The Summer Thieves

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Bright and early,” Landon reminded. “Even victorious warriors can’t coast on their conquests.”

  In his room, Johrun plopped down gratefully on his bed with its light green linen coverlet suitable for the unchanging clime. Arranging a comfortable pile of pillows, he summoned up with his vambrace the latest galactic news—at least the freshest headlines accessible on Verano, delivered throughout the day. Grandpa always said that a good citizen of the Quinary should stay current with the broad stream of politics and culture across the Milky Way and beyond, keep abreast of the big integrated economy and the separate planetary affairs. Just because the family owned their own world and were insulated by its wealth was no reason to feel disunited from the myriad other planets in the galaxy.

  Ranked by algorithms that balanced Johrun’s preferences with objective scales of importance, the headlines and the talk and the shaped-light video paraded across his drowsy attention. A conflict between the nations of Karst and Obdalia on Coombe over rights to a new strike of strangelets. The latest fashions from the famous designer Sugarbloom. (Johrun perked up significantly at the bare-bottomed models.) And the very creepy recrudescence of the phagoplasm plague on the otherwise lovely grotto world of Irion. The spread of these brain parasites was insidious, as the malign agents were both hard to detect, once embedded, and hard to separate from their human hosts without harming the latter.

  There came a knock at Johrun’s door just as he was approaching the saturation point of learning about all these distant people and doings that bore little real relevance to his own life. He welcomed the intrusion and called out, “Come in!”

  The household member who entered was not whom he had expected.

  But it was perhaps the being Johrun loved best—or at least loved in a perdurable and powerful manner which no other entity could ever share.

  Lutramella exhibited in her appearance many of the qualities of her main Gaian ancestors: otter, weasel, ferret. Traces of the mauskopfs of Spunkwater and the mellivores of Geronimus were also discernible. Possessing an almost boneless, sinuous grace of movement, perhaps only a bit tempered by age, she was lightly furred in chocolate, ecru, fawn, and cinnamon, as could be seen on her limbs exposed by her modest grey tunic and shorts, as well as on her mobile, alert, intelligent face, whose hybrid physiognamy reflected her fusion of animal and human. Quivering whiskers and a wet black nose comported in surprising harmony with anthropic lips and eyes. Compact round ears clung close to her skull. She stood six inches shorter than the man.

  Lutramella it was who had assisted at his birth. Lutramella it was who had nursed the infant Johrun, tended him hour to hour until the age of three, his constant caretaker and companion. Lutramella it was who had been ever ready in later years to nurse a bruise or listen to a wild story or fancy, to accompany the lone and sometimes lonely child in play.

  Johrun jumped up off his bed and embraced his nursemaid. She hugged him back, her fur warm and pleasant. She smelled like old clothes in a cupboard, of youth and security and love.

  Johrun stood back from the splice. He suddenly realized how she had come to be less in his thoughts over the past few years, as other matters grew to dominate. He saw her now with mature eyes that detected definite signs of aging. By intent, the lifespan of most splices was much less than that of humans, and they were seldom privileged to experience the anti-aging technics that could easily extend their lives.

  “What brings you here, Lu?”

  Lutramella’s husky voice evoked burrows and marshes, dark moonless nights crouched for prey. “I was worried you might have been hurt today.”

  “Hurt! By those louts! Dad and I had them begging for mercy within minutes.”

  Lutramella allowed herself the shadow of a grin, revealing small sharp teeth. “Then the takedown drone was just there to observe, and played no part. What a waste of Corvivios chains.”

  Johrun waved off the sardonic observation, but then admitted, “Well, maybe we had a little help.”

  “Just so long as you escaped harm, it doesn’t matter how, and I’m glad.” She paused and looked down at her bare and slightly webbed feet with their long and capable hard-nailed toes. Raising her eyes, she said, “But there’s another reason I came, Joh. It’s to ask a large favor.”

  “Ask away!”

  “Your wife-to-be returns soon, and your wedding will mark the end of our special relationship, I think.”

  “No, never, Lu!”

