by Andre Norton
The conversation was short. Jellico turned away, and Rael busied herself with her food. He slid in across from her again in the space of a minute, and she looked up in mute inquiry.
Jellico gave a faint shrug. "Was worth a try, anyway. Had a Kanddoyd flunky who was apparently willing to spend all night complimenting me, but it was equally obvious I wouldn’t get anywhere. Mindful of those Hudapi gourds, I just said I’d try again during Trade hours and left." He smiled and picked up his fork.
For a time they were silent as they began to eat.
Rael was the first to speak again, praising the excellence of her dish. The talk was natural again as they discussed the meal, ranging through unexceptionable subjects from Zacathan mosaics to O’xyhh music.
They were midway through an excellent blend of rare coffee when a reedy voice caught their attention from the other side of the Terran area. "Ho! Hah! My surprised! To astound!" A cascade of stridulations accompanied this exclamation. "That thou shouldst ask, thou hast woken up without thy braincase, O Lokanadd."
Rael sidled a glance behind her, saw two Kanddoyds at the entrance. One—wearing green ribbons—was not vocalizing at all, but produced an orchestra’s worth of clicks, knocks, ticks, hums, and squeaks.
The other Kanddoyd, a small male decorated in flamboyant flame colors, raised his arms high. "But thou knowest as good as thy name—which is Fool—or thine heritage—which is worthless—that my guests do not be troubled with the malodorous threats of yon rubbishing dacoits. Vanish! To displease me no further with thy dire whispers! Hasten, ere your whiskers wither in the blast of mine righteous wrath!"
The Kanddoyd who had not spoken now retreated, his stridulations droning on a lugubrious note. The flame-colored one now whirled into the dining area, circulating rapidly among the tables as he kept up a continuous flow of greetings, compliments, and questions which he scarcely paused long enough to permit of an answer.
"Aha!" he exclaimed when he neared Jellico and Rael. "Most profound greetings, O Captain, greetings also unto you, Doctor, and welcome to the Movable Feast! My inexpressible, your pleasure here to find. Eat! Drink! Merriness unto all; if you are not pleased, my inconsolable! Assure me you shall command my minions to restitute." He danced away, carapace buzzing, to another table.
Rael looked across at her companion, and was surprised to see an odd expression on his face. Her own amusement faded into question.
Jellico finished his drink, then said softly, "It might just be my suspicious mind, but I’d swear that act over at the entrance was some kind of warning."
"Interesting," she said. "I hadn’t thought of that. It did seem staged—I thought it was merely for effect."
Jellico shrugged slightly.
"If it was a warning, to whom?" she asked.
He returned no answer, and their conversation reverted to speculations about what kind of cargo they might raise.
But when they left a short while later, the question was answered when the quiet snick of a weapon made both instinctively duck for cover, and a high-velocity pellet whined right past Rael’s ear.
10
Someone shot at them again. Jellico’s gaze flicked back and forth, then he motioned Rael back into the restaurant towards a flowering hedge, and followed swiftly behind her.
They shoved their way through the thick shrubbery and ran headlong down a narrow accessway, dodging servitors with trays and paying no attention to the mix of Kanddoyd chirps and humanoid yells of outrage in their wake. The corridor terminated in a narrow service exit; just outside, Jellico caught at a decorative pole and swung around and up to the plant-bedecked platform about six feet above them. As Rael watched with interest, the law-abiding captain of the Solar Queen placed his booted foot against the rim of a potted tree, and shoved.
The pot tipped majestically toward the doorway they’d just quit, moving slowly in the lower-than-standard acceleration of this level. "Run!" Jellico commanded.
Rael turned and ran. Moments later she heard the smash of ceramic behind her, and shortly thereafter a cacophony of yelps, curses, and squeaks as their chasers hit the dirt pile.
"Humans and Kanddoyds," she said. His lips parted—he had been about to say the same, she realized.
He grinned instead, and flicked a salute.
