by Chloe Garner
“How far would you have gone?” Jesse asked. “You put their technology on a rocket sled. The entire planet is never going to be the same again.”
“Not much further,” she admitted. “I could see what I was doing.”
Jesse shook his head.
“Lots of unintended consequences, this time,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s you, of course, but then there’s the self-satisfied boy king.”
She’d never really known much about the king. She’d heard all kinds of stories about everything else, including the fable of Palk and Starn, but never anything about a king.
“Who is he?”
“Nobleman whose father put a Napoleon complex of galactic scale onto him,” Jesse said. “He mortgaged his entire planet for a shot at power, and then he had no idea what to do with it.”
“He bought technology from a skeezy vendor that let him strip people of their cash,” Cassie said. “But then there’s nothing to do with cash, when it’s only good on a market outside of your planet.”
“And he still had to pay for the tech,” Jesse said. “So he would take the money and spend it on himself as he found opportunity, but the guy who was selling the alteration to the space-transfer trap wouldn’t touch the currency. Too easy to trace. Finding a kid who took over a planet somewhere in the universe is hard, because the kid still lives on an uncharted planet somewhere in the universe. Finding a guy who peddles this stuff for a living? That’s easy to do.”
“So how was he paying?” Cassie asked. Jesse shook his head.
“You’ll never guess.”
“I would,” Cassie said, “but we have things to do tonight.”
Jesse gave her a crooked grin.
“Sheep.”
“Goats,” she corrected. “That’s why livestock prices never crashed.”
He nodded at her.
“Instead of making the planet richer by importing a bunch of assets, he’s making it poorer by exporting them in exchange for a currency that doesn’t buy him anything useful.”
“So we have to go shut him down,” Cassie said.
“I’m more concerned with getting back the access to the Palta accounts that he has, now,” Jesse said. “Up until now, it looks like he’d been getting relatively small scores off of hapless tourists. With the Palta fortune open to him, he might actually do something permanent to those poor people.”
“And spend a bunch of money that rightfully belongs to you,” Cassie teased.
“It’s more money than I could spend in a million lifetimes,” Jesse said. “And I’m creative.”
She wished she hadn’t said it. Even with his casual response, she hadn’t intended to hurt him that badly. He carried around his entire world’s fortune like a reminder that it was his fault that everything had happened the way it had.
There were things she needed to say. Things she couldn’t say. Things she’d always needed to say, but that were so much more pressing now, with the raw memories from her time as Starn. Her chest hurt.
“We should get going, then,” she said.
He was watching her with eyes that saw everything. She knew that she showed him nothing, and that this was their stalemate, but it didn’t stop them.
“You make any progress on turning yourself back human?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Not trying.”
He watched her. She watched him back.
She stood, uncurling herself from the bed and going to stand next to him.
“What’s going on with Troy?”
“Do you care?” he asked.
She did. But she couldn’t say it.
“Just thought you might be in a mood,” she said. The door had closed.
“He’ll work through it,” Jesse said. “Not that the last six months are going to make it any easier for him to focus.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jesse gave her a patronizing look and she answered it with a scathing glare.
“I’m not speaking euphemistically,” he finally said. “There’s no way he could understand what you’re feeling, but surely you can understand what he does.”
Palk.
He’d been such a simple, happy man. Out hunting great, prehistoric animals like a cougar crossed with a bear with a gigantism gene. He’d been good at it.
Life was complicated.
“He’s tough,” she finally said, and Jesse nodded an unenthusiastic agreement.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said.
“Fine with me.”
*********
The air changed, familiar in its own way but different from the ranch. She could identify the planet by its smell, likely from any spot on its surface. The characteristic makeup of the atmosphere was something her body was designed to analyze and remember.
They were in a large city, larger than King’s Port, but it had all of the same worn-down characteristics that they’d seen in King’s Port.
“He’s this way,” Jesse said. She followed along easily enough, seeing the contrast in the world that she perceived as Cassie from the one she’d seen as Starn.
Starn hadn’t seen the poverty. Not the way Cassie did. Starn hadn’t had the conditioning or the background to know that those people over there were only a few days away from a fight over drugs that would kill all of them, and that those ones there were in danger of starving this month. The empty buildings, their evidence hidden from Starn but screaming at Cassie, bespoke a city that was still shrinking to meet its real ability to feed and supply itself. Deurbanization. What happened when the money and the labor stopped talking to each other, and the labor left to find a new way to feed itself, and the money left to find a safe place from the labor.
And there was nothing to be done about it.
She could have fixed any single narrative she passed on that street, block by block into richer and more prosperous regions of the city. Some of them were trivially easy to solve, but it didn’t fix the problem that caused the situation. She could save a person, but there was every chance that in saving that one, she would condemn another.
