by Диана Дуэйн
stiffen up. The doctor." She shrugged. "Mechalus are kind of a mystery to me. Do they have children or send away for a kit?"
"A little bit of both, I think."
"Well, there's no telling how Delde Sota took the process. They keep retrofitting themselves until they get it right, the mechalus—isn't that the idea? No telling how much of her 'original engineering' is left then. She might just have done a valve and ring job on herself or a complete rebuild." Angela shrugged. "Anyway, in terms of human childhoods, I seem to have come off unusually well. I look at the people around me and wish I could patent the process somehow and sell it."
"You'd be rich pretty quick," Gabriel said.
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They sat there quietly for a little while, sipping at their kvass. Down the hall, Grawl was twanging away at the rhin and producing astonishing dissonances that continued to sound more like drive malfunctions than anything else.
"How do you put up with that?" Gabriel said.
"Mostly I don't," Angela said. "Mostly she does it when I'm asleep."
"How could you sleep with that going on?"
Angela shrugged. "If she did it while I was going to sleep," she said, "I'd never get there. Afterwards, you could detonate a force grenade in here and I'd just sort of go 'uh' and turn over." She smiled, rather sheepishly. "It's one of the reasons I was glad she agreed to team up with me. You don't want to know the kind of volume levels I had to set my ship's alarms for when I was alone to wake me up if something happened during my downtime."
"I'll make a note to shout at you if you doze off," Gabriel said and fell silent for the moment.
You'd know more about her history than I would, Angela had said. Gabriel could have laughed at that but was in no mood. He still knew so little about Enda. She had her own privacies, which even after all this while he was unwilling to probe.
All this while, Gabriel thought. How long have I known her now? A year?
It's just been such a busy year. but once again Gabriel was left thinking of how many questions he had to ask her and wouldn't but still wished he had answers to.
He and Angela talked a good while more, mostly about inconsequential things, but Gabriel came back again, eventually, to his father. "The one thing I should have said to him," Gabriel said with something of an effort, "is that I loved him, and I didn't want him to worry, but I didn't say that. And I think he meant to say it to me, despite it all. and he didn't say it either."
"That's hardly your fault," said Angela. She shook her head and sighed. "Anyway, you can still drop him a note next time you shift some data."
Gabriel shook his head. "Anything I send him is going to be intercepted," he said. "He might never see it. He doesn't seem to have seen messages I sent him very early on."
"Well, what if it is intercepted?" Angela said. "So the snoopies discover that you secretly love your dad.
If that information confuses them, so much the better. The hell with them, anyway."
Her belligerence surprised Gabriel a little. "They've been putting you through all kinds of grief," Angela said, seeming annoyed. "No harm for you to annoy them back a little. Maybe they need to be jolted into thinking of you as something besides some kind of inhuman murderer."
Gabriel thought about that. "I'd be more worried that they might try to use the information against me somehow, or against him."
"Sounds like they've already tried everything they could in that regard," Angela said. "From what you say your old man said, it didn't take. Look, it's your choice, Gabriel, but whatever happens, someday this is all going to be over, and you'll be able to come back again. You want to make sure you have someone to come back to." She stretched.
Gabriel nodded. "Your weapons in order?" he said.
"Grawl's checked everything out," Angela said. "I'm going to double-check in a while. We don't have anything that could remotely be considered contraband, and everything but personal arms is going to be locked up while we transit the system—except the ship's armament, of course, but it sounds like we won't be there that long."
"I want to do some provisioning there," Gabriel said, "things that could attract attention if I picked them up here. Long-life supplies, some exploration gear. we may be gone for a while."
She grinned a little. "You've caught the bug," she said. "Just as well I sold you that contract, I guess. You sure made it pay a lot better than I did."
Down the hall, a soft chirping noise began and started to escalate. "Comms," Angela said, and then raising her voice, said, "Communications, reroute to sitting room. Yes?"
"Angela, it is Enda. I was wondering if Gabriel was over with you."
"Hi, Enda. Yeah, he's here. Hey, I have that list for you. I'll send it back with Gabriel when he heads home."
"I'll be right back, Enda," Gabriel said to the air. "All right."
Gabriel finished his drink then stood up and stretched. "Maybe I will," he said. Angela blinked. "Will what?"
"Send that message." He looked thoughtfully at her. "As for the snoopies. maybe a little confusion will be a healthy thing."
Angela smiled slightly as he turned away. "Maybe so. See you later."
They lay bathed in light, and all the voices sang in the stillness there, and never an unharmonious note was heard.
They do not know.
They do not know, chorused the others.
It was not really a song, at least in terms of sound being involved, but sound was just another form of interaction which they understood well enough to use when the need arose. They preferred their own methods: silence and the interweave of thought and long lithe movement, however confined. All life was movement inside confinement, until that frightening time came when the walls of the world broke, and they went hunting another world to live in. Fortunately, such times rarely lasted long. The universe was full of worlds in which to live. Sometimes they resisted, but the resistance was never able to last long.
