Howard shifted himself on his leaf, expelled breath. “Jason Wander and Mimi Ozawa, Jazen’s birth parents, have been working for us casually, off and on, since they retired from the service after the War.”
“Jazen’s mother was a starship captain, Howard! You let her run around the universe as a spy emeritus?”
“There was no Cold War when I made that decision, Kit. Jason Wander and Mimi Ozawa made sacrifices beyond telling during their service lifetimes. It’s fair to say that the human race may owe its continued existence to Jason and to Mimi, even if no one knows it. They earned the freedom I gave them.”
Howard paused to breathe, then he spoke again. “Anyway, months ago we received a report from the source I just mentioned. He reported a meeting between a rich Trueborn and a high-up Yavi. It should have been a red flag.”
Howard shook his head, in the way that signaled frustration, rather than a simple negative. “But we didn’t connect the dots. I said I may have screwed the pooch. Two days ago, word arrived from the same source that Mimi and Jason visited their numbered account box to pick up pay and allowances, turn in expense reports. You know how that works. But a P-mail, not from us, was also waiting for them. The P-mail apparently persuaded them that Jazen was alive, and either was on Yavet, or someone on Yavet knew where he was. They asked our source for help in arranging travel to Yavet.”
“And they didn’t ask your permission, obviously.”
“Obviously. We afford personnel in the field wide latitude and encourage initiative. But some smart asses,” Howard focused his eyes on Kit, “have taken initiative to extremes.”
The corners of Kit’s mouth turned up. “I’m sure you mean that in the best possible way.” She frowned. “But Howard, I know how well you don’t pay. Two top-quality scrubs for Yavet on retired military pensions?”
“Jason and Mimi aren’t holo stars. But I imagine they have enough socked away, and they’d sell their blood to see their son.”
“Assuming they left Rand—it had to be Rand, you’re too cheap to do your banking on Funhouse—at the same time your mole at the bank sent the message that ratted them out to you, they’re probably a third of the way to Yavet already.”
“I estimate halfway. The plan that I fear’s targeted them seems redundant and inelegant, but some of the best espionage has been. The Yavi learned, my hunch is from Orion Parker by guile or by torture, how to get a message to Mimi. They could’ve simply fabricated a story that would lure Mimi in. She obviously jumped at the mere possibility that she could find Jazen on Yavet. That’s no surprise if you know Mimi. She can be as headstrong as, well, as you can.”
Howard removed the transparent cover with which he protected his eyes, exhaled upon it, then rubbed it against his integument before replacing it and continuing. “I say ‘mere possibility’ because we know Jazen hasn’t yet told Orion he’s coming to Yavet. We also don’t know whether ‘Orion’ is really still alive, or just a Yavi spoof. But if the Yavi actually could lure Jazen into the net, they would have a real, live bait to dangle before Mimi if it came to that.”
“Howard, do you think maybe Jazen’s not just bait? That he could be an independent prize? He’s done his share of damage to the Yavi.”
Howard shrugged. “So have you. Either way, we need to head him off before he leaves here.” He turned to Mort. “You find him yet?”
“For an instant only. He left Mousetrap two hours ago in the nest called Iwo Jima.”
“Crap.” Kit spun back and faced Howard. “But we can still stop him!”
Howard was peering into one of the small leaves humans called handhelds. “No.”
“Whaddya mean, no? Radio Iwo and turn her around!”
“Kit, I said I can’t.”
“You’re King of the Spooks! You rerouted this starship. You can—”
Howard raised one foreclaw. “Iwo Jima entered her first jump four minutes ago. When she pops out on the other side, a line-of-sight radio message would take sixteen years to reach her. The real space distance between the Iwo Jima and Mousetrap will just increase exponentially with each succeeding jump she makes. Mort, can you try to reestablish contact with him?”
“Now that I have lost him, it will be difficult.”
“I have faith in you, Mort.”
Kit said, “Howard, you told me a few months ago that luck and faith were crap strategies. And you just told me that good espionage is redundant.”
Howard canted his head. “What is your point, Colonel?”
