Blade of p’Na

by L. Neil Smith

  For some reason, they looked a bit like eyeballs.

  Fireflies twinkled above the lawn, attracted by special plantings selected for the purpose. Nautiloids seem fascinated with fireflies, perhaps because they remind the denizens of the deep of luminescent fish. Or maybe the Elders just enjoy them for their own sake, like I do.

  Thanks to the great titanium tower—at least a mile high, and originally inspired by Lanternlight’s ancient name—that which gives the city its signature skyline, soft overhead light illuminated the space within the park, where trees and flowers seemed to be growing more or less at random. I’m sure it took a lot of very expensive time and effort to convey that impression. And in the precise center sat an artfully browned steel dome, perhaps fifty feet across and thirty feet high, with heavy bronze appointments. The circular frames of extremely large portholes—at least a dozen of them—permitted an occupant to look outside, while giving passers-by a peek into the well-lighted interior.

  Scutigera dropped us off. The entire building was surrounded by a broad, cobbled walkway. On the side of the dome furthest from both streets, opposite the street corner, there was an extension—like the entrance to an Arctic ice-block dwelling I’d seen in some of the videos Misterthoggosh imported—with an arched, bronze-framed door, sporting a generous porthole of its own. Through that glass, twenty or thirty feet away, we could see another door and another outsized porthole. You could probably have thrown a small party in that entryway.

  “It’s an airlock,” we both said together.

  Eichra Oren added, “I’ll call Semlohcolresh. He’ll be expecting us.”

  When the old nautiloid answered, I heard him, too. “Gentlebeings! Welcome to my home! Please enter, and I will guide you down here from there.”

  We heard a heavy thump. The outer door swung away. Inside the airlock, it was perfectly dry, but as we stepped inside, out of the corner of one eye, I could see water within the main part of the dome receding behind the portholes. Extremely clear, I’d never known it was there.

  The door closed behind us and the inner door opened. Around the circumference of the dome, three feet beneath the portholes, was a wide walkway made of some plastic-coated pale green metallic mesh. It glistened, and there was water running in rivulets down the inside surface of the dome and from the porthole frames, into a dark pool below.

  A voice—speakers, rather than implants—said, “You are in what I think of as my balcony. Sometimes I like to fill the dome with water and come up with a warm bag of tea—a habit I acquired from your people, Eichra Oren—to take a look at my surroundings.” Guess I’d been wrong about the old boy appreciating the enchantments of Lamplight.

  The dark pool underneath the catwalk stirred and almost as if in defiance of gravity, the water humped up, pouring off a monster shape that was emerging, exposing the roots of tentacles and giant, alien eyes. Although I’d been seeing nautiloids—Elders—all my life, now I understood why the ancients had lived in terror of the Kraken waking.

  “My establishment here,” said the monster, “runs beneath all of the park you saw outside, and well into the wood behind it. I have dry areas distributed all throughout the living and working spaces of my dwelling, almost like the secret passageways of yore, so that I can communicate and cooperate with colleagues not accustomed to breathing water.”

  Looking like a gigantic sea serpent, a palp arose from the surface and indicated another portholed door, set in a cylindrical feature, standing beside the one we’d just come through. “Enter here. I will meet you below.” The great palp slipped back into the water and was gone.

  Inside the door an elevator appeared as archaic but well-kept as the dome itself. It took us down a pair of floors and let us out into what looked like the corridor of an extremely expensive old hotel. One side of it, however, was glass, floor to ceiling, and through it, we could finally see all of Semlohcolresh, paralleling our walk along the hall. I’m not sure, in a pinch, I could have distinguished him from Misterthoggosh.

  “I’m sure you wonder as so many other people do, especially my fellow nautiloids,” he said. “Why should I choose to live and work here, they invariably wish to know, nearly forty leagues from the kindly waters that gave us birth, when, far more easily, I could make my home at the bottom of the warm and sunny Inland Sea, as my friends like Misterthoggosh do, where I could venture outside whenever I wish, listen to the songfish in the coral forests and explore the caves of Oreglah.”

