by J. S. Morin
How long the stayed in each other’s arms, Mordecai couldn’t say. Forever would have been too little time. And then it was time for him to disappear.
# # #
On the streets of Boston Prime lurked no fewer than eight Mordecais. None of them would notice it, of course, but everyone who saw them perceived them as a tall, scrawny wizard with a baggy-sleeved shirt and a pack slung over one shoulder. Only someone as talented as Mordecai would be able to tell which was which without resorting to vulgar displays of revelatory magic. Every time he found himself at a crossroads or crowded terminal, he found a likely candidate heading in another direction and deputized them as a new doppelganger. Yet every time he sent another false Mordecai to muddle his path, he was still left with the pervasive feeling of being followed.
If he could not buy himself a moment’s peace from whoever was pursuing him, his plan might fall dead at his feet. Mordecai tried something more creative. He stopped at a shuttle terminal—nothing fancy, just a simple intra-hemispheric depot. Giving a paranoid look over his shoulder, he ducked into the mens’ washroom. In the privacy of his stall, he paused to collect his thoughts, counting to one hundred with a slow, even cadence in his head. He emerged and washed his hands, studying a gentleman at the sink beside him—tall, wide shoulders, with a gray suit and matching hair, receding from the brow. The man carried a business attaché case.
When Mordecai left that washroom, he was the one with the grey suit and hair, his knapsack transformed to appear as an attaché case. The false Mordecai who followed him out sported a beard and glasses that Mordecai lacked, and wore different clothing, but in all other ways look just like him, right down to the case that appeared as a knapsack, dangling casually from his hand.
Mordecai never discovered his pursuer. He stood by a departure and arrival board and watched as his body double boarded a flight to London Prime. By the time the shuttle to London lifted off, the sensation of a wizard concealed in close proximity vanished. It had to have been one of Wenling’s lackeys, he had assumed initially. But the more he thought about it, he wondered if it had been Pao Wenling herself following him. It certainly would have explained his inability to pinpoint his pursuer. As he watched the shuttle disappear into the distance, he raised a finger to his temple in a quiet salute.
Free from his tail, Mordecai made for the theater district, resuming his own form. At the Orpheum, he slipped past two magic-befuddled doormen and made his way backstage. “Where can I find Chuck Ramsey?” Mordecai asked a flunky who stood with datapad in hand, updating the flatvid boards that showed what was playing at the theater.
“That lot’s shipping off-world,” the flunky replied. “Try Logan Starport. His ship is the Radiocity.” The lad pronounced it like some sort of chemical process, but being a wizard, Mordecai’s mind parsed things differently. He instantly saw a likely spelling in his head, pulled it apart, and reattached it as Radio City, a New York Prime theater just as famous as the Orpheum. Ramsey had a consistent style; he’d give him that much.
Mordecai reached into a pocket and grabbed a ten-terra coin. He muttered a few words over it and tossed it to the flunky. “I was never here,” he said, as the coin was in mid-air. By the time the lad caught hold of that coin, he had no inkling of having met Mordecai The Brown. For all that theater worker knew, he had found the coin along the back alleyway.
Logan Starport was the hub of Boston Prime, despite being located on the waterfront. Mordecai hopped into the first taxi he found and paid hardcoin to get there. He wasn’t about to risk using his Convocation tab for anything… perhaps ever again. As the city blurred by, Mordecai fought the impulse to hide his hands in his sleeves. He went so far as to roll them up to the elbow to hide the wide, conspicuous openings.
At the starport, Mordecai was whisked into a world rife with science. Holovid advertisements, security-scan checkpoints, self-propelled luggage transports, and voice-interactive information kiosks. He held his breath as he passed by the worst of the scientific devices, keeping even his most casual uses of magic at bay lest he set one of them malfunctioning and draw attention to himself. Finding a lone starship in the jumble of humanity and blaring holovids was more daunting than he expected. For a moment, he considered striking up a conversation with one of the kiosks, but he had never spoken with a machine before. Would one even talk to a wizard? He hated them; would they hate him right back?