Right now, the warm light of this particular world bathed them all, and they lay luxuriating in it while they considered their business. It was leisurely work at the moment, though the wisest of them knew that soon there would be need to speed the pace a little. Things were changing outside. The plan was moving forward by indirect means, as they themselves moved—long slow strokings of body against body in the tangle, while thoughts wove and curled about one another, while ramifications slid forward through time and became manifest.
"Outside" was their great problem now.
They do not know.
They still do not know.
In that regard at least they were safe. The hosts who carried them about, the mobile worlds, were blissfully ignorant of what they carried. Oh, when they first took possession there might be some small difficulty, some little straggling of the stubborn parasitic "intelligence" that clung inside these creatures, but old habits were soon enough unlearned, and things settled down. The tangle grew in the glow of warmth, and the host discovered how not to struggle, discovered that everything was so much easier if it just gave up the troublesome habit of thought and will. There was so much other thought, so much other will, waiting to relieve it of the difficulty. Sooner or later, it always gave in.
There was always the hope that things could become simpler. There were those far away, great minds, huge knots and matrices of thought native to other tangles on the outside. They looked forward to the day when a host would be perfected that did not straggle at all, a little world even more perfect, one capable of swift movement, far travel outside, which did not put up the tiresome battle for its own autonomy. As if there was any such thing. As if any one creature by itself could lay any kind of claim to intelligence. Mind came in numbers, and the proof of it was the way that the poor pitiful spasms of thinking that the present "outside" worlds manifested were unable to resist the presence of genuine thought, genuine will, for very long.
They do not know…
It was the tangle's eternal consolat
ion. Their way of life, if anything, brought intelligence to those unfortunate wandering spasmodic shells, poor purposeless things lurching and staggering about the outside world in their little bodies and ships. Once a tangle took hold in one of those small worlds, brought it direction and purpose, then were they intelligent, then would they know. Someday they would all know. Someday the stroke and curl of thirty or fifty or a hundred bodies would enlighten them all, the twining of useful and purposeful thought as it bred inside them.
The Others, one thought came from some distance, from another tangle, they come closer now to finding the way to bring that time when worlds no longer resist us .
The time comes.
It comes. They have found the place where the secret is hidden.
They have found the one who will find the place.
Soon now.
Soon…
Thoughts stroked and writhed against one another in luxuriant pleasure. Soon the enablers, the ancient devices, would be found. For so long they had been thought to be only myth, random thought, erroneous imagination. Then an image had come drifting along the thoughtways, leaked from somewhere perhaps, cast away by some being that had seen such a thing and not recognized it for what it was, but the Others recognized it, the one true group intelligence that did live outside. They searched in that great dubious emptiness of "physical reality" and found what they sought: the truth of the image, the source of the enablers, the devices that would make all the outside safe for their kind, would turn all of it into an endless infinity of unresisting worlds, hosts that did not have to be subdued.
But the Others were delayed.
They were delayed.
Sorrowful commiseration that such a delay should have to happen. The first place that had held the enabling devices had been inadequate. Not as expected, not as predicted. The devices had been interfered with. The Others had not been able to make use of them. Many of the wild host-creatures, willful, destructive, uncooperative, had come to that place and made it impossible for the Others to be there, to take what they desired.
Agitation. Thought curled and writhed against itself, frustrated. From somewhere came a faint sound, unpleasant.
The sound repeated.
The tangle asserted itself.
The sound choked off.
They had all been angry, but the anger was unnecessary. There was another source for the enablers, the Others said.
Soon they would come there, be brought there. Soon the source would be revealed, and all would once again go to plan.
The thought came curling into their own, colder and clearer than one of the voices of their own tangle.
We will know soon where that place is. Prepare your hosts to set about our business.
A stirring, a sense of amusement. They are always about your business, for we are always about your business. All are the same.
See to it that what you say is true. Put your hosts to following these, to watching for them. Come to grips with them. Make hosts of them if you can, but be ever with them once you have found them.
Images: Three ships, and the wild hosts associated with the ships. A woman, a weren, a human mutant, and a mechalus. A fraal. and a human of sorts, though that was changing.
The tangle writhed and squirmed even at the distant thought-image-of-an-image. There was something about the last one, the light, unlike their light—but a sensitivity as well, a mind that was almost a mind like theirs, even though he was only one.
Impossibility.
The tangle writhed more violently. Agitation. From outside again came the unpleasant sound, the scream. The tangle asserted itself.
Silence fell again, and all bathed in the warmth, the light, once more uninterrupted.
Find them, said the voice of the Other. Follow them. Call us when you do. Tell us where they go, what they do. Make hosts of them, if you can. Great will be your reward, for what they seek and what you can force them to find will make our world what we wish it to be at last.
