The Flowery War

by Tim Andersen

  Lika answered my question. “Goshan, these are not two people getting off on a bit of pain. These are two civilizations. They are going to expect a lot of words to be exchanged. The safe word is going to be something that’s unlikely to occur in any natural communication. It’s probably a very long string of bits---most likely a computer file that each party has stored.”

  “So. . .” I mused.

  “So, whoever brokered the original agreement has the file,” she finished.

  “And are probably keeping it somewhere very safe,” added Smith.

  I thought about this for a moment. “But wait,” I said. “The Trolls must have a safe word too. Why couldn’t we just get them to give up?”

  “Better, but you are still displaying your ignorance,” he said. “The Trolls are notoriously stubborn. They don’t expect to say the safe word ever. I assume you at least gathered from your grandfather’s pedantic tome that it is normal for them to engage in perpetual war. To force them to give up, we would have to fire ISBMs at their home planets. Even then, they might decide we are bluffing until the missiles impacted---after that, saying the safe word would not be on their minds. They would retaliate. The ritual would be over, but the war would not.” He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, it is too great a risk. I would not even consider it as a contingency. It’s also impractical given that we three are exiled here. We have a much better chance of finding and transmitting the safe word than convincing Earth’s government to fire those missiles. I suspect the Prime Minister would rather destroy the Trolls completely than force their hand based on our assumptions.”

  “If that’s our only choice, what do we do?” I said. “We can’t go back to Earth.”

  “I don’t propose to go back to Earth. Not only would whoever tried to assassinate you most likely discover you are still alive, but they would attempt to kill all three of us.”

  “I don’t even understand why anyone would want to kill us,” said Lika.

  “Indeed,” said Smith. “It may mean that we are---as the Amidans say---critical to stopping what is happening. Whoever is responsible will stop at nothing to achieve their objectives.”

  “What are their objectives?” Lika said.

  “How should I know?” he said. Smith looked away from us, pacing. “I can’t think it out here,” he said. “I need data. I need my feet on the ground.” He paced more, seeming to ignore us. “This assassin is damned inconvenient,” he said as if somebody trying to kill us were a metro delay.

  Lika interrupted him. “What about Sylvania? The assassins wouldn’t expect us to show up there.”

  Smith rounded on her angrily. “What would that accompl---” Smith started to say and then stared at her, a look of shock on his face. His mouth flexed up and down for a while. Lika looked at me perplexed.

  “Tolan?” she said, looking worried.

  Smith shook his head rapidly as if trying to clear it, and the look of shock was gone. Instead he appeared to be considering his next words. “Your father still lives there, doesn’t he? He still has his estate?” said Smith.

  “Yes,” said Lika.

  “Then we must go to Sylvania,” he said.

  Lika looked relieved for some reason, but I was confused. Something had taken place between the two of them, and I wasn’t sure what it was. “But why?” I said. “What’s on Sylvania? What does Lika’s Dad have to do with anything?”

  Smith turned to me. “Pontius Townsend is the most powerful person in the New Sol system. He will have resources to help us.”

  “But if the person who negotiated the secret treaty with the Trolls is on Earth---in the State Ministry---how will going to Sylvania help? We need to go to Earth somehow. Look, what if we just went in disguise?”

  “This isn't a sim thriller,” said Smith. “We are not going to wander around Earth wearing disguises. We have no resources, and, as soon as we contact the authorities for help, we would be discovered by the assassin. All signs point to an insider being responsible. Without help from powerful people, we will get nowhere. Since the Amidans seem unwilling to give us more specific information, we have no choice but to enlist Lika’s father and hope that he will be able to help us.”

  It sounded like he was rationalizing to cover up his real reason for wanting to go to Sylvania. I looked at Lika, but she didn’t register anything on her face. “Goshan,” she said, “my father will help us. You’ll see. Tolan understands.” She looked at him, as if for some comfort.

  “Of course,” he said, giving her that odd false smile. She appeared not to notice it, but his eyes betrayed him.

  The problem with getting to Sylvania was transportation. For this I went to the Abbot. “Of course,” he said, when I asked about the ship. “Here it is.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out what looked like a mobile.

  “You have a picture of it on there?” I said leaning over to look.

  He handed me the mobile. “No, friend, this is the ship.”

  The device resembled an ordinary mobile in every respect. I looked at him. “How can this be a ship?”

  “If you will turn it on, I will explain,” he said. I activated it and found a typical mobile menu containing functions such as calling, navigation, broadcast viewing, network access, etc. “Open the navigation menu,” he said. I did and found a list of planets, subindexed with continents, subindexed with cities, and so on down to street corners and offices. “Your conventional navigation tells you how to get to a particular place,” he said. “This actually takes you there.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “Matter transference?”

  “Matter transference is a physical impossibility, Goshan,” he said, “especially when there is no receiver to reconstruct you on Sylvania. Your scientists’ attempts to create it are similar to the attempts of ancient alchemists to turn lead into gold.” He chuckled.

  “Then how does it take us to Lika's father's estate? Does it create a wormhole?”

