by Janet Morris
Instead of going to the lounge, Riva Lowe called her opposite number in Immigration, and then a friend in the U.S. State Department (Threshold) office.
"I know it's irregular, but everyone else has come into line with Secretary Croft's request. Can't we have immediate provisional documentation? And I think that Secretary Croft himself would be grateful if you could manage a quick set of permanent documents on political grounds."
Riva Lowe listened for a moment, eyes closed, stylus between her lips. "Yes, certainly. Political asylum, under the circumstances, will more than cover all our needs. Thank you. I'll make sure the Secretary knows what a great help you were, and how quickly your department acted in this sensitive situation."
One might have thought that Remson could have done this himself. But on reflection, she knew why he hadn't: Vince Remson had taken these Alis under his wing. Concurrence from other department heads would bolster his case if there was a Medinan appeal.
She told her secretary to alert Remson's office that the "papers he requested for the Alis are coming up to him within the hour."
And her assistant replied, "Your appointment is here, Director. Shall I send them in?"
"Appointment?" For a moment she couldn't remember who or what might be waiting. Then she did. "Oh, yes. Send them in."
She still hadn't gotten to the lounge. She put Remson's request into her desk drawer and looked up.
There stood the scavenger. Her hackles rose. Why wouldn't the old fool just go away?
Beside him was the Relic pilot, looking tired and scruffy, but marginally presentable in Customs coveralls. The pilot closed the door. "Mission accomplished, Director."
All he needed was a helmet under his arm and jackboots to click as he saluted.
"Well, that's fine, Captain South. Mister Keebler. Won't you both sit down?"
"I'm not sittin' down. I'm leavin' right away," said the scavenger. "I'm just here t' tell y', y' ain't heard the last o' me." The scavenger stood spread-legged before her, his chin jutting.
Riva Lowe was prepared for Keebler. "I think you're wrong, Mister Keebler. I think I have heard the last of you."
She keyed her hard-copy generator and it spat out a prepared document. "Take this, Mister Keebler."
The scavenger stomped forward to snatch it as the hard copy rolled out of the document slot. South stepped aside and leaned against the curving blue wall of her office, his face impassive, as if he were pretending to be somewhere else.
"What's this?" Keebler wanted to know.
"That's a restraining order. It prohibits you from going near that ball again. We're confiscating it under Customs Ruling EU-48502a, which allows us to take into custody any unspecifiable object of alien origin. Your ball is now the property of the Threshold government, Keebler. So you see, I don't think you will be bothering me again."
"Y' can't do this! The Salvagers' Union'll never permit it. I got lawyers! I'll get lawyers. . . ."
Riva Lowe knew bluster when she heard it. Even the scavenger didn't have his heart in his tirade. He was seeming smaller, less threatening by the minute.
"Don't y' even want t' know what we saw out there?" the scavenger nearly whined.
"I'm sure I know what you saw. You saw the ball. And since it's our ball, what you think about it is no longer of interest. To anyone." She had to be careful. She couldn't let him create a loophole by tricking her into making a misstatement, not after all the work she'd done to find a pretext to confiscate the ball.
"You ought to listen to him," said the pilot, who was still standing by the door, leaning against the blue wall of her office.
"What?" The single word came out of her like a slap meant to bring South to his senses.
"I—" South began.
"Never mind Cap'n South, ma'am. He's just a crazy old codger, older than I am. A Relic pilot," said Keebler with a cunning that Lowe didn't immediately understand. "It's all in his ship's log, what we did and what we saw. Y'll be hearin' from me."
And the scavenger turned his back on her, stalked over to the door. The door drew back and he started through it.
South's arm shot out to bar his way. The two men exchanged a few words. Then South withdrew his arm and the scavenger left.
The door closed again, leaving her alone with the Relic.
She expected South's face to reflect the insults that Keebler had slung. It didn't. Nor did the pilot make any move to follow Keebler out the door.
"Yes, Captain South?" He flustered her, even now when he wasn't holding half of ConSec at bay from his ancient spacecraft.
"Before I deliver my report," said the pilot, "I've got a message from Lieutenant Reice that he said has to go to Remson and Croft."
What was this about Reice?
"You do? From Reice? Is he ... all right?"
The pilot came up to her desk and put one hand on it. "I guess. He was chasing some ship and it went into a spongehole right between STARB1RD and the ball. The ball. . . changed colors during the event. Then the hole closed up and Reice flew over the area. He's gone on to continue the search. Says it's safe out there." South shrugged as if he wasn't sure he believed it. He reached into his coveralls' breast pocket and pulled out a data card. "Here's the log he wanted Remson and Croft to have. He's real adamant about them getting it, ma'am. We talked about hand-delivering it. . . ."
She took the card and turned it in her fingers. "Is there something else that's bothering you about this?"
Again, diffidently, the pilot shrugged. He had deep dark circles under his eyes, almost like bruises. "The scavenger said he didn't see the color change on the ball, but it's on the log tape. Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't. Keebler couldn't get into the ball with the black box. . . ." He took his hand off her desk and straightened up. "I got the log on that, too, if you want it."