Shots whizzed by both their heads right then. Rael ducked and began
stagger-running, fighting the urge to sneeze. The analytical part of her brain recognized the distinctive burn in her nostrils given off by the pellets: retching agents colloquially known as taste-agains. They were illegal almost everywhere in human space, and with good reason. If the pellet actually hit any portion of their skin, they’d be writhing on the ground in seconds, unable to see or hear, and miserably rejecting the excellent food they’d just eaten.
They dashed deeper into the structures of the North Pole, turning into one of the recreational concourses ringing their end of the habitat, Jellico leading the way. He dodged around passersby with an efficiency that made it plain somewhere in his past he had been trained for action.
Rael recognized the signs, because she had as well.
Together they vaulted over a low bench and a little stream. Then she stopped when Jellico suddenly turned back. Bending down, he dog-paddled water from the stream onto the glassy concourse deck, then straightened up, grinning. She choked on a laugh as they whirled and ran; seconds later they heard the first of the chasers vault over the stream—and let out a whoop of despair, followed by a satisfying crash.
My turn, Rael thought, fumbling in her pocket. She found what she sought, a credit chit, and as they sprinted down the concourse, dodging people and ducking round objects, she saw a row of automats. Putting down her head, she pounded into the lead and skidded to a stop, threw her chit in, and hit a combination.
A moment later into her hands poured a stream of the hard little ball candies that Kanddoyds were so partial to. Cocking her wrist, she threw them back down their pathway, where they bounced and scattered.
Yells and curses rose as people inadvertently trod on the tiny candies and nearly overbalanced; the runners, barely glimpsed through the crowd, were not so lucky. One, two, three figures flailed arms and shot up into the air, cursing, clacking, and howling. Rael felt that howl down her spine. It was a Shver voice, and the naked fear was probably an instinctive reaction to finding oneself in midair. Shver didn’t jump; no one would, in their heavy grav, and habit was too ingrained to make it easy for them to go leaping about even in micrograv. Probably instantly dizzy, she thought, the analytical part of her brain always observing. Shver inner ear arrangements had to be even more sensitive than humans’.
Jellico slapped one finger to his palm: one to you.
He looked around as they curved toward another bridge-way, one that would take them back toward the interior face of the North Pole, overlooking the inside of the habitat. The customary austerity of his face was eased by a curious little smile. He's playing the game, she exulted, and waited happily to see what he would come up with.
Zing! Another pellet sang between them, and they ducked, turned, pounded up a bridge toward a smile-shaped slice of sky with strange hook-shaped clouds hanging in it below the dazzle of the radiants. Rael became aware of a slight alteration in the pattern of her run, and realized they were losing gravity as they ran higher. She lengthened her strides, trying to keep from bounding up, and was immediately rewarded with an incremental increase in speed. Soon she’d be leaping and not running at all—but she knew how to run in low grav.
So did Jellico.
The captain ran without slowing straight toward the edge of the concourse, and as she followed Rael saw the deck fall away before them, vanishing under the slender railing that was all that barred them from a sheer ten-mile fall to the distant surface. He altered his step, running now along the edge, the light of the radiants filtered into a green flicker of dappled light across his uniform by the foliage clumped in pleasing arrangements along the edge.
In a flash of curious detachment, Rael took in the awesome view to one side, trying to fight the tendency to veer away from it. The vast green walls of the habitat, curling up and overtopping them like the waves that had whelmed legendary Atlantis, were studded with the huge Kanddoyd towers that lanced up from the surface at the crazy angles made possible by spin gee. The haze of distance blurred the vertiginous landscape into the semblance of impossible mountains.
Then her throat spasmed as Jellico veered suddenly and vaulted up onto the back of a bench like a free-fall gymnast. With both hands he caught the high branches of a tall, thin napuir tree. Scrambling up into its heights, he was obscured by the branches weighted with fuzzy purple fruit. Rael saw the tree shake—he was going up, rather than coming back down, up to a higher concourse!
She looked about, saw not a tree but the fine-mosaic crenellations of an ornamental pillar, no doubt disguising a tangle of cable and piping, and jumping as high as she could, she caught hold and scrambled up.
