by Bill Adams
“How did you do that?” Ariel whispered.
“He was in the same daydream, so he heard me.”
“What do butterflies dream of?” she asked.
We started walking again.
“He was dreaming that he was a poet named Chuang-tzu, somewhere in Old China, four thousand years ago,” I said. “In this dream he is standing next to a canal, watching cherry blossoms fall into the water and drift away. He has a headache from drinking too much with former schoolfriends who have come to visit; they’ve boasted all night about their positions in the government, but he sees them only as pathetic and corrupt. And so, still thinking himself Chuang-tzu, the butterfly was wishing he could go back to bed, and dream of being in another world, another time, another body, with wings to fly. And then I woke him up, and all of it was true.”
“You are a very strange man,” Ariel said.
“Strange butterfly,” I said. “Pensive and erudite. No doubt descended from a Monarch.”
“Have butterflies ranks, too?”
“That’s how the old species names ran, for some reason. Admirals, Emperors. This one resembled a Monarch—unless he was a Viceroy.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Spiritual,” I said. “The Monarch was sour inside, like all autocrats. A defense against predators. The taste of a Monarch made birds sick, and they learned to recognize his wing markings and avoid him.”
“And the Viceroy?”
“The Viceroy was lazier, sneakier—more civilized. Rather than abandon good taste, he simply evolved wing markings exactly like a Monarch’s. So the birds avoided him, too.”
“Then he wasn’t really a Viceroy at all,” said Ariel, “but a Pretender to the throne.”
I laughed. “Just so.”
“And which are you, Alun?” she asked.
Even words fail me, sometimes.
“Monarch or Pretender?” she went on. “First you bite my head off at the spaceport, which I can’t blame you for, because I was trying to hustle you offplanet before you could interfere with construction or anything. But once you’ve established who’s boss, that’s all forgotten. Now you stand around being terribly charming and informal and indifferent, doing magic tricks and talking to butterflies. You ask questions, but you don’t listen to the answers, and generally act as if you’re waiting to get back to a girl you’ve got stashed in your hotel room. But when an emergency comes up, you can pull on a third face and respond like a hero.”
“Whoa!” I said. “Just a pilot who knows the manuals. You were a lot cooler when things looked worse.”
“Well, where I come from,” she said, smiling, “menfolk never back you up at all, so maybe I’m overimpressed.”
“You really speak your mind, don’t you?”
“And do you, ever? Maybe that’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
We’d already passed the advisable limits of talking about me. “And where do you come from?” I asked.
“A planet called Myrdal—from this neck of the Blue Swathe, actually. It’s a beautiful little world, I guess. Everything well planned from the start. The population is small. Almost everything is automated. Everyone can devote his time to everyone else. I don’t know. I’ve seen the starveling planets, and I know that Myrdal will always be a paradise compared to them, but there’s something important missing all the same. I think there has to be more challenge to life, just enough of an edge to shape yourself against, you know?
“I wasn’t the only one. On Myrdal nice girls have to be the responsible ones, the social managers who run the economy and the health services. Nice boys are supposed to keep the agro machines running and generally follow orders. But every generation, more and more of the men just opt out to play games. Black marketeering, mainly. Trading liquor or cigarettes or other forbidden things they smuggle in from offworld. The actual goods don’t really matter that much, it’s the game, it’s the kick. The only other way they have to be somebody is to see how many of their responsibilities they can get out of. So the woman’s role is to keep after them, nagging—or join their side, and wind up being used for laughs and thrown away. To hell with that.
“Thank God for the Column! I know lots of Freefolk complain about your military and the hard things that have to be done sometimes, but thank God for a system that outranks all the provincial governments. Someone has to keep the barriers down and the borders open. From the age of twelve one thing kept my spirit alive—the knowledge that someday I could go someplace else. Someplace where I could have the dirty fun of wheeling and dealing, and meet respectable men doing it, too. Someplace where men are given more constructive ways of proving themselves than by treating women like shit.”
“And is the larger sphere all you thought it would be?” I asked.
“Still promising,” she said, with a sidelong glance. “I’ve been lucky to get this far, this fast. It’s been a lot of work. But to me commerce will always be a little illicit—sexy, even—and that keeps it fresh. A few more years on the senator’s inner staff and I’ll be able to afford Column citizenship.”
“Is that so important?”
“If you want to go into interstellar business for yourself, yes, the right to use the Column’s civil courts is essential. And the central worlds are the big casino; everything else is just playing jacks.”
As the construction camp came into view, we walked harder and talked less. I wished I could share Ariel’s optimism about the Column and the big reforms the Consultant had allegedly promised the party of Senator Mehta, one of his most prominent supporters. But, naturally, I took the historical view.
The Consultant, whoever he was and wherever he came from, held a position analogous to a medieval king. He liked to dispense small but popular reforms—due process for debtors, scholarships for the deserving poor, more holidays for workers—because the love of the common people kept him the support of the regular navy, and held in check the great families that had founded the Column and controlled its bureaucracy and Shadow Tribunal. But he couldn’t go too far. If he were really planning to extend universal suffrage and reform the court system, for instance—two rumors that had been flying about for years—the great families would take whatever risks necessary to put an end to his life. Besides, he couldn’t afford to wound them that badly even if they’d let him; if the universal struggle was ever reduced to the Consultant versus the people, it might be too clear-cut for comfort.
