by Brian Daley
Ash looked both charmed and pained. "Very soon, I give you my word. There'll be time; after all, you've got weeks and months of testimony ahead."
"Months?" Alacrity echoed. "Now it's months! Months of saying the same stuff over and over? The stuff you've already gone over and recorded five times?"
"I'm afraid it looks that way," Ash said. "I know it's not a just reward, but this situation has taken on a life of its own."
"But you've got Corva and Tilla and Ho for that! And the evidence we brought, and the Alphas' testimony! Can't you just let me go my way, Citizen? It's really important; there're other things I should be doing."
Ash let a little irritation show. "Don't you think I wish you could go? You knew what you were getting into when you came back. Do not lay it all at my door!"
Alacrity chewed that over for a moment. "Yes, all right; fair enough."
Ash subsided. "I'll make it as easy on you as I can, Alacrity. On all four of you. And I didn't mean to snap, because when it comes right down to it I'm very grateful to you and the others who were in on this thing. So is everybody who's managed to start thinking clearly."
"We understand," Corva answered for them all. "And we're very, very glad we could help Earth touch the stars again." When they heard it put that way, the other three agreed at once.
"Shuttle arriving now," the PA said.
"Do you think they're ready for this?" Floyt asked as Terran notables straightened their sashes and primped their hairdos, cleared their throats and wiped sweat from their palms.
"They'll have to be," Ash replied. "As Alacrity said, the writing's on the walls. Connections to offworlders and non-humans is the key to their place in the new order of things."
"They're politicians," Sintilla said. "Wait till you see how fast they adapt."
The Lunar shuttle Mindframe descended on rumbling engines, finishing the last few dozen meters on tame tractor beams. She hadn't changed a bit, Alacrity saw; down-at-the-heels as ever. The peaceguardians spread their arms, holding back the eager crowd.
The first two debarking passengers, a Spican military attaché and a Solarian secretary of foreign affairs, courteously stepped to either side to make way for the ranking member of the delegation, the special high commissioner from the Srillan Comity. He shuffled into the reception area, acknowledging the polite applause of the Terrans. He waved and nodded graciously as more passengers came forth and the first handshakes and greetings began. He glanced over and noticed Alacrity and Floyt.
"Ning-ning-a-ning! All hail the Strange Attractors! (If only, for once, they'd attract something besides trouble!) A-ning!"
"I think everything's going to be all right around here," Floyt said happily.
Lord Admiral Maska came to them first, and no one was inclined to advise him differently. He and Alacrity exchanged the odd pattycake handslap Floyt had seen them trade at Frostpile, then the Srillan took Floyt's hand in the peculiar greeting of his species, a sort of top and bottom chafing motion.
"Good stories lighten the burdens of life," Maska said. "I hope you children will take some of the weight off my poor old back by telling me yours while I'm here."
"Sure, if you'll tell us what Cazpahr Weir told you about Strange Attractors," Alacrity offered.
"I think that sounds grand." Maska turned to bow low, human-style, before Sintilla, bringing her fingertips to his lips. For the first time that Floyt and Alacrity knew of, she blushed and had nothing to say. "And it is divine to see you again, young lady."
Maska somehow resisted what must have been a powerful temptation to go into a singsong jape dance with his nephew.
Alacrity had a feeling they'd get to it later. The two aliens did a finger-twining double handclasp.
"Nice of you to take up the family business," Maska told his nephew, "of nosiness, intrigue, and cabalistic machinations."
"I lay it all at the door of my genetic inheritance," Corva jibed modestly. "And Director Weir, of course."
"Yes. Why don't we talk about that later?"
Corva bowed and backed aside. Lord Admiral Maska went to Citizen Ash. They shook hands Terran fashion. "I greet you and thank you for your kindness to my kinsman," Maska said. "That message is from myself. From the Srillan Comity I bring you our wish and our word, tsaalff! which means healing and building and making new once more."
They were all watching Ash closely. Alacrity couldn't recall ever seeing the executioner so rigidly controlled, and feared the worst; or the tepid, at best.
Ash fooled him. "I've consulted the archives, partly with Hobart Floyt's help. There was once a great accord between Earth and Srilla. It would be beneficial for that to come again, under a new Terran government. Ts—ts—tsaalff!" He bowed. So did Maska.
"Excuse me, but just what kind of government are you going to put into place?" Alacrity asked Ash.
Ash evinced shock. "Me?"
"Who else?"
That hit home, wringing a smile out of Ash. "Hobart's been accessing about that too."