They both swarmed over the rail above at the same time, and Jellico tossed her an armful of fruit.
Holding her breath, trying not to choke from laughter and a pungently nasty smell, she popped her share of the weird fruit and threw the squashy pulp down on their chasers. Howls of rage came from below the trees—but with it the clatter of fast-climbing Kanddoyds.
"Those Kanddoyds are too good at climbing," gasped Rael.
Jellico nodded, looking around. "We’ll have to go down, then." He suddenly seemed to see something and ran forward, deeper into the concourse along a V-shaped gash that bulged the inner cliff edge of the concourse inward here, toward a complex glitter of metal and plasglas with garish laser beams and actinic light points flaring from it.
TORQUEMADA’S DELIGHT, the sign announced, THE GALAXY’S STEEPEST SPINBOGGAN.
"You can’t be serious," she said, slowing somewhat. Jellico glanced back at her, then past her. She shot a look back along their path: several Kanddoyds were already climbing over the railing.
"There’s no faster way down," he said.
And, Rael saw, there weren’t any Kanddoyds waiting in the line that snaked toward the entrance to the establishment. No wonder, she thought, given that the toboggan terminated on the surface ten miles below, in 1.6 standard gees, intolerable to them.
Then Jellico slowed—he was gauging the timing as they pushed forward, ignoring protests from the humanoids and Shver in the line.
Then, as one of the iridescent pods, open on top like a kayak, shot out of an opening and glided to a stop at the front of the line, he hissed: "Now!"
They dashed forward, pushing aside the two Rigelians waiting their turn, and dove into the pod. Rael oofed as she hit the heavily padded interior, cushioning her fall with her hands and then lying facedown on
the humped control chaise. The screen only inches from her face lit up as she grabbed the control handles to either side, and she felt the restraints lock in over her back and legs.
Then the pod rocked under Jellico’s weight and lurched forward; he had taken the forward steering position, leaving her the even more critical weight-balancing controls. A surge of pride, of delight, of emotional intensity at his unspoken confidence in her abilities helped her to orient swiftly and make ready for what was to come.
The concourse suddenly slipped back as the pod shot forward and the cries of the cheated Rigelians dopplered away behind them. As it cleared the edge of the concourse it veered sickeningly to run along the cliff edge for a time, past a series of restaurants whose tables gave diners a close-up view of the Delight’s victims. She tried to ignore the dizzying perspective plucking at her peripheral vision over the low sides of the pod and concentrated instead on the stress and acceleration vectors graphically represented on her screen. A smaller window within the screen echoed Jellico’s screen as he chose their course: the controls of spinboggans were deliberately set up to mimic starship navigational metaphors—the trick was to map them to the varying gee field and Coriolis force of a habitat.
Rael had never tried it. She hoped Jellico had; otherwise their ride down would merit the rather sadistic anticipation she thought she could glimpse on some diners’ faces when she looked up for a moment.
PING! Rael sneezed again and, after a moment’s fumbling, windowed up a rear view. A short distance behind them, two of their pursuers glided along in a pod, the one in the rear propped up on one arm to fire at them.
Their pod slowed abruptly. There was an agonizing pause; then, even though the course plots echoed from Jellico’s controls were still evolving, its nose tipped down, bringing the distant surface into view, and the bottom dropped out of the world as the mechanism threw them into free fall down the track.
The wind whistled past the fairing like a chorus of screams—in fact, Rael noted, the edge of the pod appeared to be fluted precisely for that effect. It didn’t help her stomach.
At least they won't be able to shoot at us anymore.
They were falling along an excruciatingly attenuated spiral, following a path that precisely matched the effect of the Coriolis force at every point along their path.
KATHUMP! The pod jolted violently.
"Switch point!" yelled Jellico. "Next one we’re going inward, gain some velocity before we hit the Toaster."