“Let me chase Jazen. Yorktown’s outbound via the same jumps and arrives at Yavet two days after Iwo. If Iwo runs late, I might head him off. If I can’t head him off before he gets to Yavet, I can link up with him there. And you know the two of us improvise like freakin’ bandits when we’re together.”
“Kit, I’ve recently been ordered by my commander in chief, who is also yours, in case you forgot, to cease covert aggressive operations. I call infiltrating my most headstrong case officer onto Yavet with orders to improvise like a freakin’ bandit covert and aggressive.”
“You’ve already got one case officer inbound to Yavet. So is the biggest intelligence failure since the Russians stole the A-bomb. If you had time to consult our commander in chief, he’d tell you to do something. Howard, take some damn initiative yourself.”
Mort watched as Howard sat and thought.
Mort touched Howard’s mind and found an impenetrable jumble of conflicted considerations, and then a curious sadness.
Howard said to Kit, “Alright.” He raised one digit. “However, I see your options this way.”
At that moment, as Mort searched for Jazen, he touched a speeding nest of five thousand intellects. Mort grasped and dropped threads of consciousness within the nest until he found one that showed promise. She was one of the ship’s masters.
He felt her fatigue, heard her yawn. “Log entry, HUS Yorktown—” Mort recognized that he had found the nest of which Kit had just spoken, which was coming toward them, not the nest within which Jazen was now traveling away from them.
Mort discarded the thread. He would encounter countless threads and pockets of intellect in his search for Jazen, great ones and small, bright ones and dull. The only pocket he would pause at to search in detail was named Iwo Jima.
He returned his attention to Howard and Kit.
They stood facing one another, but were no longer speaking.
Whatever they had said while he was distracted they had already relegated to their respective memories, as disciplined humans did. The residue that remained was emotion, and in both Howard and Kit that residue was hope and energy, but also apprehension and sadness. And in Kit, bitter anger.
Howard turned, then floated out through the bulkhead hatch.
Kit turned to Mort. “Okay. Here’s the deal. You’re going home in this ship to mate. I’m going to Yavet in Yorktown. Both trips will take months. If the xenobiology nerds’ estimates are right, you should be through mating before Yorktown pops out into line-of-sight space inbound to Yavet. Can you keep searching for Jazen in the meantime, and still keep a line open to me?
“I think so.”
“Think’s not enough. Mort, we can’t afford a dropped call on this one.”
“I have never mated. I don’t know what effect it will have on my ability to keep the line open to you.”
“Fair enough.” Kit turned away, then turned back. “Mort? When you meet her, if you can’t be good, be careful.”
“Ha-ha?”
Kit nodded. “Yeah. Ha-ha.” She turned and walked toward the bulkhead hatch.
Mort thought, “Kit? What did you and Howard discuss just before he departed?”
She waved her foreclaw, but did not turn to face him. “Details. Not important.” She vanished from his sight.
The human nerds who knew of his gift were fond of saying there was no lying to a telepath. He realized now that they were wrong. Unimportant details did not make a human feel as sad and as angry as Kit
was.
TWENTY-THREE
In the course of Iwo Jima’s journey to Yavet, and my journey to find Orion, Iwo made her scheduled layover at her halfway port, which was Foundationally Earthlike 117. At FE 117 cruisers drifted all the way down to surface.
They did this because they sometimes offloaded cargo vital to the economy of FE 117, which cargo was too large and too fragile to downshuttle. So the instant Ya Ya and I stepped out through Gateway’s main hatch, we stepped from canned atmosphere into sea-level local.
FE 117 was as far as Ya Ya was going, his vacation destination, and he was accordingly decked out in a tiny Trueborn tuxedo and matching eye patch. He had made me rent a tux too, because he insisted I go with him wherever he was going during our layover. I suppose the pair of us resembled one of those carnivale organ grinders with his monkey.
As Ya Ya waddled down the gangway alongside me, he breathed deep. Then he turned his face up at me, grinned, and beat his barrel chest with both fists. “Feel that? Today Ya Ya win many bets, pork many women. This I promise on my mother’s grave.”
