Furthest

by Elgin, Suzete Haden

  “You try that and I’ll kill every member of your staff cheerfully. Would you like to refer to your files and see just what sort of damage it’s possible for a mass projective telepath to do if he really puts his head into it?”

  The Fish leaned his cheek on his hand and sighed.

  “You are so difficult,” he said solemnly. “Is it really necessary for you to be so difficult?”

  “Yes,” said Coyote. “Otherwise nothing would get done. Ever.”

  “All right,” said the Fish. “Who do you want in the meeting?”

  “I told you. The full board of TGIS plus a Council member with influence and sympathy for us. That shouldn’t be hard to arrange—especially since none of the board does anything but sit around on their butts and think of new regulations for the agents to break.”

  The Fish ignored him and began to dictate to the Amanuensis Mark IV, which then went to the comset by his desk and punched out the proper buttons to call the meeting. Coyote watched, unbelieving.

  “You’re even more of an idiot than you were when I was here last time!” he said finally. “Do you mean to tell me that the taxpayers of these three galaxies are paying for the maintenance of this Amanuensis that does things for you like punch the buttons on your comset? Do you mean to tell me—”

  “I don’t mean to tell you anything, Mr. Jones. You want your meeting, I’m getting it for you. You don’t need to concern yourself with anything else—especially my office furniture.”

  “Especially my office furniture,” Coyote mimicked, in a high falsetto voice. He pulled his hair, which was longer and redder by half a year, up onto the top of his head into a raggedy knot, and went swishing around the room with one hand on his hip. “My goodness deary me, I do think that next year I’ll get one of those automatic chair cushions that wipes my ass for me… perhaps with the TGIS insignia embroidered on it in pearls—”

  “That reminds me,” said the Fish, “where precisely do you wear your TGIS insignia?”

  “Look,” Coyote said, in his normal voice, “I’m supposed to be a folksinger, remember? I’m not supposed to be a TGIS man. It’s called a cover, right?”

  “In this office,” said the Fish in icy tones, “you are a TGIS man. I am not interested in this trivial musical drivel you mouth about the galaxies at the expense of those taxpayers for whom you are otherwise so concerned. While you are here you will wear your insignia. Where is it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “One moment.”

  The Fish went through a complicated succession of servomechanisms, both human and plastic, and then he said into the receiver, “Miss Kai? Who? No—I am calling Miss Tzana Kai, will you put her on, please?”

  “You’re calling Tzana?” asked Coyote. “What for?”

  The Fish ignored him, speaking into the receiver again.

  “Miss Kai?” he said. “This is the Fish, at Mars Central. Would you please tell me whether, last time he visited your quarters, Coyote Jones left his TGIS insignia somewhere around?”

  There was a lengthy pause and then he went on.

  “I rather thought so,” he said. “In that case would you please send it along by the next mail rocket? Mr. Jones finds that he is uncomfortable here on Mars Central without his insignia.”

  Another pause went by, during which the Fish grinned with gleeful satisfaction and Coyote prayed for him to be electrocuted by his comsystem.

  “Thank you, Miss Kai, we’ll appreciate that,” he said at last, and hung up.

  “I just plain and purely can’t stand you,” Coyote said to him.

  “I know that,” said the Fish. “Come along then; I’m sure everyone is here by now.”

  Coyote stood at the end of the table beside the screen where his photographs were being projected, along with the classic boy-meets-girl film which Bess had let him bring along. When he had explained it all, he waited, and got the expected reaction. My goodness. Heavenly days. Who’d have thought it. That sort of thing.

  “Yes,” he said, “I agree with you. It’s hard to imagine that a hoax of this scope could have been perpetrated on all of us for hundreds of years. But it’s really a long, long way out there. There’s not another inhabited planet or asteroid or anything else within nineteen million miles. If they’d been closer, of course, we would have gotten to the bottom of it long ago; but out there at the end of nowhere they’ve managed very nicely to fool us all. It’s hard on the pride, but it’s true.”

  A member of the board observed that it was very interesting, and Coyote agreed. Another marveled at the cunning of the Furthesters and at the dedication that had maintained the Surface Duty construct for so long, and he agreed some more. A third asked him for a few more details about the mindwives, and he refused.

  “They’re a sort of state geisha,” he said. “Awarded like prizes to men who have done unusual public service. That’s all I know.”

  “That is your full report, then?” asked the Fish.

  “That’s it.”

  “In that case, may we have the outrageous request?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “In that case,” said the Fish firmly, “may we now hear the totally outrageous request that is the reason you insisted upon reporting to this body instead of just sending in a report in a normal fashion?”

  “Well, there is something I want. Two somethings, as a matter of fact.”

  “I thought so. What?”

  “I want a total blackout on the mindwife custom. On the grounds that it is an intrinsic part of the religious taboo complex of the Ahl Kres’sah.”

  “Done, of course,” said the Fish. “That’s quite routine. Now the other one—the outrageous one.”