The pressure from the massed politicians was about to become a riot; Ash led Maska to take up his duties, Corva taking his uncle's other arm. Sintilla dogged their track, recording and chivying.
'Things aren't going badly, considering how much got jinxed along the way," Floyt remarked.
"That's not far wrong, I guess," Alacrity said, looking down at his pathfinders. "The problem is, for Ash and the others, it's a beginning. They can't see that, for some of us on a different time cycle, it's the wrapup."
Floyt nodded slowly, watching humanity mix with aliens.
"But still, overall, I think it will amount to something good, don't you, Alacrity? Alacrity? Wh—Alacrity?"
Then Floyt saw him, sauntering along casually, well behind the crowd-control peaceguardians and the customs officers who were working furiously to expedite the envoys' documents and luggage. He seemed to stop at the boarding tube entrance by chance; no one beside Floyt noticed him in the confusion of the reception area.
He chatted up the Lunie shuttle crewchief. Floyt realized it was the same man from their first trip. Somebody was starting a speech. The Lunie was yawning and looking around, noting the situation. Alacrity exchanged a rather drawn-out handshake with him. The crewchief looked down at his palm and deigned to raise one eyebrow. He nodded slowly.
Alacrity looked Floyt in the eye across the room. He didn't have to gesture; he merely stepped to the tube entrance, grinning wickedly, and mouthed, You coming?
Floyt was on the move before he could be assailed by second thoughts; he knew now what that tidal current was, and it carried him along. Alacrity had reached behind some peacer equipment trunks and drawn out his warbag, complete with brolly. "We're almost out of time," he warned Floyt, when the Earther got there.
"We're always almost out of time." Floyt frowned.
"Yeah; that's why people are always mistaking our guile for good luck, Ho. But this time I mean really, see?" He indicated the crewchief, who was headed for the shuttle's lock.
"Alacrity, they're never going to let us go."
"We'll know in a second. Look."
Citizen Ash, with the Solarian defense minister nattering in his ear, was glaring directly at them. Alacrity backed a step into the boarding tube. Floyt thought about living on only one planet for the rest of his life, then joined him.
Ash's volcanic look held them, then his lips shaped a single syllable, go! He gave them the hint of a smile, then turned to hear more about the joint commercial project being offered Terra by the rest of the Solar system.
Sintilla, who was more or less clinging to Citizen Ash's arm, had caught the exchange. She would've yelled in surprise except that Floyt held a finger to his lips. She shook her head with an exasperated grin, the brown curls bobbing. A tear had started from one eye.
You bums! she yelled at them silently. Alacrity blew her a quick kiss.
Maska and Corva were watching too, Floyt saw, but were doing everything they could, in a decorous way, to
draw attention to themselves. Floyt wasn't absolutely sure he saw Maska silently pronounce the words Strange Attractors!, but that's what he thought he saw.
Shoulder to shoulder, Floyt and Alacrity backpedaled nonchalantly for five steps, back out of the lights and sounds and pickups and hubbub. Then they turned and doubletimed for the hatch. Floyt vividly remembered having been shoved headlong down that same tube by Supervisor Bear and her assistants.
"Ah-ah!" said the crewchief, stopping them with a pointed finger. They skidded to a halt.
"Oh; sorry. Forgot," Alacrity apologized. Digging in his warbag, he handed over the Captain's Sidearm and the Webley. He'd also thought to fetch Floyt's prized all-purpose survival tool, which he also surrendered. The Lunie checked Floyt's Inheritor's belt suspiciously, but let him keep it.
"Awright, gents, take the first seats you come to. Mindframe's going right now."
They sweated every second of the time until then. At last the fires flared; the Nazca Lines fell away to take on totemic shape beneath them once again.
Alacrity produced a deck of cards. "Want to learn how to deal seconds and win at blackjack?"
"Yes," Floyt said. "If you'll tell me what that's got to do with somehow getting control of the White Ship."
Alacrity froze in midshuffle. "How d'you figure that?"
"The symbol in that file you took from Dincrist, for one thing—the file that started the row between you and Heart. It took me a second, but I placed the White Ship symbol. It's the same as the crests on the grips of the Captain's Sidearm, isn't it?"
"The very same, Ho."
"And that's why you two fought?"
"That ship isn't Dincrist's and it isn't her group's either. It's mine! That ship's gonna be used to do what she was conceived to do, before everything went wrong. Three generations now, my family's been trying to make sure of that. I'm the one who's going to."
