by Janet Morris
"Good," Croft said. "Now, if we can keep the principals alive, as well as the peripherals, we'll really have done something." Croft looked down his long glass conference table. Riva Lowe was sitting at the far end of it.
"Riva, you've been unusually silent today. What about the contraband issues: the Leetle smuggling; the status of this new life-form of Cummings, the Olympian Brow; and the misrepresentation or underrepresentation of the mocket?"
"Urn, Director Croft, we'll need some time on the Brow question: NAMECorp has its own standards on worlds it's administering—worlds like Olympus that haven't yet applied for territorial status. But I'm not sure that that can protect the Brows, since the Brows need to eat contraband— Leetles—to survive, and Cummings the Third knew that. Also, if Remson is right and the Brows can affect human behavior, they ought to be prohibited out of hand. The simplest rationale is to prohibit the importation or transportation of the Brow species on the basis that it needs to eat quantities of an already proscribed life-form in order to survive; we won't give Leetle breeding rights to any prospective owners or breeders of Brows. Therefore, it would cause undue hardship to the Brows to export them from Olympus, where Leetles occur naturally and can't be proscribed, according to the Indigenous Species Protection Act."
"And the legal position of Cummings, who used the Brows as an aid to smuggling?"
"Sir, I'll do whatever you want on that. It's so complex an issue that NAMECorp can tie us up in court for years if we overextend ourselves. We've got young Cummings on Leetle smuggling, and the girl on Leetle possession, and I think that's enough to allow us to interpose ourselves between them and the Medinans. I don't see the percentage in looking for more sweeping charges at the moment, when we have cloudy issues, at best, which will surely come into dispute."
"All right. Anyone else?" Croft looked down one side of the table and up the other. The ten department heads were sheafing papers, closing briefcases, preparing to leave.
He saw Remson pass a note to the ConSpaceCom general, but was content to let Remson handle the worst-case sort of planning that had to be done with that agency.
If ConSpaceCom entered the picture, it would mean that ConSec, as well as diplomacy, had failed in keeping Threshold orderly and secure and the application of superior force was then the only option.
Michael Croft detested force and single, last-ditch options. The idea that Threshold and the Territories must act aggressively upon the fundamentalist leader and his rabble was abhorrent.
Therefore, Croft would proceed as if the option did not exist. If it must exist, Remson would oversee its application. That was Remson's job.
"Dismissed, everyone. Good luck. And see you at the banquet this evening, bright-eyed and smiling and to all appearances unconcerned that anything will come of these disruptions."
Face was everything. Croft mustn't end up with egg on his.
Young Dodd was waiting with the two teenagers in an anteroom. Once his staffers had all filed out, Croft slid down in his chair, taking a moment to relax and loosen his tie and summon strength for what was to come.
These children couldn't possibly know what their puppy love might cost the civilized universe.
But Croft remembered when he was young and nothing mattered in the way that love mattered.
One grew out of it. Or one grew into an understanding of love as a deeper matter than a reproductive urge coupled with feelings of insecurity and a genetic recognition of some other party as a likely co-parent.
But you couldn't tell that to these two kids. They'd risked everything, even their lives, for one another in full understanding of what was at stake.
If it weren't so toweringly stupid, it would be touching. But Croft couldn't afford to be touched. He also couldn't afford to be angry, which he would dearly love to be.
Anger he must save for Cummings, Jr., who deserved it in any case and should have raised his son with a higher regard for the law, if not a greater sense of personal responsibility.
"Dodd," said Croft into his intercom, "bring them in."
The two children came in the far door arm in arm. The girl's eyes were wide and young Cummings's were sullen, even from this distance.
"Sit down, both of you."
They sat where Dodd positioned them, at the far end of the long conference table.
Croft, watching Dini Forat, remembered the effect she'd first had on him, and his attitude toward young Cummings softened slightly. These children were only that—children.
But they were child smugglers and child fornicators. Worse, they were children rebelling against the customs of generations.