  But even as he spoke, Johrun acknowledged the truth of this statement. He could not imagine Lutramella sharing a household with stringent and self-minded Minka.

  “You know I am enrolled in the Quinary databases as your splice alone, not the family’s. So I ask you this: could you manumit me, before you marry?”

  “Set you free? But what would you do? Where would you go?”

  “I have some plans—some dreams. And some savings. Gifts of a few-score links here and there that I’ve saved over the decades. But after two decades, it amounts to a couple of thousand chains.”

  Johrun did not hesitate, even though this whole concept and request was utterly unforeseeable. “Only a couple of thousand chains? Not enough! I will endow you with twenty times that amount, and set you free at once!”

  And as good as his speech, Johrun carried out the necessary protocols via his vambrace. Money was transferred, and the formal notifications of Lutramella’s freedom were broadcast—or at least buffered, till the next outsystem drone arrived—and ping!, the letter of freedom shot out across the stars.

  “The galaxy knows you are your own mistress now, Lu.”

  The slim chimera was silent for some time, her expression unreadable. She said, “Remarkably, I feel much the same as I did a minute ago. I thought I would not. Could I ask one more thing? Might I sleep on my floor pallet here in your room tonight, one last time, as when you were a boy?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Striding at a brisk pace that Johrun had to stretch to match, Grandpa Xul led the way across the ranch grounds, past the splice stables—not crude communal bunkrooms or stalls as on other latifundia, but rather resembling the spartan dormitories of an underfunded state school—past the windowless abattoirs and automated meat-cutting facilities, past the refrigerated warehouses, and past the various storage sheds.

  (Gone from one certain shed were the dismayed poachers, those bumbling ruffians, now wearing obedience collars, having been picked up a day ago by a security squad dispatched by the Motivators affiliate based out of Zarrinjub, a nearby planet sharing the star-packed M68 globular cluster with Verano. The impressively armed and stern-faced squad had loaded the prisoners aboard their sleek Mazurka Class ship the Indomitable. Then, before departing this brane for their base, they had bounced halfway around the world to pay a social call on Aunt Fallon, with whom the commander had once served, in her premarital days as leader of “Fallon Brujan’s Brutes.”)

  The day, as ever on Verano, was exquisite: air like floral perfume after a dawn rain, the wan amethyst light from Wayward’s Spinel lending even mundane objects a fairytale aura. Whatever else the Harvesters might have been—saviors, executioners, or something in between—they had definitely manifested a certain artistry in their planet-sculpting.

  “Do you really think the fabricators will finish the new house by the time Minka arrives tomorrow?”

  Xul smoothed his impressive white mustachios. His words attempted to prolong some suspense, but the truth of the matter could be read in his hearty anticipatory attitude. “Well, let’s run the numbers. Always a useful exercise, to have the hard facts arrayed. We set the hephaestus units a-building seventy-two hours ago, and they can enclose ten cubic meters per hour, including laying down all the HVAC and circuitry. When they’re done, you have to factor in the interior finishing and furniture genesis. Your plans describe a compound of some seven thousand cubic meters. So far, so good. But wait! I’m forgetting the exterior finishes! I must ponder further—”

  Johrun threw a mock p
unch at his grandfather’s shoulder, and the centenarian winced and pretended to be pained. Johrun knew full well that in reality Xul could have still deployed a large degree of the youthful strength he had retained, as well as the rough-and-tumble experience derived from his decades of adventuring, and taken his grandson to the woodshed. After all, had not Xul and his companion, Brayall Soldevere, Minka’s grandfather, wrested the title to Verano from the infamous and redoubtable Honko Drowne, the Red Lion of the Spires, and lived to boast of it?

  “Give, you old rascal! Don’t keep me on tenterhooks!”

  “Yes, yes, I’d say your new home should be finished just about the time Minka steps off the University ship from Loudermilk III, or maybe thirty seconds after. Give or take an order or magnitude on that last figure. But wouldn’t the best way to gauge the progress be to eyeball the place?”

  Their walk had brought them up to the structure in question, and they stopped now to appreciate what the fabricators had rendered.