Floyt watched the stars. "What happened?"
"Happened? Bad luck; human entropy; behavioral dynamics. What goes up; how the mighty … My grandfather was letting things fall apart even while he was putting everything he had into laying the keel of that tub. My father—that's just a downhill story and at the bottom is dying of undertow addiction. Listen, that's not the important part, not anymore."
"I know, Alacrity."
"It's not! The White Ship; sweet Freya! If anything can open up the secrets of the Precursors, it's that bloody ship. And she'll be mine, Ho. No more losing; that's over. Now I know how to get her back, and more important, I know I will get her back."
Floyt became circumspect, fearing what was to come. "Know? You can't know for sure, Alacrity."
"Oh, yes I can. Remember the causality harp?"
"Of course. Are you and Heart enemies now?"
"Competitors. She has her plans for the White Ship, I have mine and I can't change that."
He held up a copy of the memory wafer he'd taken from Dincrist on Rialto. "I copied it back in the Stray. It came right into my hands. Doesn't that prove something? The harp was right."
Floyt examined it. "What about the harp?"
"That was what I was asking it, Ho! About me and the White Ship; my affinity for it—my destiny, if you want to get dramatic. You saw what the answer was yourself. You're in for a share, if you want it."
"That's awfully generous, Alacrity. Thank you."
"Forget it. Stick with me. You hungry? I'll see if I can get us something to eat." He looked around for a summoning signaller.
Floyt gazed into limitlessness with no appetite, thinking about the causality harp. He wondered if he owed Alacrity brutal honesty, because after Alacrity had fed in his query, Floyt, bringing up the rear all unawares, had changed things. He'd passed the screen that read WORKING and stopped at the one displaying NEXT TEST RUN SUBJECT:. From that angle, Floyt couldn't see what Alacrity was up to on the gantry; accessor that he was, the Earther quickly figured out how to ask the system about Astraea Imprimatur. The harp had acknowledged that they were linked to it—that Alacrity was in particular—with that overwhelming sound and light display.
Moments later, helping Alacrity to the lift, Floyt noticed that the indicator over the original screen, the one Alacrity had programmed with his White Ship query, was red again, that that screen was displaying WORKING. Looking back, Floyt realized that Redlock must have made the change, to find out what Alacrity had been doing.
More to the point, the White Ship query had to be the one that made the harp go dim and quiet at the end. That was the answer to Alacrity's question, and his hope of taking back the White Ship: a negative.
"What made your father turn to undertow?" Floyt asked suddenly, still watching the stars.
"Hmm?" Alacrity was shuffling the cards again, having summoned the crewchief. He suddenly looked very young, and mournful. "People just give up hope, you know? And after that, what difference does anything make? I tell you, there's nothing worse than that."
Floyt sat back, compelling himself to relax muscle by muscle. "It's too bad your father didn't live to see you there at the causality harp."
"Well, yeah; that's—thanks, Ho. But no more looking back. Um, listen, how much money do you have left? It cost me just about all I had to bribe the Lunies."
"Are you serious? You gave them all your novaseeds?"
"No, no no! Only the two I had left. Most of them I gave to Victoria. I knew Heart wouldn't take them, and I knew they were going to need them."
He still felt a disbelief that he'd lost her; the delphianisms of the causality harp had given no forewarning of love or, much more importantly, the loss of love. But when I've got the White Ship, I'll find her. Somehow, I'll make her love me again …
"Alacrity, I gave my daughter just about everything I had, except for what's left of the Daimyo's blood money, which is back in our quarters. I didn't know I was going to be travelling again so soon."
A penurious silence settled over them. "There're Inheritors who owe me a favor, supposedly," Floyt said at last. "And I do own a starship that's out there somewhere, after all."
"Well, maybe we're still liquid in a galactic sense, Ho, but we've got a little short-term cash problem, here."
"So?"
Alacrity showed him the mechanic's grip. "So: you hold the cards this way, see, and you … "
About The Author
Brian Daley is the author of eight previous novels of science fiction and fantasy, the most recent being Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds
He also scripted the National Public Radio serial adaptations of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. His whereabouts are subject to change without notice, but he favors Manhattan.
Version History
19 Oct 2003—Scanned By Theoilman
27 Oct 2003—Proofed By Escaped Chicken Spirits (ECS) v1.0
03 Aug 2005—Re-Proofed By Fltgoon v1.1
1 Jan 2008—Conversion To LIT By B.D. (No Proofing) v1.1