"Both of you know why you're here. I'll not belabor your errors. You know they may still be deadly. I'd like to know what each of you would like to do, given your current situations. You first, Ms. Forat."
The girl stood up to address him. Her boyfriend jerked her arm so that she sat back down.
"Sir," she said. "Rick and I want you to marry us. Right now. Right here. Then my father will see that he cannot do this to us, that our love is true and strong and he should be ashamed of himself."
Croft's eyebrow raised despite his determination not to be surprised by whatever the children said or did.
"Indeed. And you, Mr. Cummings? Do you concur?"
"Yes, Secretary General, I certainly do." Cummings laced his fingers together on the table in a passable imitation of his father's negotiating behavior. "If you'll marry us, and drop all other charges, we'll leave immediately for Pegasus's Nostril, NAMECorp's habitat around the planet Olympus. We'll take the Brows back with us—it was a mistake to bring them. We'll take just enough Leetles to make sure the Brows don't die on the trip. That way, everybody's happy." With a half-smirk and a toss of his head, young Cummings sat back in his chair.
"I wouldn't say everybody's happy, Mr. Cummings. Not at all." But it wasn't a bad proposition, coming from a teenage boy.
"If we drop the smuggling charges and the contraband charges against you two, I'm not sure we can hold off your father, Ms. Forat, long enough to get you both out of here in one piece. And there remains the execution order that Medina has issued on both your heads, wherever you may be. You'd be living in constant fear of Medinan agents. There must be some way to appeal to your father's reason."
"Trust me," said Dini Forat bitterly. Her voice shook. "My father will relent only when it is politically embarrassing to continue. Let us do this thing, Secretary Croft. It is the best—the only—way. And we will not be separated. If anyone tries to separate us, we will fight."
"It's suicide, the way it is," Cummings III said quietly. "The Medinans will kill us—hunt us down, find us and kill us. You surely can't stand by and let them murder citizens of—"
"I know my duties, Mr. Cummings. All right, it's not a bad plan. I'll consider it. I'm seeing your father next, Cummings. Try to keep in mind that whatever I work out with him is ultimately in your best interest."
"To hell with my father," Cummings snarled, and then said: "I'm sorry, sir. We're grateful for all you've done."
"Won't you marry us right now?" Dini Forat was on her feet. "It will show my father that we are not to be trifled with . . ."
"Perhaps tomorrow, Ms. Forat."
"Tomorrow will be too late," she said, before Cummings could stop her.
"I certainly hope not. As a matter of fact, Ms. Forat, I trust not. Dodd, escort them back safely."
The Cummings boy had Dini Forat under his arm as Dodd led them out the door.
Now all Croft had to do was find the energy to make the boy's father see the wisdom of buying off the Ayatollah Forat with whatever the Medinan wanted most.
Since Cummings, Jr., was a skinflint and a tyrant, Croft had his work cut out for him. But with lives hanging in the balance, he would summon the energy, somehow, to prevail over the injured pride of both parents.
He must.
CHAPTER 19
A Better Place
Dini Forat cuddled her mocket, on
ce again small, fluffy, and white, in her lap and stared out the window of the Cummings limo as the car sped toward the building owned by her beloved's father.
Beside her, Rick was stiff and tense as his father lectured them both.
There was nothing to do, Dini understood, but to be silent and appear to obey.
The elder Cummings was saying: "Rick, I don't know what I'm going to do with you. To get you two out on bail, I had to promise Mickey Croft the moon."
Dini looked away from the glory of Threshold, staring at Rick's father in horror. "The moon! Surely you did not pay an entire—"
"A figure of speech, Ms. Forat," said Rick's father. When the elder Cummings looked at her, Dini felt disquieted. There was a marked similarity in the looks of father and son. Would Rick resemble this forbidding, gruff, icy-eyed person when he was old?