But you couldn’t expect Ariel, with her healthy-minded belief in hard work and meritorious service, to understand that sort of thinking. I compared her with much younger women I’d wooed at college dances, once upon a time—women who are all white-haired now, or long dead; Ariel would laugh at the styles we’d worn, the slang we’d spoken, the standards we’d upheld. Sometimes it is too overwhelming to know that I am one of those ghosts, and have no fit part to play in the here and now. I cannot raise a pen to compete with the monument they’ve made of me; and if you take away any poet’s vocation, what’s left is a bum: a shirker, a seducer, a sponge.
It’s a morbid mood, a kind of burnout. Too much high living amid too many lowlifes over the past seven years, too many times hitting bottom between peak experiences meant to blot out the screaming dreams. But all those other ghosts keep kicking me out of the doldrums, keeping me honest. Liar, say the shades, fool. You’re still alive. Your body and mind are only thirty-three, in excellent health, as you walk through green fields behind a gladsome girl with a perfect rear end. Ungrateful bastard, admit it: your blackest thoughts are only butterfly dreams.
◆◆◆
Naturally, the spirit of honesty and intimacy and genuine affection that had sprung up between Ariel and me killed any prospect of sex.
Perhaps wary of having opened up so far, she took the first opportunity to retreat into her work. After a bath and a brief supper, only the latter of which I shared, she took charge of the flitter’s recovery and salvage. She spent the evening in conference with the cons
truction bosses over the logistical problems created by the loss of the vehicle, and I was left to my own devices.
Fortunately, Construction Chief Arsenovich had no interest in the problem of the Otis module. I bullied him into at least showing me where the cybermaintenance apparatus was, in one of the prefab technical shacks. After running preliminary diagnostics on the module, I affected to let the matter go, and told Arsenovich to order a replacement from offplanet.
Next, I needed an excuse to work in the technical area overnight. I asked Arsenovich how the interior design people assigned to Mehta’s palace intended to make their replicas of whatever artifacts the archaeologists turned up. He referred me to one of the decorators, who explained that they would create exact simulacra of any finds with a simula-kiln.
“A popular technology in the Blue Swathe,” I said. “But I don’t know much about it. I can’t have any alien artifacts damaged.”
“There’s no question of that, Commissioner. The device is as simple to operate as a camera.”
“Fine. Then teach it to me, and I’ll operate it personally when the time comes.”
He reluctantly complied. There were two quite different types of luminotrope glass, he explained, Alpha and Beta. The transparent—virtually invisible—kind, Alpha, could be produced quickly and easily, and in conveniently thin sheets, if desired. But the image of a physical object could only be produced at the center of a considerably larger volume of solid Beta type, and the process, he assured me grimly, was “much harder to explain, though simple in practice.”
But I outlasted his lecture, perforce learning a craft I never intended to use, until he was finally willing to leave me alone in one of the prefabs with his precious machine, making “practice” simulacra of pebbles and twigs. I waited for the shift change and then returned to the cybermaintenance apparatus as though that were where I belonged. No one bothered me; the executives were all asleep.
It took me two hours to dope out. But I had the advantage of knowing exactly what I was looking for within the Otis master module, and I found it—trace evidence of exactly the same kind of reprogramming that had downed the flyer.
But why hadn’t the saboteur used his skeleton coder to simply wipe the Otis cybercell clean? Conceivably because he or she had hoped to reset the Otis for private use, once everyone else had given up on it. That went along with the theory that one of them was working a valuable find in secret, with plans to smuggle it out for himself. Or herself. Foyle had technical know-how and equipment, as well as that—criminal?—record with the Shadow Tribunal. Her desire to have the module repaired could have been an act if she’d rigged the flitter, too; the crash would have destroyed any evidence of the module’s reprogramming.
That was a pretty weak motive for murdering a Column official, though. I was either dealing with an awfully bloodthirsty smuggler, or with something bigger, as yet unseen.
◆◆◆
The following day Arsenovich flew Ariel and me back to the Stone Hut site. As she’d promised the archaeologists the day before, she had cleared her schedule to stay at the dig for a week, and now she turned down the chief’s offer of a radio, telling him to come get her if anything really big came up. From the grateful look he gave her I could see that she was not on vacation; keeping government officials occupied, and away from the workplace, is an important executive job.
Everyone expressed polite concern at my tale of the flitter accident, but no more; Bunny wandered off with a yawn. The archaeologists didn’t take the news about the Otis module nearly as well.
“Foyle was sure it could be fixed,” Helen Hogg-Smythe said. The cookhouse tent flapped in the morning breeze behind her.
“I still am,” Foyle snapped. “May I have it back, please?”
I returned it with misgivings. Suddenly my afterthought of the night before didn’t look so smart.