Security cameras throughout the starport would be recording him every step of his search, but one magic that he would not relinquish was the one that kept his features indistinct to science. No techno-gadget was going to do better than a finger-painted picture of Mordecai while he was in the starport. Humans were another matter. A lone traveler might not attract attention, but one who asked for directions might stick in someone’s mind. Wiping memories was a simple enough task in an empty theater, but there were wards against those sorts of magic in high-security areas.
Mordecai’s eyes widened. There was a group of laaku passing by, wearing uniforms for Phabian Starways, the major interstellar passenger service of their homeworld. The laaku were chimp-like, resembling those distant ancestors more closely than humans mirrored the great apes from which they diverged in pre-historic times. Shorter, quadridexterous, and covered in short fur, they were the only xeno-species allowed to freely roam Earth. Despite being humanity’s closest ally and a founding member of the Allied Races of the Galactic Ocean, there was a common perception that all laaku looked alike. Among laaku, that perception was inverted, and they found all humans more or less identical. Mordecai could use that.
“Excuse me, sir?” Mordecai asked one of them. The laaku stopped and craned his neck up at a human twice his height. He wore a name badge that identified him as Korvin, with some laaku script beneath that likely said the same thing.
“Can I help you?” Korvin replied in English with just the barest hint of a laaku accent. Master collaborators, the laaku had largely embraced Earth culture, and many spoke English better than their native tongue. It was a survival technique that had made them prosperous where other species saw their worlds bombarded from orbit and occupied.
Mordecai smiled. “This is my first time in a starport, and I’m lost. Can you show me where I can find the Radiocity?”
Korvin exchanged an amused glance with one of his co-workers and took Mordecai to a holovid map, buzzing though a rapid-fire explanation that ended with a simple instruction on which way to go. Had Mordecai been able to grasp the process, he was sure Korvin had showed him enough to find any ship he ever needed to, but all that he had gotten from the exchange was a concourse number and landing pad. It was enough.
Logan Starport might have been a Byzantine labyrinth, but it had good, plain-painted signs. Permanent. Non-digital. Non-holo. Just words on flat panels, dangling over every intersection. Mordecai followed them to Concourse J, Pad 1172.
Given all the gadgetry scattered around the starport, he was sure he had been scanned a dozen or more times on his way, but nothing made a fuss. He came out into the open sky to find a starship that looked… well, very starship-like to Mordecai. It was dishwater gray and bigger than his house, though not by much. The side of the front bit was painted with the name “RADIOCITY” in bold letters, flaked away in spots but clearly legible.
Music came from the ramp around back, where men with hovering skids and robotic arms carted things aboard. Mort listened to Chuck Ramsey’s voice singing along as he made his way around the ship—some sort of backhanded ode to Boston Prime that he had never heard. The comedian was playing an acoustic guitar that sounded like it might have been half a note out of tune. When Mordecai rounded the corner, the song stopped.
“Well, how’s about that?” Chuck said, standing and setting aside a guitar with a frayed strap and the cherry wood buffed smooth where the player’s hands rubbed over the years. “Mort! Didn’t expect to be seeing you… well, ever, frankly. We don’t get back to Earth much, and what’re the odds, you know?”
&
nbsp; Mordecai stepped onto the ramp, glancing over his shoulder to see if any of the freight loaders might be listening. “Hey, Chuck. Any chance you might take on a passenger?”
Chuck pulled back and narrowed his eyes, but a smirk spread on his face at the same time. “Thought you were some fancy-pants real wizard, not some star-drive mechanic. Never heard of wizards traveling off world much, except for navy attack dogs or terramancers.”
“I have pressing business with the Convocation that involves being anywhere but here.”
“I see,” Chuck said. Their eyes met, and Mordecai had the impression that Chuck Ramsey was sizing him up, weighing him, and deciding whether there was room aboard his ship for both Mordecai and the trouble he was bringing with him.
“You told me you had troubles with your star-drive,” Mordecai said.