  “I want an arbitrary one hundred year quarantine for Furthest,” said Coyote, and then he sat down and let it all go on over his head.

  Impossible. The scientists would want to go at once and observe these people. The anthropologists would want a chance at observation of a culture which still actually maintained the worship of an anthropomorphic god. The phonologist… such an interesting system of consonant clusters. The eugenicists… no other instance known of man/amphibian interbreeding. The dolphin experts, for that matter! My goodness. Oh deary me.

  “Look,” he said when it all began to die down a bit, “I appreciate all of these things you’re saying. I realize that the observation of a planet like Furthest, with an artifact culture that’s been isolated for a thousand years, would be a matter of intense interest to science. And I don’t really care. These are people, not pieces of data. The scientists will just have to wait.”

  “On what grounds?” demanded the Fish.

  “On the grounds that if you go in right now you’ll break their culture to bits and destroy them, that’s on what grounds.”

  “How can you maintain that?”

  “Their whole lives,” he said patiently, “their entire belief system, their religion, their conscription to Surface Duty, everything they do, is based upon the maintaining of these two big hairy secrets. Secrecy is the absolute foundation of their every move. And now they must be told that neither secret is of the slightest importance—”

  “And how are they going to learn that?”

  “I am going back and tell them about it,” said Coyote. “At government expense. And when they learn that, when they learn that they have devoted their lives, and their parents and grandparents have devoted their lives, to the service of something that is entirely meaningless and stupid, it’s going to be a profound cultural shock. It’s not going to be a small thing for them. You’re going to have to give them time to readjust—time uninterrupted by a flood of prying poking scientists and tourists. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it has to be like that.”

  “But look here, man,” cried a member of the board, “if they are told that and given one hundred years to rearrange things, it will no longer be an artifact culture! You’ll have destroyed the very things that would be most valuable to science!”r />
  “That’s tough,” said Coyote.

  “You can’t do it like that!”

  “If you don’t do it that way,” he told them, “you’ll have destroyed a people. I think that’s more important than the data the scientists want to look at. Even this way, even my way, the Furthesters may not make it, it may be more of a shock than they can bear. But at least they’ll have a chance.”

  “But—”

  Coyote cut off the protester with a wave of his hand. “No,” he said firmly. “Just no. It would be all wrong. I’ve been there, okay? I am the expert on this subject, and I tell you it would be all wrong. Submit it to the computers, give them the data I brought you, and ask them—they’ll back me up.”

  The Fish was nodding his head at the opposite end of the table. “He’s right,” he told the others. “Unfortunately. I don’t like it, but he’s right. He usually is.”

  “Give me whatever you want in the way of equipment,” Coyotesaid, by way of comfort. “I’ll take films, record measurements, do threedies, anything you like. I’ll bring back enough data on the state of the culture right now, before it begins to change, to make a tremendous contribution to all the sciences that would be interested. Just guarantee me the century quarantine.”

  There was a good deal of sighing and moaning and regretting.

  “Do I have it?” Coyote insisted.

  “You have it,” said the Fish with decision. “Nasty. But you have the quarantine. We’ll send the directive down to the Council—computer-supported, of course.”

  Coyote let out his breath in a long sigh of relief. He had been a little scared he wouldn’t be able to bring it off.

  “I’ll go back and tell them, then,” he said softly. “I want to leave in twenty-four hours; you’ve got that long to get me a list of the experiments, pictures, tapes, all that stuff that you want, and the equipment to do it with. Then I’m leaving.”

  “Twenty-four hours?” asked the Fish sarcastically. “I suppose that’s so you can go see Miss Tzana Kai?”

  It hadn’t been, but it sounded good. He could always do with seeing Tzana.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Don’t you wish you could?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “There is only one sort of love that has any value, and that is the love that leaves the beloved free. All the rest is sickness.”

  (from the Devotional Book of Tham O’Kent)

  It seemed to Coyote that he had spent the majority of his time since he arrived on Furthest in two activities—bewildered waiting, and astonished staring. It was the latter of the two that was occupying him now.

  He had arrived just after dawn and had all but run back to the MESH, his eagerness to see Bess and to pass on his good news so great that it was not even dampened by the monstrous list of scientific crap that he was supposed to do in the few months that remained to him here. And now he was faced with something that had done more than just dampen his enthusiasm; it had totally destroyed it.

  The sign on the front of the MESH, dim in the early light, was most explicit: closed by order of the government—trespassers will be severely punished. And underneath, a comsystem number for emergencies.It wasn’t something he had expected to have to deal with.

  There was a public comset at the corner, and at this hour he would not have to wait to use it. He headed for the intersection at a fast walk that turned into a run, inserted his credit disc in the slot, punched out the number from the sign, and got a servomechanism which, after hearing that he had neither fire nor burglary to report, refused to discuss anything else with him. Now what?

  He sat down on the stone curb with his head in his hands and tried to think, fighting a sense that something was more than just casually wrong. A jeebie chimed, close by his ear, and he didn’t move a muscle; a cold wind whined all around him. He wondered if Furthest was about to enter its equivalent of a winter season, and supposed it must be; he didn’t remember ever feeling cold here before.