  The plans for the residence where Minka and Johrun would soon live had been selected by Johrun himself. (Minka had been in charge of choosing the design of their separate home at Danger Acres. As yet, it remained her secret. As the yoked scions of both families, the couple would spend half the year at each holding.) Johrun had picked as his architectural model the Aestival Gazebo of Margravine Thais on Bueno Corso, fabbed in pastel marble and quartzite. A truly romantic conception, distinct from the other utilitarian ranch buildings, the light and airy structure, incorporating almost as many pavilions and loggias as boxed-in rooms, seemed perfectly suited to the Verano clime.

  It would be strange to live as man and wife, apart from the family, but Johrun was eager, already picturing himself and Minka lounging at the breakfast table together before the day’s chores began, bantering and exchanging passionate side-glances.

  Xul’s vambrace blarped an alarm, drawing him to a hephaestus machine that was stuttering: laying down the same patch of laterite patio tile over and over in a rapidly accumulating useless stack. He took it offline with commands from his vambrace and summoned its replacement, which began to decohere the excess material before completing the job properly.

  “I still think we should have started the project sooner, and not taken a chance on it being unfinished tomorrow.”

  “You know the duties of the ranch came first, and how busy they kept us. We could have turned the builder modules loose to operate without regular checks while we were in the field. But you saw how this one just went astray. Would you have us running in from the far pastures every time a unit went glitchy? As for splice supervision with something so delicate—chancey at best.”

  “Sometimes I wish the Recension didn’t limit what machines could do for us on their own.”

  Xul said sternly, “Never doubt that Bondi Rainstick and his Silicrobe Boys saved humanity from extinction when they stopped the Sly Artilect and its many nodes in their tracks and then imposed their universal strictures. No, limits on self-governing action and some degree of machine inefficiency are much more acceptable than cyber-perfection and human nonexistence.”

  “You’re right of course, Grandpa, but still—”

  “No equivocating! You’ve verified that your honeymoon cottage will be finished when Minka arrives. And she won’t even see it till a week after that! So let’s tend to our duties and get this ranch ready for our departure.”

  The formal University student shuttle ship from Loudermilk would be arriving not here, but at Danger Acres, naturally enough, bringing Minka back to her own hearth first. And although the Corvivios family would be present for the reunion, the elaborate marriage itself—more of Minka’s meticulous arranging—would not take place until after several days of prenuptial revelry. And only after the happy conclusion of that ceremony would the newlyweds return to Sweetwater Pasturage for an extended stay.

  Johrun and his grandfather and Landon spent the rest of the early day putting all systems into idle, and rehearsing the boss splices—Arbona, Tucker, and Pieface, three corvulpecans of superior wit and initiative—in the maintenance of the ranch infrastructure.

  During his lunch break, sitting on the terrace outside the kitchen in a comfortably squelchy biomorph lounger, enjoying a sandwich of rocklamb and cress on marshwheat toast and a mug of beer, Johrun noticed Lutramella exiting softly from the kitchen. She carried a tray of food. Always permitted the full run of the family’s residence—in fact she had her humble private quarters in a far wing of the manse, and not in the general stables—her presence was no surprise. Nonetheless, Johrun intuited something amiss.

  The splice halted at Johrun’s beckoning. She wore not her usual grey outfit but a more colorful gold-and-green striped blouse, a taupe waffled weskit that fell below her slim, almost nonexistent hips, and black ophid-compressive tights that stopped mid-calf. (Did she really need such circulatory aids? Johrun wondered. True, she was nearly thirty-five, well past middle-age for a splice, but he always pictured her as eternally fit.) As always she went barefoot. But if her somewhat gayer clothes showed a spirit inclined to celebrate, her face conveyed the opposite sense.

  “Lu, stop a minute. What’s happening, where are you heading?”

  “I have to take my meal in my room.”

  “But you always enjoy eating with the household staff— Boysie, Hanzl, Trinket, and the others.”

  Lutramella’s dark eyes regarded Johrun with neither self-pity nor anger, just calm acceptance of reality. “They don’t want my company since you freed me.”