“You gonna sign on as a mechanic?” Chuck asked, crossing his arms and cocking his head.
Mordecai harrumphed. “Please… with me aboard, you won’t need a star-drive. All those gizmos do is imitate what a real wizard could manage. You not only won’t have to pay for constant repairs and getting towed back to real-space, you’ll be able to outrun… well anything without a wizard as good as I am.”
Chuck gave him a shrewd look. Terras floated in his eyes, weighing against whatever trouble Mordecai might be running from. “Deal. Come on aboard. I gotta watch these lift-loaders, but Bradley can show you around.” He stuck out a hand, and the two men shook.
Bradley Carlin Ramsey looked ecstatic to have a live wizard aboard. “You can bunk with me,” he insisted. “You’re old, so I’ll take the top bunk so you don’t have to climb so much. You know… I always wanted to be a pilot, but if you could teach me to be a wizard, that would be far out!” The boy had obviously been listening to too much of his father’s old twentieth century material and picked up the archaic lingo.
“Whatever you grow up to be, just don’t become what everyone expects of you,” Mordecai said, wagging a finger and trying to sound sage. “People like that are boring as shit.”
Bradley looked around, ducked his head, and whispered. “Shit’s a bad word.”
“Kid, I’m an expert on bad words, and trust me, ‘shit’ doesn’t make the top one hundred.” Every word of the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts qualified, he thought bitterly, the book that had cost him his life on Earth.
# # #
[Fifteen years later]
Mort arrived at the shipyard in a foul mood. The taxi had refused his hardcoin, and he had to take a public tram from the starport to a tram station a half-hour’s walk from his destination. Granger III was backwater, but not backwater enough that all the colonized regions were clustered together. Three days on a starliner to Granger VII, intra-system shuttle to Granger III, and now this mess of planetside transportation. Bradley had better have something planet shattering to show him.
The man who met him at the shipyard entrance was not the same young man who had left his father’s ship at eighteen to join the navy. Brad had filled out a little, turned scruffy, and had a cocky veneer painted over his face that he had lacked as a boy. Somehow, it had taken nine years away from Chuck for Brad to turn into his father.
“Brad,” Mort called out, raising a hand. “Good to see you, boy. I’d have sworn you dropped through the astral plane and out the other side.”
“Hey, Mort. I’ve taken to going by Carl these days,” Carl replied. “We had another Brad in my squadron, and he was there first. Besides, now I can tell who knows me from where when someone shouts my name across a room.”
“Well… Carl, what did you drag me out to Merlin’s privy for?”
Carl’s eyes lit up. “Come on. I gotta show you.” He beckoned Mort along as he backed toward the shipyard.
After following him around the hulking masses of a dozen derelict used starships, Carl stopped at one and spread his arms. “What do you think?”
“Is this one you shot down as a fighter pilot?” Mort asked. “It’s a sweet gesture, boy, but I don’t have a mantelpiece big enough—”
“I just bought it,” Carl replied.
“You own this… device?” Mort asked carefully.
“Yeah. If anyone asks, I won it in a card game.”
“And the truth?”
“Me and some guys in my squadron saw some shit,” Carl said. “Navy bought us out of our pensions to shut up about it and go away. Sweet deal. If I refused, next on their list was probably a series of suicide missions until one of them took.”
A clang from inside the ship caught Mort’s attention. “Who’s inside?”
Carl held up a finger and retreated up the ramp, grinning. “Tanny!” he shouted into the ship’s interior. “Mort’s here.” There was more clanging, and the clatter of something metal dropping to the floor. A woman emerged from within. She was Carl’s height, with close-cropped dark hair and muscular arms bared under a sleeveless top that showed a marine insignia tattooed on her shoulder.
She eyed him up and down. “This wizard of yours looks a lot like an out-of-work accountant. You sure this is the right guy?”
“Mort, this is my girlfriend, Tanny,” Carl said. “Tanny, this is Mordecai The Brown.”
“Charmed,” Mort muttered.