Toaster? Rael realized she wasn’t as familiar with this toboggan as she’d thought. She’d never heard of anything on these rides, popular throughout known space, called a Toaster. She flexed the controls, watching the moire patterns of stress and acceleration shift, trying to correlate them with what she was feeling.
And soon, with a kind of rarefied delight, she realized that the way a spinboggan worked had more to do with orbital mechanics than she had thought. Grounders never got used to the fact that in orbit, you decelerated by firing your rockets to move into a higher, slower orbit, and accelerated by using your retros to drop into a lower, faster orbit. Here, due to the combination of track friction, the ’boggan’s rotational motion, Coriolis acceleration—the tighter the spin, the faster one spun—and varying gee levels, it was the same. She wondered if their pursuers knew this.
PING!
Evidently, they did.
But the pod was gaining speed, the scream of its fairing rising in pitch, mirroring her heart rate. On Jellico’s screen echo, their position point inched nearer a huge annular region in the mid-gee levels, crisscrossed by bright lines graduated in yellows and reds.
"Be very careful with the spoilers in the Toaster!" yelled Jellico. "You can pop up right out of the slot if you’re not."
Working frantically, grateful that, for the moment, the track seemed sufficient to keep them on course, Rael labored to call up a help screen.
KATHUMP! Her stomach lurched, and not just from the sudden swerve onto a faster track. Gees pulled upwards at her recumbent body, but she
hardly noticed, staring in fascinated horror at the readout about the Toaster.
"Here we go!" shouted Jellico as the pod bucked violently. Then the noise of its progress changed to a smooth hiss as it shot into a slot, like a tube open at the top, the opening angled slightly toward the Spin Axis high above. The only thing holding them in the slot was their acceleration; it was up to her to keep them there through whatever course changes Jellico initiated.
Moments later she heard a faint scream, and realized that they were drifting up—the fluted fairing was an audible warning device triggered by its rising above the edge of the slot, not just a nerveracking embellishment!
Then there was no time for thought, only reaction, acceleration, counterreaction, deceleration, in an increasingly dizzy ballet of pursuit and flight.
But their pursuers continued to gain.
"Hold on!" Jellico’s voice held suppressed merriment.
"To what?" she yelled back, glad her voice, at least, sounded as unconcerned as his.
"Your stomach!" he called back with a laugh.
His screen echoed a complex twisting maneuver, chosen
from among the maze of possibilities offered by the crisscrossing slots of the Toaster. She started to gasp a protest— surely their pursuers would catch up!
But it was too late. With a shattering thump the pod swerved into the first chicane and she compensated frantically as the scream of the fairing rose to a desperate pitch. In her peripheral vision she saw their pursuers in a parallel track, closing in—and their courses were intersecting.
Then Rael saw what Jellico intended. She could abort the maneuver, but she had to trust that he knew what he was doing.
She raised her head, looking squarely across at the humanoid filling her position in the opposite pod, and, with a broad, challenging smile, lifted
her hands from the controls.
A look of horror crossed his face as the two slots veered together, the two pods converging at tremendous speed. If they collided, the impact would kill all of them, despite any safety features, and she had lifted her hands from her controls. It was up to her pursuers to decide.
With a wail of despair the other yanked on his controls, and Rael heard the scream of his fairing soar to a shout of mechanical terror as the other pod seemed to shoot backwards, hesitate, and then lift out of the slot into free fall. As it tumbled away towards the approaching surface, she watched in her rearview screen, feeling sick.
Then relief washed through her as a parachute blossomed, to lower them ignominiously to the surface. The unknown crew of the Starvenger had probably perished; best that no more die, no matter their motives.
The rest of the ride was uneventful; Jellico steered them through the rest of the Toaster on a conservative course, and then the track resumed, taking them the rest of the way to the surface.
Rael saw the terminus coming up, surrounded by a crowd of excited Shver, and hauled on the brakes. Here on the surface they worked normally, and the pod stopped several hundred feet from its destination.
On the edge of the Shver she saw three others of their race, their aspect menacing. Two were armed with pellet projectile weapons.