"Hold on to it. Later, if we have trouble with Keebler, we might need it. But we deal with so much information, Captain . . . I'm sure you understand."
He looked disappointed. "Yeah, I guess I understand."
Then Lowe thought she, too, understood. It was crucial to this man from the past to have done something relevant, something that was important, or at least acceptable: mission accomplished.
She'd sent him out there with the scavenger. He needed to know that what he'd done had mattered.
"I will want an abbreviated report. You can send one to my office, as soon as you get some rest."
"You bet." He was backing away.
"And, Captain South—nice job. We might really have had a problem with Keebler if you weren't around to make sure he was able to exercise his rights."
"Doesn't look to me like you needed much help or that he had a snowball's chance," said South under his breath, still retreating.
Snowball? Impulsively, Riva Lowe stood up: "Wait a minute, Captain. It seems we've got to deliver this data to Croft and Remson. You were on-site. They may want a verbal report. You have no idea how fortunate it was that you were around to bear witness to that freighter's disappearance."
And neither did she, until they got to Vince Remson's office and Remson viewed the log tape that the antique STARB1RD had made.
Vince looked South up and down, when he'd finished viewing the log, and said, "Well, aren't you a gift from fate?"
Remson ran a spread hand through his pale hair and turned to her: "Riva, I can't thank you enough. With this log, we can convince both those fathers that they have no recourse under law to blame anyone but themselves. It may even stop these accursed demonstrations, if we play our cards right."
South looked at her, his brow furrowed. Of course, she realized, he couldn't possibly understand.
"We got lucky," she said modestly to Remson.
"Take your man, here, out to lunch on me. And, Captain South, if Riva doesn't treat you right, or you get bored in Customs, come see me. I can always use a man like you."
Vince Remson stood up to shake South's hand.
"Come on, South," said Riva Lowe. "
Let's get that lunch."
The Relic was looking around Remson's office, which was filled with mementoes from out-system junkets. "I'll try to convince you to stay with us. I can't have Vince, here, picking off all my best officers."
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, sir," said South, either confused or bemused, or some combination of the two.
On the way out of the U.S. Mission, South openly stared at everything until she said, "Are you all right, Captain?"
"Huh? Yeah, fine. That was a regular old American flag in that guy's—in Mr. Remson's office. And down here, that's the seal, right?"
"Right," she said, fighting the urge to chuckle. "You've done not only Threshold, but the U.S. government, a service."
"Nice to know we've still got one," he muttered, and turned around to walk backwards and crane his neck this way and that as she led him toward the doors.
"Let's go to my place for lunch," she said. "I'll have something sent in. You're tired and everything's still new to you." She kept forgetting how much must be strange for him. And he certainly wasn't dressed for a better restaurant.
Riva Lowe wasn't even the least reluctant to have him in her home until they got there and he stood on the balcony overlooking the government complex with his hands in his back pockets.
She was setting the table. The food and wine were on the way up. In her apartment was nothing to make anyone uncomfortable: good views of Earth—expensive, high-resolution shots of the Grand Canyon and the Maine coast— dominated the walls in the living room; excellent Epsilonian art hung in the foyer; the furniture was all antique, from the late Information Age.
She kept trying to make small talk but he wouldn't play along.
Finally she said, "Tell me about how you're making out. I do hope you won't jump ship and go work for Vince. He's a bit of an operator. ..."
"I get funny flashbacks of someplace I was, or I saw, during my X-3 exploratory," he said, still looking over the balcony, his back to her. "I saw 'em again when I touched the ball."
She nearly dropped the water glass she was holding. "You— when you touched the ball. You weren't supposed to take Keebler out—"
He turned to face her and leaned against the railing. "I didn't take Keebler. I follow orders, lady—ma'am—Director. I went myself. If anybody bothered to look over a person's reports around here, you'd know that. I had to satisfy him—or I thought I had to. I didn't know you just wanted him out of the way until you could get your paper knife all sharpened up."
South wasn't stupid, she reminded herself through the shock she was feeling. She came around the round table and leaned against it. Their body language was nearly identical when she said, "I went out myself, you know. I touched that ball. And I saw ... a ringed planet, kind of hazy—"
"Lavender mist. Sunset. Yeah." He dropped his eyes. "But you weren't out at X-3."
"No, I wasn't. Maybe I'll look at your log."
"Yeah, I'd like that."
"And all the rest of your data you think someone should see."
"Would you?"
"Absolutely."
A dozen years seemed to fall from the pilot. "I want to thank you for ... giving me a chance."
"I want to thank you, for taking it and making something out of it," she said.
"About the ball—"
"The ball," she said firmly, "is government property. We'll have plenty of time to study it together."
The door chimed: their food had arrived. She straightened up. "Lunch is here. Will you get it? Just give them your Customs card."
And that reminded her, so when he came back with the containers and handed them to her, she said, "You know, I have no idea how or why you spent so much on that antique ship, but the next time it's that kind of money, clear it with me?"
He nearly grinned. Perhaps he did, for a second. "I knew I was going to catch hell about that," he said, putting down the final container and struggling to open it for her.