I did feel that, “that” being something in the air. And it made me grin just like it had on my one prior stopover at FE 117 when I was a Legion skinhead.
FE 117 was relegated to “foundationally” Earthlike status because it differed from Earth in one seemingly inconsequential way. FE 117’s Planetary Oxygen Concentration at sea level measured plus-six above Earth normal. Not enough to make humans go blind, which too much oxygen can do, just enough to make them giggle. The locals acclimated to the elevated POC, but it turned offworlders into party animals at breath one.
And FE 117’s locals stood ready to feed the animals. Ya Ya and I stepped off the gangway onto the boardwalk that led to the ground transportation roundabout. A smiling redhead, wearing a chauffeur’s cap, sparkly high heels, and nothing in between but what looked like a yard of dental floss, stepped alongside us and held up a printed card. The card offered prospective fares assistance with the other thing that Orion had warned me would make a human go blind.
I stopped and gawked at the girl, until Ya Ya grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. “No need quick chick. Sporting Club car meet us.”
At the roundabout’s closest approach to the boardwalk, a gasoline powered limo as blacked out, sleek, and almost as long as a Scorpion fighter rumbled past a double line of cabs and electrovans. The chartered limo cut them all off and muscled up to the curb.
Its driver, a knockout brunette wearing disappointingly complete chauffeur’s livery, sprang out, dashed around to the passenger door, held it open and smiled at Ya Ya. “Welcome back, Mr. Cohon.”
Ya Ya tucked a bill roll as big as a baby cabbage into the back pocket of her uniform trousers and copped a feel. “You been working out, sweet Juju. What you lose, four pounds?”
“Three.” She smiled again as she closed the two of us into the limo’s rear compartment. Through the one-way window glass I tracked her baby cabbage until it swayed around the limo’s front fender and vanished.
Pop.
As I swiveled myself into the compartment’s rear-facing jump seat, Ya Ya, stretched out across the red velvet rear banquette, pressed his mouth over the champagne bottle he had just uncorked, and contained most of its overflow foam.
The compartment was lined floor to ceiling in red velvet, even the headliner, which looked and smelled brand new.
“Let me help you with that, Mr. C.” One of the two rear-compartment hostesses tugged the bottle out of Ya Ya’s hand and sucked off the remaining foam while she stared into his eyes.
These two young ladies obviously worked out as productively as Juju did. Probably more often, too. Because they had apparently just showered down and hadn’t had time to get dressed.
The other hostess crawled forward toward me, and blinked. Her eyelids were made up in silver and black, like snakeskin. It was a terrific grabber, not that she needed more grabbers than nature had already provided her. “Been here before, Mr.—?”
“Parker. Jazen Parker.” Not my scrub name, but what the hell. Girls like this were paid to forget. I swallowed. “Once.” But Legion liberty hadn’t been like this.
She curled alongside me on the adjacent jump seat, traced my ear with her fingertip and whispered, “Well, Mr. Jazen Parker, welcome back to Funhouse.”
Funhouse. The day I fell in love with Kit Born, which was the first day I ever saw her, she was a mud-smudged tomboy in khakis who gave me a lift from the spaceport on Mort’s home world, DE 476, into Dead End’s human “capital city.” The “city” was a mud hut cluster that the colonists had misnamed “Eden.”
Kit had smirked and asked me whether I had ever seen an outworld planetary capital with a name that fit. I had told her “Funhouse.” I think she had agreed with me.
Nobody who saw the capital of FE 117 disagreed that the name “Funhouse” fit this planet. In the years since that day, my tomboy and I had disagreed as often as we had agreed. But there had never been a day when I had loved her any less.
“Hel-lo! Jazen whatever-your-name-is.” My hostess had her hand inside my tuxedo shirt, and she smelled of cut lemons and jasmine. “Am I boring you?”
Syrene had counseled me that a woman forgave a man who followed his prick easier than one who followed his heart, but I was in no position to press my luck.
“No. Not at all.” I shrugged. “It’s been a long flight.”