  Not to mention the singing sponges. “Well,” I answered, “it had occurred to me.” I’d never heard of this fish-caves of Oreglah thing before. The prospect of a sodden, matted pelt tended to limit my curiosity.

  The nautiloid stopped, his tentacles waving amongst one another, as if by nervous habit. For a moment he reminded me of Hyppod Zart of the Famensed Tanoh. “Here we are five blocks, as I believe the parlance has it, from the greatest university on this version of the planet—and on many others—where the vast majority of scholars are landdwelling airbreathers. Thanks to a generous endowment I made many centuries ago, there is a tunnel originating here, within my own house.”

  “So that you can—” Eichra Oren began.

  “No, so they may come converse with me, use facilities I maintain here for solving problems and investigating phenomena of interest to me. And here we are, at one such facility. Please feel free to enter, friends.”

  It was a small laboratory, glass on every side, in which a man stood at a tall bench working in a glove box while peering through a microscope. He looked and smelled familiar. On second sniff, he wasn’t a man—that is, he wasn’t entirely human—but an H. gracilis, the same species as Eichra Oren’s amorous friend Lornis. The furniture and fixtures were all oak and brass, with black granite countertops, attesting either to the age of the place, or a certain nostalgia on its owner’s part. But all of the equipment was first rate and leading edge.

  “I know you,” I said to the man.

  He lifted his glacier-blue eyes to mine. “Shhhhh.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Jakdav Hoj and Mikado

  I WHISPERED, “BOSS! THIS IS THE SAME GUY WHO—”

  “I know who he is,” Eichra Oren said. “He was there at Ray’s when Stomos—”

  The man looked up again. “I was there when Stomos Revyak brought you to see the body. You assumed that I was working for some emergency service the same as your fireman friend. Not a terribly creditable performance for a debt assessor. In fact, it was Misterthoggosh who sent me. My name is Jakdav Hoj. By trade I’m a consulting forensic pathologist.”

  He raised a gloved hand. “I’d be glad to shake, but I’m trying to stay sterile. Your friend Ray was a brave, tough, and resourceful individual.”

  Eichra Oren nodded. “It doesn’t surprise me to hear you say that about him. I knew the fellow very well for many years. But why now, in particular?”

  “Okay, as you know, mantoids are filter feeders. They draw water into their mouths, expel it through their gills, trapping plankton—little tiny plants and animals—on the way out. They’re carnivores, in a manner of speaking—omnivores, really—but certainly not predators. The whole, wide world—its oceans—is their bowl of soup.”

  “I see,” I could tell the boss was feeling stung. Apparently, our new client had known about our friend Ray and his alien attackers all along.

  Of course he’d never said he didn’t.

  “Very well,” said Eichra Oren, “Please go on.”

  “In fact, although they’re closely related to sharks, what teeth mantoids have are vestigial. Sometimes they don’t even erupt from the gums.”

  And I said, “Which means…?”

  “Which means,” Hoj explained, “that the chunk of meat that I found in Ray’s mouth, about half a pound of the stuff, lodged between what teeth he had, wasn’t there because he’d just come back from a steak house.”

  “It was there,” Eichra Oren said, “because he’d bitten one of his assailants.”
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br />   “That’s right, almost in half, as near as I can tell, and possibly not in self-defense, but to leave us with something to identify them by.”

  “Because he didn’t swallow. You mean identify genetically?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Genetically. And that’s what I’ve done just now. I can tell you authoritatively what they are. I just can’t tell you who they are.”

  I said, “Okay, I’ll go along with the gag, what are they?”

  “Something completely new.” It was Semlohcolresh speaking. I don’t like bosses who horn in on their employees’ explanations. “They do not match any known sapient genome. I can assure you that they are from Earth—some alternative version of Earth, anyway. The one known organism whose genetic code theirs most resembles is this one, right here.”