  Obviously, if the MESH had been closed by the government, something had happened to Bess, and perhaps something had also happened to RK, and neither of those somethings was likely to be anything nice. In addition, it was perfectly possible that he himself was under some sort of sentence, although it was unlikely that he would have been allowed to land if that had been the case. He hoped. What with the damned star-ship having had to be repaired, and the bloody scientists having talked him into giving them extra time to get their lists together, and the ship having to go around a meteor storm, one damned delay after another, it had been seven months since he’d left Furthest. One hell of a lot of things could have happened, in seven long months.

  “Are you ill, Citizen?”

  “Ill?”

  He looked up into the face of a tall Furthester male, seemingly ten feet tall, in a costume of purple and black with high black boots. He hadn’t seen those before either; they must be something that came out for this season.

  “No, thank you, Citizen,” said Coyote. “I’m just thinking.”

  “On a curb?”

  “I was just leaving,” Coyote told him. “Relax. I haven’t defaced your kluthatz curb.”

  He left the outraged man staring after him and walked away. He knew where to go because there was only one possible choice. That was the home of RK’s parents. If they didn’t know what had happened to their children then he would have to tear the planet apart. In scuba gear. But he could try the Qu’es first.

  He took two wrong turnings before he found the right house, and as he looked his tension grew, and the conviction that he was too late.

  Tzana Kai had asked him what he was going to do.

  “What am I going to do about what?”

  “About Bess, Coyote,” she had said. “You can’t just leave her there—sooner or later she would be caught.”

  “I know.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Tzana, damn it to hell—”

  “Never mind damning it to hell,” she had said firmly, nudging him over onto his stomach so she could rub his back. “Damning it to hell won’t help her. You know what I want you to do?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Bring her to me, Coyote. I can easily make one of these rooms watertight and keep it filled with water for her. And no one would dare touch her if I had her with me.”

  “It’s a good idea, Tzana.”

  “Of course it is.”

  It was, too. Tzana’s home, like the offices of the translation bureau that was her cover, was entirely made of inflatable plastic bubble chambers. It would be no problem to convert one for Bess, and Tzana was right; as a TGIS agent she could claim virtual immunity to any sort of harassment for herself and her household.

  “I don’t know that she’d be willing to come, Tzana,” he said.

  “You could ask her. That’s more useful than damning it to hell.”

  “I’ll ask her, all right?”

  “All right.”

  The major problem then had seemed to him to be getting Bess off Furthest to begin with, without her being taken away from him by the Furthester police. He hadn’t been sure it could be done. Now that problem seemed relatively minor—all he wanted to do was find her.

  He knocked on the Qu’es’ dock, seething, and shuffled his feet impatiently, while minutes went by and no one answered. And then at last the door opened and there stood RK.

  “Citizen Jones!” the boy shouted. “Mother… Father… It’s Citizen Jones! He’s back!”

  There was the sound of running feet on the stairs, and both of the parents appeared, arms and hands held out to greet him. He couldn’t imagine what was the source of this sudden informality, but he returned their greetings with all the warmth he could muster through his worry, until he could contain his impatience no longer.

  “Please…” he said at last. “Please tell me what’s happened to Bess.”

  RK opened his mouth and his father put a firm hand across it.

  “She’s all
right,” said Citizen Qu’e. “We want to tell you all that has happened, and what has happened to her. But not here in the doorway. Not like this.”

  “Could we take him down into the water?” his wife asked breathlessly. “It would be so much better… He could wear diving equipment… it—”

  “You know that’s not allowed.”

  “But Father, Surface Duty is a farce now, a completely unnecessary farce. So there’s a regulation forbidding anyone on Surface Duty from going below the surface—it’s meaningless!”

  Citizen Qu’e shook his head at his son. “RK, I wish you were right. Unfortunately, the laws have not been repealed, pending the report your friend here is bringing back from the galactic government.”

  “But everyone knows already!” RK protested.

  “How could they know?” Coyote asked, bewildered. “Would someone please explain all this to me?”

  RK’s father nodded. “Come with us,” he said. “We’ll go up to the water garden, and we can tell you there. But first we have something to show you. Will you follow me, please?”

  Coyote was sick with impatience, but it was obvious to him that he was going to accomplish nothing by objecting. He would be told as it suited them to tell him, and in no other way, and there was nothing he could do about it. The Fish would have been pleased to see that tactic used against him for a change.

  He followed them up the steps and down the corridor, and then into a small stone chamber on the right of the hall.

  “Look there,” said RK’s mother gently. “See what we have for you?”

  “What is it?” he asked, staring around him at the usual set of bare walls, stone tables, chairs of warm loving nutwood.

  “There,” RK said. “Look there in the corner, Citizen. Go see what Bess left for you.”

  What do you say? He looked and looked and waited for appropriate words to come, something suitable for the occasion, but all he managed, finally, was, “Can I hold it?”