I had decided that since Condé had lied to me about his claim, he might have lied about the barrow, too. Perhaps I’d better take my own look at it, wherever it was. I knew where to search first: that balancing rock formation on the ridge. That meant I might need to run an Otis unit, even though the system had to remain down. Accordingly, I’d used the cybermaintenance apparatus to repair the module, but had set it to respond only to my password.
I hadn’t foreseen that Foyle might go back to work on it. But she didn’t trust me, I could see it in those green eyes. Did that mean she was the saboteur, who knew damn well that the module was repairable? An inherently suspicious bitch? Or a good judge of character?
“If you should think that you have repaired it,” I said carefully, “please inform me before trying to operate any of the large units. I would have to inspect them first, for safety.”
“Whose?” she asked, and disappeared. Her smile could have meant anything.
No one was happy with his sub-commissioner any more. “I suppose we’ll have to make room for you in the men’s tent, too, Commissioner,” Wongama said gloomily.
Lagado began to sputter. “Perhaps your aide could bunk with Mishima, since he prefers the out-of-doors.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean he stepped out last night to wander into the hills. Woke us all up around three, trying to find his way back to the tent. Wouldn’t apologize either, the—”
“That’s all right, Dad,” his son said quietly. The kid was too well-behaved for his own good; look at the summer vacation it had earned him.
“It may not be safe to wander at night, either,” said Wongama. “The life bombers aren’t supposed to have supplied any large predators, but there was a very suspicious disturbance near Foyle’s tent one night. We tried to track whatever it was the next day, but lost it. Your aide should be warned.”
“I have to consult with Velasquez anyway,” I said. “I’ll mention the matter to him.”
I changed into what my protocol manual called a “field uniform,” the tunic as white and sharp, but the boots and pants more practical. After a while I located Bunny up on the ridge. I was surprised at how thick the scrub trees were; the archaeologists—Mishima, mainly, according to what I’d heard—had made only a few paths through the underbrush. Bunny hadn’t strayed far from them.
“Let’s talk, Bunny,” I said. “First things first. What the hell were you playing at, sending away our levy ship?”
“I’ve been expecting this,” Bunny said. “You’re supposed to be the soldier of fortune and I’m supposed to be the poor funk, but I guess it’s the other way around, isn’t it, playactor? You’re the one who’s too scared to stick.”
“If that parts boat doesn’t come on time—”
“Then you’ll have to earn your money and play your role in front of Mehta for a few days. Be a man. If I’m not scared—”
“If you’re not scared, there’s something fishy about it. You’ve got something else going here, don’t you, Bunny? You took a walk into the bush and met someone last night, didn’t you?”
“You’re dreaming.” He pointedly turned his back on me, as was his style.
I raised my right fist and hit him lightly at the base of the neck. The hypodermic I’d stolen from the crashed flitter’s first-aid kit injected him, a small compressed-air kick.
As he spun around I made the hypo disappear into the woods with a conjuror’s throw-away sleight, and faced him in a reasonable facsimile of a martial-arts stance.
“Don’t even know how to rabbit-punch,” Bunny said with one of his more confident sneers. But his words were already beginning to slur. Emergency drugs are meant to work fast, and the closer to the brain you pump them the better.
Bunny shifted his body to feint a kick, and instead launched a high handblow that might have suckered me at its proper speed. As it was, it arrived so slowly I could come up with what might even have been a Shih Ho block for it. Bunny’s face registered total incredulity as my arm straightened directly from the block into his face. I didn’t hit him hard; I just wanted my fi
st to be the last thing he’d remember.
Chapter Nine
This was the dark side of the ridge, shadowed by the morning sun, out of earshot of the people on the prairie, overlooking the dead lake and the marsh. At the highest point, partly visible from the rocky ledge where I sat, stood the balancing rock formation Condé had asked me to keep the archaeologists away from.
The ridge was a windbreak; the balancing rock’s slenderness had presumably been shaped by the wind. But its string-of-pearls shape would be unusual anywhere, and I resolved to take a closer look at it as soon as I could.
I finished scanning upward and eastward to make sure we wouldn’t be disturbed, then turned back to the marsh below. Slate-blue shrubbery and pale-green ground cover patched the landscape despite the alkaline water chemistry, and the plant life grew thicker the farther one got from the steep banks of the lake. The broad expanse of water looked shallow for the most part, but a large circular area of deep black hugged the ridge. I noticed that the hunting birds that skimmed the algae-covered ponds in the distance did not bother with the surface of the lake.
I heard a stirring below me. Just west of the boulder I was sitting on, the ledge dropped off steeply. Bunny Velasquez, rolling on his side as he regained consciousness, reached the point of no return and began to slide over the edge. He was brought up short—and shocked awake—by the strip of leather around his wrist.
He cried out and I said, sharply enough to penetrate, “Make no noise, Bunny, or I drop you.”
I had removed his belt, made a small loop through the buckle, and fixed his hand in it. The other end was buckled to my own belt, which I was holding at arm’s length. The reach of the whole lifeline was no more than two meters, but that was enough to make the difference between my sitting safely and his clinging prone to the slanting rock face.