It was so domestic a moment that something inside Riva Lowe was totally disarmed. She went to help the Relic pilot with the container he didn't know how to use.
"You just push this indentation, and it breaks its own vacuum seal. See?"
But by then he had his hand on her waist and she knew that, unless she did something to stop him, he was going to kiss her and things would go on from there.
But she couldn't think of a single reason that held up against the hungry, vulnerable, determined look in the pilot's eyes.
A few moments later, she stopped worrying about Joe South's ability to reacclimate to modern society. He was going to do just fine.
CHAPTER 30
Model Citizens
"I don't think you're going to have any more trouble with Richard the Second or Beni Forat," Remson said with a wolfish grin as he came in, dressed for the evening's festivities.
"That would be nice," said Mickey Croft mildly, straightening his tie in his dressing room mirror. Only Vince would have the stones to barge into Croft's very bathroom to report. "What about the demonstrations?"
"Take a look outside." Vince Remson was trying unsuccessfully to restrain himself, which in itself was unusual.
So Croft left the dressing room and strode across his adjoining library to a window overlooking the street.
The demonstrators who had become a constant fixture of his existence and whose presence had been so unutterably depressing . . . nearly all of them were gone.
A few people in tribal headgear were picking their way desultorily through the litter, which, at last, sanitation crews were starting to clear. ConSec vans were pulled up, loading force-field generators and yellow police barricades.
"You know, Vince," Croft said dryly to the man standing behind him, "I've told you before that it's disconcerting to have you working unannounced miracles while I'm in the bath."
"Yes, sir," Remson said crisply. "Sorry, sir. It won't happen again."
Croft turned around and added, deadpan, "Until we need another miracle, it had better not." Then he let his pleasure show, and his big security chief dropped his eyes in bashful pride.
"I hope you're not going to make me beg for an explanation, Mr. Remson."
"No, sir." His eyes came up and locked with Croft's. "I took the liberty of treating Mr. Cummings, Junior, and Mr. Forat to a session with your modeler."
"You what?" Croft wasn't sure whether he should laugh or cry. The modeler wasn't to be used publicly, ever. But the result . . .
"I had the log that the Relic ship made of the kids' spongejump in the NAMECorp freighter at Spacedock Seven. You knew about that."
"Yes, you told me you had something of the sort."
"I took the log, edited it slightly, and invited both parents to the modeler room to watch it. At the same time, I showed them models of both their children, each of which told the father that they'd do anything they had to in order to get away together, alive."
"That must have been touching."
"Embarrassing, I. believe, is the word. At that point, Cummings knew he'd lost any chance of blaming this whole mess on Forat, or on us. And once he caved, Forat fell into line. . . . The political repercussions alone made my case."
"You mean you didn't tell these poor parents that you wouldn't—couldn't—release the modeler data?"
"I sure didn't, sir." Vince was looking at his highly polished dress shoes concertedly.
Croft rubbed his chin with one hand and said, "Vince, you're not telling me everything."
Remson looked up with an air of exaggerated, wounded innocence. "I'm telling you everything."
"Oh, you didn't. Heaven preserve us, you didn't . . ."
Remson's white teeth flashed and he nodded his head.
". . . fail to explain to those two parents what a modeled image is, Vince. You let them believe that they were talking to their actual children?"
"It really wasn't that hard, sir. The questions they asked, and the way the models responded, just lent themselves to allowing the parents to make those assum
ptions. Which they dearly wanted to believe: that their children are alive and well and simply hiding out somewhere. You know parental guilt. ... I didn't have the heart to tell them they were making their separate peace with a couple of Al-generated images."
For a moment, Croft's calm snapped: "And what's going to happen when they do find out?"
"Then we'll be surprised and apologetic that they didn't realize what they were seeing. And talking with. We can't be responsible for technological illiteracy and its results. How could anyone not realize it when they're in a modeler room?"
Croft's legs were weak. He felt behind him and then sat very gingerly on the window seat. "But the risk, Vince ..."
"I don't see it as significant. Either the kids are alive, somewhere, or they're dead. Either way, the models were adamant about making their own lives together and not giving the parents the opportunity to destroy those lives. So, unless and until the kids show up, alive or dead, as it were, we're in good shape. The demonstrations are over; Cummings owes us an apology; Forat is a born-again moderate, rethinking the whole concept of ritual beheading—and women's rights."
"What did we trade for all this moderation?"
"Well, we're sealing the kids' files: no subsequent drug or smuggling infractions in five years, and we wipe those files. I've done as much for less reason."
"And a few concessions on your Alis?"
"I was getting those anyway. But yes, Forat won't obstruct the humanization legislation, as long as we don't release the log of the kids' escape or any of the . . . model . . . comments to the news services."
"Vince, remind me never to cross you."
"I won't have to do that, sir. Ever. Now, if you're ready, I've come to take you to the evening's festivities."
"I'll just get my coat, Vince." Croft still felt numb. This morning, he'd been fighting an impossible battle and there was a single straw of hope in the shape of an accidental recording of those children escaping in a wild and dangerous fashion.
Not to mention an illegal one.