know.”
The entity seemed to be honestly perplexed.
“As the Spirit of the Cellars, I draw my energy from the pain, the suffering, the fear, and the anger of the people and other creatures who were thrown to die in the dungeons, or who were tortured in its chambers,” it communicated, slowly. “There I know who I am. I am the Evil Spirit, and I have learned to turn my evilness into the murk and miasma which fills the cellars, and exudes out of there into the world above. I like being the Evil Spirit; the part of me that remains in the cellar likes it. The pain that gave me birth is being visited upon a new generation of people, and I like that. It is vengeance, and I like getting revenge.”
Kati wondered if it made sense to point out that the vengeance was rather misdirected; the individuals it was directed at likely had no connection whatsoever to the crimes that had been committed. Had the entity the ability to understand the difference?
“Here, around this cabin, I draw my energy from wherever I can get it,” the creature added. “Maybe the Forest Spirits are feeding me, maybe not. If they are, what they are doing is only what is due me.”
“Aren’t you thankful to them for feeding you? For giving you sustenance? I am, whenever something, or somebody, is supporting me.”
“I don’t have to be grateful to anything or anyone. That is not required of me. What is required, is that I block the thoughts and emotions of the people inside the cabin. Those are not to spill outside the cabin at all, though I can feed off what’ll nurture me, and I can communicate with someone like you as much as I want to.”
“But you don’t like the grandpappy who wants you to hide stuff,” Kati objected.
“No, it’s true, I don’t,” the entity sighed. “But he hardly ever comes around. Only Papa and his wife come. Except now you’re here, and that other young female was, for a while. And you’re the first one, outside of grandpappy, here in the cabin that I can communicate with. I’ll want to keep you here, and I won’t let Papa hurt you in any way. No, I won’t let Papa or his wife hurt you. No, I won’t.”
*****
Surely, Jaqui thought, one of the off-worlders had the know-how to bypass Gorsh�
��s security system, if it was that old, and mine the information in the HBusiness file. Only to get at the file they had to have access to the computer, and physical access was going to be hard to arrange. She had a vague notion of communications networks based on the nodes, which could access machines from enormous distances, but had no idea whether or not Gorsh’s computers were hooked to any such network. If she had a node, perhaps she could have used it to find out, but she had never been one of the people Gorsh considered important enough to implant with one.
She had to get in touch with the off-worlders, and she had to do so through her own, normal self. She thought about the matter while going through her daily routine of doing the jobs that Gorsh assigned her, chatting with Rosa when they ran into one another in the communal cafeteria, and listening to Tere tell how Mosse had been whipped by the Overseer, but Tere himself had avoided punishment.
It was Tere’s retelling of how he found the Federation Agent gone from the basement that gave Jaqui the idea of chatting with Murra, the odd-looking boy, as she thought of him. Maybe the first jini was still down there in the room beyond the laboratory, she thought. If so, Murra, and his two invisible companions would be able to communicate with Seleni, who might be in touch with the off-worlders! A little bit convoluted, yes, but there was no Mosse in the laboratory to worry about (which reminded her that someone ought to look in on the girl he had been torturing—did she need anything?) All she had to do was come up with a plausible explanation for wanting to go down into the cellars to check up on the prisoners there!
Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers Page 54