  “No, it would be most destructive if a wormhole were to connect us to his estate. He could end up with a new cathedral, and we might receive a new mansion. Things would be very messy. No, this works by a far more advanced method. Let us call it ‘configurational shifting’.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good, let me explain. Right now you are standing here in the Abbey light-years away from Earth. However, there exists a configuration of the universe where you are on Sylvania with your memories and thoughts in the exact state in which they are now. This configuration has an infinitesimal probability of occurring of course, which is why it seems impossible. However, we have developed the ability to, shall we say, increase the probability to near certainty.”

  “What?”

  “Of course, what I’m saying is more of an analogy to what actually happens, but the point is that we can ensure that you disappear here and reappear on Sylvania as if you had always been there. There is no displacement of particles in either place, and you will feel as if you have simply fallen asleep here and woken up there.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “Ah, but you’ve already done it once, the last time you went to Earth, you travelled by this method. The power is contained within us, but I have, with some effort, conferred it onto this humble device.”

  “My God,” I said, staring at the tiny mobile. “This is much more than I expected. I thought you weren’t interested in helping us.”

  “Well, we do expect you solve your problems on your own. This is simply to help you on your way. Besides which, my exposing Lika to Crispin in our crypt was partly responsible for the loss of your old ship.”

  “You also saved our lives,” I said. “We would have died with him if he hadn’t abandoned us.”

  He bowed in response. “I see that you have overcome your difficult feelings toward us. I am pleased.”

  “Your reluctance to help more still confuses me,” I said. “But this,” I held up the device, “proves that you are true friends in our t
ime of need.”

  He bowed again and said, “you may wish to save your thanks till after your mission succeeds. I'm afraid we cannot guarantee your safety once you leave here.”

  “I understand,” I said and he left me.

  I gulped realizing that we didn't know what to expect on Sylvania. How much could Lika's father protect us with a rebellion underway? Or had Earth re-established control with the Troll attack over? We had no way of knowing. There was still nothing on the news sites. Without superluminal arrays, basic communications including social networks between Earth and New Sol were still down. Either Earth's government was keeping quiet or Trexel had not checked it out as he said he would.

  I considered contacting my mother. She didn't know whether I was alive or dead, but I realized that this might alert the assassin that Lika and I had not died in the attack on our ship. I needed the assassin to believe he (or she) had succeeded. I was certain that we would eventually have to travel to Earth to find the file. This trip to Sylvania was, in my opinion, a wild goose chase that Lika and Smith had agreed to for reasons of their own.

  I looked down at the device and felt giddy realizing the power I held in my hands. I could go anywhere in the universe---correction, anywhere contained in its database. I noted that the only planets listed in its database were those inhabited by humans. The only non-human world was Amida. It seemed as though the Amidans had their ways of manipulating us even as they insisted they wanted us to do things for ourselves.

  I scrolled through the list of places. I noticed that it had my apartment address in there. I considered whether I could make a brief stop at home to pick up some things. I had lost my pack when our ship blew up (again). With this I could get in and out without being seen. I hesitated about using the device though. I didn't want to take myself somewhere without Lika and Smith and not be able to get back.

  I put my finger on the “close” button but, before I could stop, it had slipped on the tiny screen to “send”.

  I was still looking at the screen when the lighting changed. In fact, it was completely dark except for the mobile's tiny glow. I felt around and, by the feel of the junk that was squeezing me from all sides, I was in my closet at home on Earth. The closet was relatively spacious as closets go but jammed full of sports equipment, old clothes, boxes that I hadn't unpacked when I moved in, and old books I had inherited. I swore.

  I looked at the mobile and saw a large button marked “Home”. That probably led to the Amidan homeworld.

  I was about to press it when I heard voices. The voices were in my apartment.

  “What was that in the refrigerator?” said one voice, a woman.

  “God knows. Did you check the bedroom?” said a man.

  “Yes, there's nothing there. There's not much to take besides the computer.”

  My workstation! Briefly I wondered if they were Copyright Protection Force looking for all the illegal sims I had downloaded. Somehow I doubted it given all that had happened, and I started to long for the days when being caught for copyright violations were my main worries. Jail didn't sound so bad right now.

  “You really think her son was a traitor?”

  “Well, we know his boss is. We can't be too careful. Anyway, it's not our job to question orders.”

  “Pah, with a pedigree like his I don't wonder if he would've gotten away with it.”

  They were speaking about me in the past tense! They must think I'm dead, I thought.

  “Who, Smith? I didn't know he had a pedigree.”

  “No, Fenn of course. No, Smith'd go to rehabilitation for a long time---if they ever catch him.”

  “Where is he anyway? Run off to a fringe world?”

  “Dunno. I heard he never came back from a mission.”

  The voices were getting louder.

  I had been perched between two stacks of boxes and realized that I was standing on a pile of clothes too. I shifted my weight. The pile shifted, and I fell backwards into the dark closet. I felt fabric swish past me and fell with a crash, tennis rackets, trousers, and empty boxes coming down on top of me.

  “Somebody's here!”