  Sliding his plate onto a side table beside his beer, Johrun came quickly to his feet. “This indignity won’t stand! I’ll deal with them right now!”

  Holding her tray one-handed, Lutramella put a warm paw on Johrun’s arm to halt him. “Please, Joh, don’t. Anything you could do would only make things worse. And in any case, I’ll be gone from the estate soon.”

  Lu’s departure—retrospectively obvious—shocked Johrun. Somehow, in the press of events—the end of the roundup, the poachers, the upcoming return of Minka, Lu’s manumission— he had never contemplated that, once sovereign, she would want to leave. It only made sense, though: without official status, her presence among the Corvivios family would be anomalous. He knew she would not want to remain as a charity case of any sort—although Johrun would have sponsored her in his life forever.

  “You’ll be gone? But where? And when?”

  “Not until after your marriage, of course. I wouldn’t miss that for the world! I am invited, aren’t I?”

  “Invited? You head the guest list!”

  “Oh, good, I’m so glad. When I see you and Minka wed, my duties will finally be over.”

  Johrun took the tray from Lutramella, set it down on his chair, and embraced her. The chimera’s wiry form, familiar as his own reflection, conveyed tactilely all of Lutramella’s usual strength and dignity. She hugged him back, and then they unclasped each other.

  “As for where I intend to go,” the splice continued, “I thought the money you so generously endowed me with might cover my passage to Vinca’s Ebb, and my longterm sustenance there. From all I’ve heard, it’s a nice quiet place.”

  “A world full of superannuated free splices, who spend all their time knitting, tending vegetable plots, and playing cat-an-cribbage? You’re too vital still for that fate, Lu!”

  She shrugged. “I suppose, in one sense. But in another, my life’s mission is over now, and only peace and inactivity loom.”

  Johrun could not conceive of counterarguments at the moment. “Be that as it may, you’re not to take your meals alone, whenever I’m free. Here, sit, and we’ll finish our lunch together.”

  While they ate, Johrun allowed himself to conduct a rambling but enthusiastic monologue touching on Minka, her fine qualities, familiar anecdotes from their youth, her imminent return, and the future he anticipated for them. Lutramella listened closely, interjecting a mildly pertinent question here and there. When Johrun finally wound down, she sa
id, “When did she last write to you, Joh?”

  Johrun had to pause and cast his mind back. The answer he came up with startled him a bit.

  “It must have been six months ago. But it was a very tender message. She blew me endless kisses at the close. I played it time and again.”

  “I would have hoped for more frequent contacts between two people destined for each other.”

  “But this was her senior year, and she had so much to do! Why, mastering the categorical logic of Krokinole’s Manual of Essential Niceties alone required endless hours of memory work.” Minka’s self-directed degree was designed to encompass all the technics that would help her guide Danger Acres into the future, and a firm grasp of Krokinole’s, which laid out all the cultural taboos and requirements, quirks, and kinks of the hundred thousand major starfaring cultures of the Quinary, was deemed essential. “And she knew how busy I myself was here—”

  “Nonetheless. To stay silent for such an interval bespeaks—”

  Johrun stood up abruptly. He was a little irked at Lutramella’s insinuations and criticisms. “There’s no need for you to pass judgment on matters about which you can know nothing. I realize you and Minka had never formed the closest of bonds. But I’ll thank you to keep your wet black nose out of my love life.”

  Lutramella’s flattish muzzle quivered. “As you wish, Joh.”

  Johrun stalked off then. As soon as he was out of Lutramella’s sight, he felt guilty at his harsh rebuke. But ire and pride swiftly reasserted themselves, and he put aside any thoughts of the affront he had unjustly given his loyal companion.

  Landon and Xul were finishing the mothballing of some machinery—mainly covering the vehicles and equipment with powerskin tarps against Verano’s occasional tempests. The planet’s eternal summer did not preclude some humdinger blows, and warm rains and winds could be as powerful as cold. And although weather satellites revealed no impending fronts, one could never be sure what the unknowable Harvester planetary programming intended.