  Instead of sending it to our implants, Hoj put it up on a video screen that one wall had become. I vaguely recognized it, although I couldn’t guess the scale. Kind of a worm, I guessed, several times as long as it was wide, mottled grays and browns, its front end shaped like a cartoon arrow—the kind that says “You Are Here”. The most noticeable thing was a pair of oval eyes—eyespots, I learned later—not unlike those of the creatures that we’d seen recorded in Ray’s implants.

  “It’s a planarian,” the pathologist declared. “Plantyhelminthes Turbellaria dugesia, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. A common, ordinary flatworm.”

  “About an inch long,” Semlohcolresh observed.

  “Its eyes look crossed,” I crossed my own. Not many dogs can do that.

  “Which means somebody is Appropriating Persons again,” said Eichra Oren.

  I countered, “Or that, unprecedentedly, as far as we were aware until now, these things have invented sideways time-travel all by themselves.”

  “My thought, exactly,” Hoj agreed, nodding. “Say, listen: do you guys think you might be able to wangle me an introduction to Lornis Adubudu?”

  It could have been the idea that someone had discovered crosstime travel. The expression on Eichra Oren’s face was one I’d never seen before.

  Before we left home, we’d had a pair of eerily similar visits to make.

  The first was to Llossure Knarrvite, A.K.A. Helianthus sapiens russellii, the flower guy from the restaurant who we’d learned was in recovery at home. We’d never really had a talk with him about his missing partner—he’d been too busy convulsing at the time, and we’d been fighting for our lives with what had seemed like half the Elders’ menagerie.

  The house was about what I’d expected, located on a hill covered with prairie grasses, a few miles north of the coastal road, a low structure of blond brick, with a roof of some kind of tough transparent plastic.

  I’ll bet he hated birds.

  Inside, the walls were covered with mirrors, which alternated with various original paintings—many of them pleasant landscapes showing mountains, evergreen trees, rustic buildings, and rocky streams—all framed and covered with ultraviolet-proof transparencies that also protected them from a periodic misting the house delivered. At a guess, I’d have said the scenes were from the northern of the western continents.

  “No, I haven’t heard from Meerltchirt,” the poor plantman told us. He was a pitiful sight. It was as if he’d fallen victim to a gang of psychopathic tree surgeons. He didn’t have a single branch, leaf, or tendril left, simply bandages wrapped around his stem where they had been. Even worse, his face seemed to be lacking at least half of its petals.

  In the background, music was playing that I seemed to recognize from some of Misterthoggosh’s otherworld imports. I also remembered the kind of stuffy “classical” music that orthodox plant people preferred.

  Unsubtle, I asked, “Are you a sport?”

  “Not genetically,” our host replied good-naturedly, “but I do love Dixieland.”

  We’d had no choice but to introduce ourselves, all over again. The fellow was standing in what appeared to be his living room, feet in a bucket of plant nutrients and medicine, and strapped to a pole to keep him upright. Beside him, on a tall, small-topped table not unlike the ones at the restaurant, a stick of incense was burning. When we’d been warned about his defective memory, we’d also been informed that the only photosynthesis he was getting was by way of his stem, although he was receiving regular chlorophyll injections in order to increase its efficiency.

  “You’re looking very green this afternoon,” Eichra Oren said politely.

  “Far greener than I have any reason to expect,” he replied. “Thank you very much. It has to be the chlorophyll injections. Reasonably painful, but refreshing. The worst part, is that I can’t do anything for myself until my tendrils grow back. Would you mind terribly, sir, scratching my stem over on the right side, about an inch beneath my blossom?”

  My boss had had worse requests. As he complied, our host, sighing with relief, said, “Please understand that I don’t remember either of you. I assure you it’s nothing personal. Perhaps poison was already getting to me by then. Or perhaps it’s a case of retrograde amnesia. You say that you’re looking for Meerltchirt, my friend and business partner. I infer that it’s for his bride-to-be. Do you think that’s wise?”