“No problem. But just so you know, I’m included in high-roller service for the duration of your stay. And Mr. Cohon is a very high roller.”
She uncoiled from her jump seat and pythoned aft to assist her work-out partner, who was helping Ya Ya keep the back half of the promise he had just sworn on his mother’s grave.
My voyeuristic cup of tea isn’t troll a trois, so I stared out the window watching Funhouse roll past while the limo rocked side-to-side down Lucky U Parkway.
The world that rolled past looked a lot like the lushest parts of Earth, the roadside riot with outsized trees that perpetually blazed pink, purple and cantaloupe orange. The trees rose from flower carpets studded with turquoise and lemon-yellow blossoms the diameter of dinner plates.
Funhouse’s vegetation swayed in breezes that never seemed too brisk or too still, too cool or too warm. The few buildings visible from the road were resorts and casinos that curved and soared up above the treetops like alabaster yacht sails. The Funhouse tourism bureau even claimed it rained on Funhouse only after the last floorshow and before the breakfast buffets opened.
The planetologists say all those trees and flowering plants are bigger mostly because they get more carbon dioxide. They get more carbon dioxide because the animals breathe more of it out. The animals breathe more carbon dioxide out because they’re bigger. A lot bigger. The animals are a lot bigger because the Planetary Oxygen Concentration lets them breathe so much more oxygen in.
“Titanopods ahead on the right.” Juju’s voice dripped like honey through the speaker set in the forward partition.
Three heartbeats later the limo slowed momentarily as it passed by a half dozen fawn-colored, droop-snooted quadrupeds as they pruned treetops like living maintenance ‘bots. Except titanopods stand twenty-six feet tall at the shoulder. If Mort’s biochemistry had allowed him to digest Funhouse animal protein, I expect he would have given his left tusk to retire here.
That’s why I described Funhouse’s elevated POC as seemingly inconsequential. Funhouse’s megafauna tentpoled Funhouse’s core business.
That business was gambling. Not poko or traditional Trueborn casino gaming, though Funhouse offered bags of both. So did Shipyard, and most nations on Earth. And of course, so did every cruiser.
Gambling was fun for plenty of people. Funhouse gambling was fun for all those people and plenty more people besides. Betting on contests of power and speed between and among monsters combined spectacle with gambling.
“Funhouse Trust, Mr. Cohon.” Sweet Juju announced our first stop as she swung the limo off
the Parkway and down an underground ramp into a gated drive-through monitored by a mini-gun-equipped security ‘bot.
As the gate rolled up into the ceiling to admit us, Ya Ya disentangled himself, tugged his tux pants back on. Then he buzzed down the side window and leaned out. From the drive-through window a big-eyed girl in a low-cut gold lamé jumpsuit leaned out and pipped Ya Ya with a handheld retinal.
Ya Ya’s withdrawal came back in seconds. It arrived as crisp bills tightly wrapped by a gold lamé band that matched the teller’s jumpsuit. I thought that was good customer service. It was such a large packet that it required her to lean way out of the window in order to hand it to Ya Ya. From where I was sitting, I thought that was extraordinary customer service.
So far this trip, every customer-service job on Funhouse was held down by a seductress. It made me wonder who shoveled up behind the titanopods.
Ya Ya tore the gold band from his bills, peeled off a handful for each of the hostesses, then folded the rest and stuffed the wad down his pants.
Three minutes later, we stopped briefly beneath the portico of the Funhouse Grand Luxoriana, waited while our hostesses slithered into gowns, then we dropped the pair of them off at the hotel.
The one who had stuck her hand down my shirt spun a disc-shaped, pink business card into my lap. Then she said, “Remember. For the duration,” blew me a kiss, and disappeared.
I held the card under my nose. It smelled of cut lemons and jasmine. As the limo pulled back out onto the Parkway, I turned the card round between my fingers while I looked out the window. Then I folded the card and stuffed it as far down into the limo’s side door pocket as Ya Ya had stuffed his tip money down his pants.
I muttered, “I’m either the smartest man in the universe or the dumbest.”
Ya Ya frowned across the compartment. “What you said?”
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