“Tania Rucker, officially,” Tanny offered, extending a greasy hand after a quick wipe on her dungarees. “Tell me something. That really your middle name? Carl said it was, but he’s full of shit half the time, so I couldn’t be sure.”
“Family tradition,” Mort replied. “My ancestors had a sense of humor, and my parents lacked imagination. How do you and Carl know each other?”
“Frequently,” Carl quipped. Tanny gave him a backhanded slap to the chest without even looking. It appeared they have been together long enough for her to be ready for Carl’s off-color jests. Nine years in the navy had done nothing to undo the bad influence Mort had been on him growing up. If anything, it appeared to have fertilized him.
“Back from a mission, I had this hotshot pilot track me down and brag how he’d blown six Zheen fighters off my tail,” Tanny said. “I was flying dropships, ferrying troops down to the front lines on the surface. Never noticed any heat, and I told him so. Turns out it was some other dropship he’d bailed out, and he bought me dinner to apologize. Well, one thing led to another—”
“And another … and another …” Carl added.
“Anyway, when Carl left the navy, my tour was almost up,” Tanny replied. “He had this half-cooked idea about running his own starship and convinced me to come out here with him and sign on to the crew. How’d he get you?”
“He hasn’t… yet,” Mort replied.
“Lemme show you around,” Carl said. He took Mort on a tour of the ship. It was larger than the Radiocity, bulkier, blockier, and far, far emptier. The main feature Carl kept dangling before him like a mule’s carrot was the fact that it was an old diplomatic shuttle, Turtledove class, as if that was supposed to mean anything to him. But because it was designed to ferry diplomats around, it had multiple crew quarters, enough for everyone to have their own private space.
“I don’t know…” Mort hedged.
“Mom and Dad aren’t touring the galaxy anymore,” Carl said. “You want to join up, maybe one of these days we’ll stumble across that book of yours, and you can get home to see your family. I don’t plan on running things like Dad did. He only ran cons here and there to fill in the gaps between gigs, but we plan on cashing in however we can, short of piracy. We’re going to go places and meet people Dad was never going to with a family in tow. If you’re up to it, we can take on the galaxy and make our own rules.”
Carl’s choice of words was calculated. He told Mort much between those lines. Carl knew the whole story behind that book, of course, even things Mort had kept secret from his wife. He knew that Mort was never going back; but he must have told Tanny the fairytale version with the happy ending still pending. That meant that Carl had kept Mort’s darker secret safe. As for the bit about C
huck Ramsey, Mort had always enjoyed the challenge of matching wits with two-bit criminals over the steady tedium of hearing the same old comedy routines, system after system. Carl could be masterful when he put his mind to it—carrot and stick, held out for Mort to choose with Tanny none the wiser.
Mort gave Carl a rueful grin. “Let me guess: the star-drive on this heap doesn’t work.”
“Oh, the star-drive works fine,” Carl replied. “Maybe the newest system on this old bird.” He picked up a wrench big enough to twist a man’s arm off and proffered it to Mort. “You join up, you’re welcome to smash it to scrap.”
“You’re such a fucking salesman,” Tanny muttered.
“Deal,” Mort said. “This bucket of scrap star-drives have a name yet?”
“Carl keeps trying to name it Star Ghost,” said Tanny. “But I like Trident. Seems a bit less… kitschy.”
“Better than naming it after a spear,” Carl countered.
Mort looked the vessel over and considered its prospective crew. It was less in need of a name than a philosophy. “No, those won’t do,” he said. He imagined a strip of white cloth into being. It was only a temporary prop, destined to oblivion the moment he stopped devoting attention to it. He gave it a twist and connected the two ends, fusing them with no sign of artifice or technology. Tanny’s eyes widened; Carl’s narrowed. “Do either of you know what this is…? It’s a mobius loop. It has a single side, the only object in existence to exhibit that peculiar property.” He handed it to Tanny and watched her trace a finger around it, coming back to the start without ever leaving the same surface. “That should be this ship’s name: Mobius. That way we’ll always be on the same side, and no matter how long it takes, we’ll all eventually get back to where we started.”