  I had to work to suppress a bark of laughter. The guy was smarter than her looked—which, at the moment, was terrible. Eichra Oren nodded. “It isn’t our place to decide, Llossure Knarrvite. The job is ethical.”

  “I understand perfectly,” the plant replied. “Please call me Knarr. I sincerely wish I could offer you something, but I have sent my symbiote on an errand.” I wondered what kind of symbiote a sunflower would have. “Perhaps, instead, I can offer you some information.”

  Eichra Oren raised his eyebrows. “Information?”

  The flower-being gave a little nod. “It’s the very least I can do, considering what you were put through at my restaurant. I’m a highly peaceable individual. I’m only grateful I wasn’t conscious to witness it.”

  “Very well,” the boss nodded. “Please go on.”

  “As you may have discerned from my decor, I am not originally from this place, with its many lovely rivers and vineyards, its fascinating practice of bullfighting, but also with its horrible hot wind from the south that drives mammals mad, and can blow the ears off a boulder. I am from the temperate northwest continent, not far from its eastern coast.”

  “I see.” If the boss had noticed that the fellow was nostalgically failing to mention charming little western phenomena like blizzards, hailstorms, hurricanes, and the howling nor’easter, he wasn’t letting on.

  “No you don’t, Eichra Oren, but you will before long. Understand that the achievement of maturity in my species is marked by a ritual of passage in which the young—who have been completely sessile until then, rooted in one spot—uproot themselves, to the delight of their adoring friends and families who have gathered together for the occasion.”

  Horribly enough, I could picture the whole thing in my mind. Delicious packets of manure and refreshing flashlights laid out on the table. Guests presenting congratulatory bouquets of gerbils to the celebration.

  “At my uprooting, I met a young jumping spider just the equivalent of my age, nephew to my parents’ neighbors, who was visiting from the Great Continent—from this very neighborhood, in fact—and we ‘hit it off’ as the saying goes, from the beginning. We became friends and got in and out of a lot of adventures together. He’d been everywhere, while, because I had been confined to the nursery, I’d only read and seen and heard about what he’d done in person. I wanted to travel and have some experiences, and my friend Meerltchirt was willing to guide me.”

  “This is all very interesting,” Eichra Oren said. “But what does it—”

  “I’m getting to that. The point is, at the conclusion of each of our expeditions—have you heard the singing Quindli sponges of the Island Continent?—we always returned to the same place, his aunt and uncle’s cabin in the mountains of the northwestern continent. It was a kind of ritual with us, every y
ear, even after we started the restaurant.”

  He gave us the coordinates and we promised to look in on him again from time to time until he was well. He seemed a bit lonely and grateful.

  Talk about amnesia. I never remembered to ask him what a Prelbish is.

  “No, I don’t know what a Prelbish is,” Lyn Chow told me, as she raised her chair a bit higher on its antigrav. “You sure you heard it right?”

  She could stand, and walk, but she still needed to rest as much as possible. She’d lost a lot of blood, and her knife injury, long and deep, would have killed most people in any other civilization but this one.

  I looked AT the highly-decorative lady in her highly decorative eye under her glossy blue-black bangs. “I’m a dog. I can’t hear any way but right.” She wore a high-collared two-piece peacock blue outfit of embroidered brocade with a diagonal opening that suited her perfectly, somehow.

  “There is always that, of course,” she conceded. She looked from me to Eichra Oren. “Will either of you gentlebeings care for more tea?”

  I’d had enough tea to last me a lifetime. I don’t believe that dogs are supposed to drink the stuff. Eichra Oren, who didn’t like it any more than I did, surprised me. “Yes, please, I believe that I will.”

  We’d come to check up on Lyn Chow one more time before we headed for Lanternlight. Medicine in the Elders’ world is good, an amalgam of the healing wisdom of ten thousand cultures. The lady had shown us her wound—blushing furiously as she did it; her people are notoriously undemonstrative—which was no more than a hair-line of scar tissue, now, even though the enemy’s big, curved knife had all but cut her in half.