This wasn’t a question of simple issues. This was a huge lack of resources, one that they’d been aware of on the ranch, with their hole-in-the-ground technologies for water and sewage, with their entirely self-sufficient economy of food that revolved exclusively around grain and meat, with the huge number of hopeful people who wanted to come be a part of that food economy. Who would do anything to belong in a place that could feed everyone consistently.
Worse yet, her Palta eyes could see just how quickly it was getting worse. The decay was progressive, and some of it was new.
They reached a gate with a large hedge stretching to either side, and a gray man in a uniform stopped them.
“What business are you here on?” he asked.
“I need to speak with Narcoth,” Jesse said easily.
“And who are you?”
“Someone who knows how to deal with Alad Alan Alath.”
There was a silence between them and Jesse finally nodded.
“You get the message up to him, and he’ll see me. No question.”
“Narcoth is a very busy man,” the guard said.
“They always are,” Jesse said. “The problem is that he’s busy with all the wrong things. He needs someone to show him what he’s doing wrong.”
The guard stiffened. Jesse grinned.
“I appreciate loyalty. I do. But he needs advice from someone with a little wider experience than him. Alad Alan Alath. You tell him that.”
“Please be on your way,” the guard said. “The king is a busy man who does not take kindly to strangers who assume to know better than he does how to run the kingdom.”
Cassie waited. There was a plan here. She didn’t need to know what it was to know it was happening. The emotional response from the guard had been exactly what Jesse had hoped for; she’d watched the clear manipulation as he’d
triggered it.
“Thank you,” Jesse said, turning his back on the guard as he faced Cassie. The Palta winked. That was when Cassie noticed the bush moving.
Spies.
“You’ve been here before,” she accused and he nodded gleefully. Of course. What kind of tin-pot king wouldn’t be spying on his own people? And Jesse would already know all kinds of things about him, from his search for Cassie and Troy.
She yawned.
“Cute show,” she said. He shrugged.
“Could have just walked in,” he said.
“You know their rhythms?”
“No, but I know a native,” he said with a teasing grin. She glowered at him.
“I said be gone,” the guard said at Jesse’s back. The Palta ignored him.
“I figure about two minutes.”
“Two minutes and that guy’s going to be throwing rocks at you,” Cassie said. Jesse shook his head.
“There’s a line,” he said. “And strict instructions. And I’m on the other side of the line. I’m just teasing him, now. A little too enthusiastic about the power, really, don’t you think?”
Cassie looked at the guard again, seeing the play of exasperation, desperation, and frantic impotency as he tried to figure out what to do about Jesse.
“Just how far over the line are you?” she asked. He checked his feet.
“He’d be within his rights to attack my right heel,” he said. “The last quarter inch of it.”
“Don’t lean back,” she said dryly, and the Palta grinned at her again.
She counted it out in her head, and he was on the money. Two minutes later, a runner came down to the guard and whispered to him. If it had been their biological design, the guard would have turned bright red.
“No,” he said. “He doesn’t deserve an audience.”
Jesse turned and walked past the guard without looking at him.
“You ever wonder how he knows?” Cassie asked on the way past, then followed Jesse and the runner through a maze of hedgework toward a house that increasingly dominated her view.
The architecture was awful. She could identify the inspiration behind any number of sections of the house, but there were dozens more that she couldn’t identify. Young king Narcoth was well-traveled for a monarch from a planet still in the early stages of its first industrial revolution, and he’d done his best to explain the architecture he wanted on his palace as his whim had driven him to add on to it over and over again, but between poor grasp of what made the architecture iconic, poor communication of those ideas, and implementation by people who had never seen a combustion engine, it was a mockery of all of them.
All it really had going for it was that it was big.
They finally exited the maze and the runner took them to a six-door wide entrance. The doors rose well overhead, but they didn’t exactly fit their slots, and they all opened on the same side, like a racing gate. Cassie stared up at them as the three of them went through, boggling at the ineptitude they showed.
“The ranch was a lovely piece of construction,” she whispered to Jesse. “That’s not just how I remember it?”
“Colloquial, but elegant,” Jesse said. “It isn’t just you.”
She shook her head.
“This is where all of the taims went.”
He nodded gravely, his eyes dancing. She shook her head. Disgusting.
The building wandered, through this addition and that, for a long way before they got to the small-ish room where Narcoth sat. For as big as the building was, his throne room was more like a conference room.
“This is him?” the Drint king asked. Someone gave him an affirmative signal, and he waved them off. “Very well, I will see him. Be gone.”
The individual he had spoken to turned and left, then Narcoth suddenly looked around the room with violence.
“I said begone.”
There was a general, accelerating shuffling as the rest of the men and women realized that he intended to clear the room and did their best not to be the last one to leave. Narcoth looked at them, fat as a frog, with skin that had passed its prime two hundred pounds ago.
“You know Alad Alan Alath?” he asked Jesse.
“I do,” Jesse said.
“You work for him?” Narcoth asked.