Richard Cummings, Jr., had a face full of lines, tanned like old leather. His pale eyes stared out of it, swimming in startlingly bright whites, as if out of a ceremonial mask. His teeth, too, were white. There were more wrinkles around his eyes than even around her own father's and, from the sockets they described, his nose jutted like a ship's prow or a cannon on a battlement.
His was a mean face, an arrogant and unforgiving face, a face as devoid of sensitivity as her own father's. She hoped against hope that her husband-to-be would not earn for himself such a face.
The father's stare took her measure, then something in it changed. "A figure of speech, but a prophetic one. Whatever I promised Secretary Croft is only a pittance compared to what I'm going to have to use to bribe your father to call off his dogs and make this marriage official—sanctioned by Medina. Can you give me one reason I ought to do that, Ms. Forat? Pay a king's ransom for a bride I'm not at all sure is suitable for my son, when I can just sit back and wait and end up with my choice of debutantes from good families whose cultural base is more . . . appropriate to my family's needs?"
Dini Forat said, without thinking, in a hurt and angry voice, "Because my father will kill Rick, as well as myself, if you do not find a way to placate him."
And Rick, speaking for the first time since his father had come to secure their release into his custody, said, "You mean, more appropriate to your dynasty's needs, you bastard. Don't pick on her. Whatever it costs, we can afford it. And I'm going to marry Dini, one way or the other." Rick crossed his arms, jabbing Dini in the breast as he did so.
Dini's mocket growled at Rick.
"We?" said his father in a dangerous voice. "And what's this 'one way or the other' crap? You're going to do exactly as I say, until the hearing. Both of you. You're not going to leave this level—not going to leave the building except under armed guard and stringent precautions."
The car slowed, passing through a tunnel-like lock. Dini craned her neck and, sure enough, she could see the star-spattered sky through the ceiling above them.
"You're worried that we might jump bail? I should have known." Rick Cummings skewered his father with a disparaging glare. "All you care about is mon—"
"I'm worried that, as Ms. Forat suggested, someone might try to kill you both before I can talk some sense into Ayatollah Forat. I know you couldn't have heard, but Dini's father and I had a rather unpleasant initial encounter. It's not going to be easy to come to terms. You'll both want to understand that whatever this costs is going to come out of—"
"My hide," Rick finished his father's sentence wearily. "What else is new? Thanks for the bail money, Dad-O. But we don't need any more lectures. I'd rather have stayed at Croft's under house arrest than listen to you—"
"If you'd listened to me ..." Richard Cummings began, raising his voice.
Dini clapped her hands over her ears. Her mocket began to whine and jumped off her lap to cower on the floor.
Rick put his arms around her. "Now look what you've done. Why don't you go back to whatever rented wife you've got this week, and whatever safari we dragged you away from? That's what's really eating you, isn't it? We took up some of your precious time."
"That's about enough out of you, young man."
Rick subsided, stiff and staring straight ahead.
The elder Cummings rubbed his face with his palm as if he were some animal cleaning itself. Then he began again, - in a much quieter tone: "Stay out of trouble. Stay with my people. We've all got to pull together to get through this."
Dini reached down to lift the quivering mocket back onto her lap. Then she risked a look at Rick's father.
For a moment, she thought she saw real concern in those pale eyes. He smiled at her tentatively. The smile was forced and false.
But she smiled back, smoothing the mocket onto her lap.
"What about my Brows?" Rick wanted to know as the car pulled up before the Cummings Building.
"Your . . . Oh, the new species." Humor tugged at the father's mouth.
Or perhaps it was pride. Dini couldn't be sure. She was having trouble holding the mocket, who wanted to crawl back down onto the floor.
"That's right. The undiscovered species. Worth a fortune, admit it. Can't you bring yourself to even admit how great they are? How much they're going to be—"
"Not since you brought them in here, to everyone's attention. We're going to send them back to Olympus, with just enough Leetles to keep them alive. Croft's idea."
"My idea," Rick flared.