  I swore again. I had dropped the mobile when I fell. I could hear footsteps rushing through the bedroom toward the closet. I felt around me for it. Any second they would find me here. Where was it?! The light in the bedroom flicked on, and, with the light coming in under the door, the closet became bright enough to see dimly the shape of the mobile. It was right next to the door!

  I crawled over to it, slipping on junk, resolving that in the future I would organize my closet properly, and grabbed it. The screen lit up at my touch, and I jammed my finger onto the home button.

  I had a glimpse of two pairs of dark boots and heard the click of plasma disruptors as the closet door was yanked open, but all they would have seen is an image of Goshan Fenn, there one moment and gone the next---the ghost of a man presumed dead.

  The next thing I knew I had the sensation of waking up. I was covered in cold sweat, and I thought I had been dreaming, but my finger was still pressed against the home button. I breathed a sigh of relief realizing how close I had come to getting caught. I was lying on my stomach in the same place I had left.

  Smith came into the room and saw me there. “Fenn! This is no time for calisthenics. We have work to do. Did you get the ship arranged?”

  I scrambled to my feet and showed him the mobile. Smith seemed pleased. Then I told him what I had heard. Smith's eyes flashed at hearing that he had been branded a traitor.

  “I believe I shall hold on to the mobile from now on,” he said, yanking the mobile out of my hands as if I might disappear at any moment. “As for what you heard, this merely confirms my suspicions that there are elements deep within the government working against us.”

  “So you think that they've framed you?”

  “Any hypothesis would be presumptuous,” he said, “but, assuming that your story is accurate, I can give two possibilities. One is that there are forces within the government powerful enough to have a warrant for my arrest issued and the other is that someone has planted evidence incriminating me to, as you say, frame me. In either case, I assure you that they will get their just desserts.”

  Looking into his eyes I could see a glint of malice in them I had never seen before. Now it was personal.

  Chapter 10 – Sylvania

  We had little to take to Sylvania---some clothes, camping gear, a small amount of food, a bottle of the strange liquor that the Amidans produced. Lika promised that her father would let us stay at his estate.

  “But you haven't seen him in years,” I said.

  “We've stayed in touch. He even wanted me to come live there, but I didn't want to leave Earth. There's very little to do in New Sol unless you're involved in the local industry. I would have been bored out of my mind.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  She frowned. “Dad is not the easiest person to get along with. When he and mom split up, I decided I didn't want to have much to do with either of them anymore. On Earth it's easy to get lost in the crowds. On Sylvania, unless you want to live in the wilderness, there aren't a lot of places to go to get away from somebody.”

  The late afternoon light filtered through the high windows in the main hall. Through the shafts of light I could see a tendril of smoke from the cooking of the evening meal. The Amidans had wanted us to stay for it, but Smith was impatient and had asked only that they pack some food for us to take along.

  As Lika bent down to tie a strap on her pack, I asked, “do you think that we'll be able to find the file?”

  She looked up at me, her brows furrowed. She seemed tenser than I had seen her before. “Goshan, will you stop doing that?”

  “Stop doing what?”

  “Worrying. It's making me anxious. Try to be optimistic. Tolan isn't worried. I'm not worried. It'll be fine.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  She stood up and faced me and clapped me on the arm. “
I just know, kay?” She went back and slung her pack up onto her shoulder.

  Somehow, I found her optimism unsettling.

  Smith came into the room. “Time to go.”

  He took out the mobile and motioned us to gather in a circle.

  “The mobile is very clever,” he said, pointing at the screen. “It can tell what we want to take with us and what we want to leave behind. Still, if you're not near enough, it will leave you.”

  He pressed “send”.

  I looked around.

  We were standing in a clearing of a forest, but what a forest! Even some of the smaller trees were larger than the largest redwoods on Earth and the largest trees were immense.

  I craned my neck to look up and could barely make out the canopy some 500 meters above my head. Without thinking I ran to the nearest trunk, it was at least 50 meters in diameter, covered in a smooth, dark gray and brown bark that resembled volcanic rock. The root system had to be enormous. I felt as if I had been transported to some woodland New York City or New Tokyo with giant trees instead of skyscrapers.

  Very little light was reaching the forest floor, which, along with the tree roots sucking up all the water, probably explained the lack of underbrush. The air was warm, humid, and still. I noticed that there were a few insects buzzing around as well, imports from Earth. The trees were certainly native, but, as for animals, I believe Sylvania had no native ones. I had read that some illegally imported moths had found ways to kill some of the larger trees. How I couldn't say, but efforts had been taken to eliminate them by a genetically engineered ant that ate the moth eggs and larvae.

  Smith was calling to me now. “Fenn! This way,” he said and started off towards what looked like a path to one side of the clearing.

  I ran after them. I felt oddly springy and sprinted toward them. When I stopped next to Lika who was walking behind Smith, I didn't have to breathe hard. “Wow! I feel great!” I said.

  “The oxygen level on Sylvania is higher than on Earth, closer to how it was on Earth 300 million years ago, about thirty percent,” she said. “You have to be careful when you start fires here because they burn out of control very easily. Come on. We're almost to the entrance.”