And they will not know
They will not know.
Satisfied, eager, thoughtful, ready, the tangle smoothed and preened and stroked against itself, bodies writhing among bodies in the warmth, thought knotting through thought.
Outside, unregarded, water ran down the face of the world, and great sobs shook it until the tangle finally asserted itself again and choked the air away.
Chapter Five
Several weeks later they prepared for their final starfall into Algemron. Everyone's nerves were on edge.
The first problem with this system was exactly where to arrive. Much of it was theoretically neutral territory, but there was a lot of that to police and only one force doing the policing: a little Concord task force based on Palshizon at the edge of the system. Gabriel and everyone else discussed this via comms before their final starfall.
"If we go in under escort from the Concord ships there, we won't have this problem," Angela said. "We could," Enda replied and glanced at Gabriel. Gabriel said nothing for the moment.
The problem was the war. In a way, it was an offshoot of the Second Galactic War, continuing even though the Thuldans and Austrins had long since ceased that particular conflict. Some of their client worlds, however, had been slower to give up the war, and the inhabitants of Galvin and Alitar had been slowest of all. Only the Monitor Mandate, some years back, had prevented the two planets' "parent" stellar nations from becoming directly involved in the conflict, but even the Mandate had not been able to stop the "children" quarreling and killing large numbers of one another at every possible turn. While the Concord might not approve of this, there was nothing it could do about it at the moment. It kept a Concord Administrator permanently in the system, a woman named Mara DeVrona, which to Gabriel's mind was a clear indication of how desperately intractable it considered the situation there. They kept the little base at Palshizon, which conducted an escort system for ships passing through the system, trying to
bolster the economy and local stability by keeping trade moving. Still, there were problems with their presence as well.
"If we do report there," Enda offered, "and they decide to query Gabriel's records. Well, that would be bad."
"You have a talent for understatement," Gabriel said gently.
"I don't want them escorting me in any case," Helm said. "It gives people the wrong idea. Anyway, all our roles are straightforward enough. You two have business there. You're infotraders. We're your escort. The Concord force there has enough problems taking care of people who do need escort. We won't bother with them."
Gabriel's feelings about this were mixed. On one hand, he still felt loyalty to the Concord and felt like a Marine, like one of the good guys, despite the way he had been treated. He hated having to avoid them. On the other hand, he was in no mood to have the Concord grab him at this moment in time. The luckstone was increasingly on his mind, and not just in terms of certain odd dreams he had been having. Lately, he could feel the stone "leaning" away from him toward the more distant areas of the Verge. In its wordless way, it was becoming most insistent that it was important, very important, to get there soon.
"If we stay close together," Gabriel said, "and we're polite to the inspection ships when they come out to meet us, we'll be all right. I've had a look at the reports on the Grid for the past few months. There don't seem to have been any incidents."
"That got reported, you mean," Angela remarked.
Gabriel sighed. "So we go in, get searched if we have to, and land at Fort Drum. The shopping's pretty good there, to judge from the ads on the Grid."
It also was just about the only city into which the Federal State of Algemron was likely to allow an offworlder without going too deeply into his records—something Gabriel was as nervous about from the Algemron side as from the Concord. The Concord at least had due process and believed in the assumption of the innocence of the accused and his right to prove himself guiltless. Gabriel was unsure of any desire on either the Galivinite or
Alitarin side to do anything but prove their enemies dead, and they seemed a little hasty about deciding who their enemies were. Someone discovered by either side to be running under a false identity would probably not be assumed to be very innocent at all.
Helm folded his arms. "All right for you, but I don't particularly love the idea of landing myself in an armed camp."
"You mean one where they are better armed than you are," said Grawl.
He grunted. The implication that anyone could be better armed than Helm was never likely to sweeten his disposition.
"I would have thought you would have selected Alitar for our business," Enda said. "It is somewhat less repressive in its philosophy."
"I'd have preferred to go there myself," Gabriel said, "but the suppliers don't have the equipment I'm after, and if I'm right in my analysis"—he looked at Helm—"the Galvinites have the edge on the Alitarins at the moment, especially in terms of patrol ships. If we filed a plan for Alitar, the Galvinites would come down on us in a hurry, possibly impound the ships."
Helm nodded and let out another grunt. "How long you think it'll take you to do your business?"
Gabriel had been studying their starfall schedule and the system times. "It'll be local morning when we land," he said, "assuming we're not delayed too much on our way in. Most of the day for the shopping, and then the end of the day for the export formalities." The Galvinites believed in stringently checking outgoing cargos to make sure that nothing left their planet that might be of any use to Alitar.
"Overnight there, since the port curfew means they won't let us move between end-of-business and local morning, then straight out and on to our next destination."
"Which is?" asked Enda.
"No system," Gabriel said. "Starfall in space, possibly several of them, one after another." "You are hunting a directional trace, then?" Grawl asked.