“I don’t work for anyone,” Jesse answered. “I’m just someone he will respect.”
Narcoth scratched his chin, causing his entire face to wobble.
“I wouldn’t mind being rid of him,” the young king said.
“That’s not why I’m here,” Jesse said. “I’m here to insist that you dismantle your space-interchange trap.”
“Why would I do that?” Narcoth asked.
“Because that’s the only way I’m going to help you with Alad Alan Alath.”
There was another hesitation. A long one. Cassie wondered if the boy-king would actually consider declining Jesse’s offer and continue to impoverish his people in exchange for the luxurious lifestyle he was living.
Wasn’t being king enough?
“Tell me how,” Narcoth said.
“You return it,” Jesse said. “The entire system.”
Narcoth shook his head.
“No refunds,” he said. “That much was very clear in the contract.”
“You’re an idiot,” Cassie said. He bristled.
“You’re very skinny and very pale,” he told her. “Shut up.”
“Wouldn’t talk to her like that,” Jesse said. “She’s got a temper.”
“So?” Narcoth asked. “Women here know their places.”
“But she isn’t from here,” Jesse said. “And she’s much smarter and much more powerful than you’ll ever be.”
“You’re sucking the lifeblood out of your economy and feeding it to that vampire, and you’re looking for a way out of giving it up because you like being the only person on your whole planet who gets to see the universe.”
Narcoth blinked at her.
“What’s it to you?”
“Careful, boy,” Jesse said. “I’m serious about her and her temper.”
She narrowed her eyes, making the connections.
“Wouldn’t take that much,” she said. “Unrest is usually hard to predict and hard to channel, but I’m actually pretty good at it. Wouldn’t take much to unseat you and put power somewhere where it’s much less likely to starve half your population to death.”
Narcoth leaned back in his chair.
“I’m untouchable. The people think I’m a god.”
“I lived here for six months and never heard of you,” Cassie said. He tried to read her. Failed.
“It’s true,” Jesse finally said, trying to help things along. “Look, I don’t care if you stay king or not. It obviously doesn’t matter to that many people, so long as you stop taking all of the resources off of the planet and giving them to Alad Alan Alath.”
“What if I don’t want to give it up?” Narcoth asked. “I like being able to teleport, and I like having money to spend.”
“About that,” Jesse said. “That’s the other condition. You have to give it all back.”
Narcoth’s eyes got big.
“No.”
“Then I wish you luck with Alad Alan Alath, when Cassie unleashes her revolution on you.”
The ranchers would be a decent place to seat power, at least temporarily. They at least had a flourishing economy and the ability to manage a staff. They had a complex system of contacts, and some renown. Yes, they would do.
“You’re outsiders,” Narcoth said. “What can you possibly do?”
Jesse glanced at Cassie.
“I wouldn’t take this lightly, if I were you,” he said. “She’s got most of a plan, already, and if we keep standing here, I can’t promise she isn’t going to act on it, regardless.”
Cassie stared hard at Narcoth.
Fat little man. The men on the ranches, out risking their lives every day, and here he sat in his corpulence, thinking he had
importance at all.
He swallowed.
“So if he doesn’t allow refunds, how do you expect me to give it back to him?” Narcoth asked.
“You mention me,” Jesse said.
The mix of nerves and pride vanished under pure curiosity.
“Who are you?”
“I’m the son of Eno-Lath Bron,” Jesse said. Narcoth looked unimpressed. ‘Trust me,” Jesse told him. “It matters.”
“I’ve never heard of you,” Narcoth said.
“Name someone you have heard of,” Cassie muttered. Jesse was right. Whether or not Narcoth handed over his technology to the weasel who had sold it to him, she was going to grind the green goober into dust.
“Control your tongue, woman,” Narcoth said.
“I’ve always admired watching her work,” Jesse said. “This is going to be a masterpiece.”
Narcoth glanced at him.
“No one talks to me like that, especially not a woman.”
“I lived and worked on a ranch, full of overconfident men who actually did real work for a living, and none of them were as stupid as you when it came to women,” Cassie said.
At this, Narcoth’s eyes flew wide open.
“You’re her?”
She frowned. She’d never heard of him. What were the odds he’d heard of her?
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” she said coldly.
“The witch. The one with all the magic who was changing everything.”
“Sounds like her,” Jesse said.
Narcoth looked like his mouth had gone dry.
“Seriously?” she asked. “All the things I can do, all the things I know, and the fact that I invented a sewing machine is what’s going to impress you?”
“Sewing machine,” Jesse said. “That sounds about right. It’s a great starting point.”
She glanced at him.
“And if I’d had the ability to pick, I’m sure that’s exactly what I would have done.”
“People underestimate textiles,” Jesse said. “The ability to wear something clean because you want to. It’s a big step toward real civilization.”
She looked at him with exasperation, and he shrugged jovially.