"Oh, and was it your idea to slap them with a permanent export ban? We'll never be able to use them off-planet, you idiot!" This time, it was the father who looked away, out the window as the car pulled to a halt before the building bearing his name. "Get out, both of you. Don't fool with the Brows, no matter how proud of yourselves you are. They're under a Secretariat seal until we can ship them home. And don't eat their Leetles. They've got just enough Leetles in there to get them through the spongejump—"
"They're in there!" In Rick's voice, surprise was mixed with grudging admiration.
"They're ours, son. In a way, they're yours. Of course they're in there. I said this whole thing's cost me. They're probably tearing up my den right now. I'll take any damage they do out of your—"
"Hide. Yes indeed, I'm well aware of that. Well, here's where we get off." Rick leaned around Dini and pushed open the door.
She knew her beloved well enough to notice the strange expression on his face, but not well enough to identify it. On someone else, she would have thought the look to be mischievous.
Gathering up her mocket, she got out of the car. Rick said a few words to his father that she didn't catch, and followed.
Then the car pulled away, leaving them on the doorstep of the Cummings building, where three uniformed NAMECorp security men were waiting for them.
She started to say something, but Rick hushed her, "Not now. Wait until we get upstairs."
So she cuddled her mocket, who was panting happily now and wagging its stubby tail, as the guards escorted them up to the penthouse.
Inside, there were no signs of the mess the Brows had made. No sign of the Leetle infestation that, really, had caused all the trouble.
She put the mocket down and it ran, yapping, down a hallway.
"It's scented the Brows," Rick said authoritatively. Then he turned. "Okay, fellows. Sweep this place and get out. You can protect us well enough from the foyer if you're any good at your job."
The security men eyed one another. Their leader gave a signal and they split up to examine all the rooms for signs of Dini's father's henchmen.
She looked wistfully after her mocket. There were Leetles in there with the Brows.
Leetles made everything all right. Brows made everything more than all right.
Dini didn't feel anywhere near all right. She turned to ask her beloved, "Couldn't we just—?"
"Shut up! Not yet. Wait until the bug sweep's done."
At first she thought he meant a sweep for Leetles, then she realized what he did mean: Rick was afraid there might be hidden listening devices in the apartment.
"But
who ..." Then she did shut her mouth. Any number of parties might be interested in hearing what she and Rick had to say: her father, his father, Mickey Croft's office . . .
The security men frightened Dini's mocket. It came barreling out of the hall and leapt into her arms. "There, there, Pepi," she crooned to it. The mocket looked just like the dog of her favorite vid star. She'd even named it after the star's dog. Medinans, of course, couldn't have dogs. Dogs were unclean. But a mocket was a mocket, whatever shape it took.
The guards consulted briefly with Rick and they left, shaking their heads.
When the door closed behind them, Rick said, "All clear. We can talk. But let's hurry. We don't have much time."
"Time?"
"We're getting out of here."
Dini nearly dropped her mocket on its head as she let it go. It yapped once, shook itself, and again raced down the hall toward the room where the Brows were being kept.
"But we can't! You heard your father ..."
"I heard him. And I understood him. You didn't." Rick took her hands in his. "Dini, we're taking the Brows and the Leetles and your mocket and we're getting out of here. I've ordered my ship readied. By the time we get there, the security men will have bribed the right people, and we'll be able to sneak away."
"Away?" Dini was aghast. "But where will we go?"
"Home. To Pegasus's Nostril. My father's company owns the habitat. We'll honeymoon on Olympus. The Brows are going home, and we're going to take them."
"But that's jumping bail!"
"It's only money. I have to give my father the leverage he needs with your father."
"Are you sure?"
Rick Cummings pulled her against him. "Of course I'm sure. Now, let's go see our Brows. A couple of Leetles, and you'll feel better. You let one Brow ride on your shoulder, the way I taught you. The other one will look just like the mocket to anybody but us. We'll get into a van that'll be downstairs, and go straight to the dock.