The Stalk

by Janet Morris

  The Assistant Deputy Undersecretary for Interstellar Affairs/Medinan Desk assured Croft that he indeed had every nuance and fell back.

  The third staffer said, when Mickey eyed him, "Sir, we have an interim report from Mr. Remson's task force, and a request for permission to proceed—"

  "Permission denied. I'm going out to the Ball site myself. No action is to be taken until I've reviewed all the details personally."

  "Yes, sir," said the staffer doubtfully.

  "And get with Mr. Cummings' office. Tell them that there'll be no further work for his firm on the Threshold logistical problem until I'm satisfied that everything is proceeding smoothly. Make the stop-work order retroactive to this morning. Make it clear that no hours are billable until further notice."

  "Yes, sir," said the staffer, happier now that he could do some damage to someone.

  Hitting Cummings hard, in the pocketbook where it would hurt, was Croft's way of reminding the NAMECorp magnate to be on his best behavior while Dini's father, the Mullah Beni Forat, was in town.

  The staffer hurried away in a duck walk that testified to shoes too stylish to be comfortable and a new sense of importance too inflated not to give nightmares to the first luckless Cummings employee he contacted.

  "And you, Mr. Reice?" Croft sighed, left with only the ConSec lieutenant accompanying him.

  "Mr. Secretary, I've got some tracking information on those runaway kids, sir. Mr. Remson thought you would want it immediately."

  And by courier. These halls were Mickey's private preserve. They turned a corner into a low-ceilinged secure corridor whose length was baffled with cloth constructs and tapestries and lit with fluorescents whose white noise defeated most recording equipment.

  "What I'd like immediately is a summary, in one sentence. Or less, Mr. Reice."

  "The kids are clearly no longer on Threshold, which means they're either being hidden on a ship somewhere nearby, or they've made a break for it. We're checking passenger manifests of outgoing traffic now."

  "That's two sentences, Mr. Reice."

  "Sorry, sir. I also brought a progress report from the Task Force...."

  "Give it to me now. I'll read it on my way out to the Ball site. I assume you're staying here to continue your investigation?"

  Reice handed over the black bag, saying a bit wistfully, "I thought that was what you'd want, sir."

  Croft sent the ConSec staffer off to make sure a fast cruiser was ready and waiting to take him out to the Ball.

  The black bag in his hand was heavy. It represented thousands of man-hours squeezed into a very few days. If anyone, even Remson, could have been trusted with Croft's evaluation of the true nature of the modeler data taken from Dini Forat, much of this dithering could have been avoided.

  But what did you say? Threshold has already been invaded, penetrated, and possibly compromised at its heart by the Unity aliens?

  Croft wondered, all the long journey out to the Ball site in the sleek ConSec cruiser's VIP cabin, what use there was in pretending that he was in control when, clearly, he was not.

  Although, he was trying his best to pretend. Space travel had never been his favorite pastime. Now, it excited all the phenomena he had been so stolidly trying to contain: time slipped back and forth for him, yawning endlessly, then compressing itself.

  Reading the progress report Vince's task force had prepared was as arduous as reading the complete works of Henry James and as inconclusive as his own state of mind.

  When the ConSec cruiser came up on the Ball site, the intercom in his little cabin crackled and a voice told him that if he wished to see the docking maneuver, he should come forward.

  Forward he went, and there was the Ball. He sank into a copilot station and forced himself to look at it. Accursed thing, featureless and round. Was it a Stonehenge or a Rosetta Stone? Was it a place, or a portal?

  He hadn't a single person on his staff who knew the answer to even those simple questions. And now the Ball would again be at the coordinates of controversy. Perhaps they should destroy the thing. Or find a way, as rumor said was possible, to get inside it. Joe South had gotten inside the Ball, so his records and some supporting evidence claimed, but Croft had sent South off to the Unity with the new ambassador.

  Another error. Another piece of faulty judgment. Another decision whose provenance he now doubted was his own addled, aging brain.

  The Ball didn't metamorphose under his scrutiny, as others had claimed to see it do. It didn't open a mouth to swallow him. It didn't change colors. It didn't disappear to reveal anything alien behind or within it.

  It just sat there, looking like a Christmas ornament on a toothpick stand. And then, for just a moment, Mickey Croft thought he saw a leading edge of sunrise, a shimmer of color, lions holding open the doors of a portal, and dragons within the portal, weaving reality in great clawed hands.

  He grasped the arms of his chair, and the phantasm obligingly disappeared. He had been reading too many reports. He had eyestrain. The pilot beside him was busy with docking maneuvers. Today had been a busy day.

  Croft wanted only to leave the vessel, to walk over consistent ground. He wanted to greet Remson with no sliding of his person through collapsing spaces, no climbing of Escher-like stairs into peripheral dimensions, no treading of Penrose tiles into eternity as he tried to shake Vince's hand.

  It was physical contact that kicked off the worst of Croft's symptoms, he knew. The interval in the modeler bay had almost made him forget the horrors of coming loose from Euclidian geometry.

  Euclidian metaphysicis, now, that was another way to look at the phenomenal world. But Croft must look at the face of Remson, swimming before him, and make sense of the words coming out of Remson's mouth in backward streams of alphabet letters.

  Somehow, the Secretary General of the UNE managed to make the long walk into Remson's ad hoc Spacedock Seven office without falling over himself, becoming a public spectacle, or saying anything to betray his sensory distress when faced with simple tasks such as climbing the stairless ramp that led into the bowels of the facility without sliding back down to the bottom and having to start all over again.

  Remson was certain that the lovers had come as far as the Ball. "Mickey, I'm sure of it. They must have been smuggled out here by someone—or something. We logged an approach to the Ball that probably wasn't an error on the part of a freighter pilot. And maybe we had an unscheduled EVA. But the freighter was in heavy traffic, and it wasn't that far off course. There was no reason to think twice about it at Traffic Control. I wasn't even informed at the time. Only later, when we had a ... disturbance here. You know the kind I mean."

  "Lions and the portals and dragons all the way down," Croft said under his breath.

  Vince Remson's head snapped up and he squinted at Croft as if Mickey had suddenly combusted before his eyes.

  "You saw something on your approach vector?"

  "I see lots of things, these days, Vince. Now what shall we do about children who travel in high circles in ways we don't understand?"

  Remson got up and paced his Y Ring office until Croft saw a parade of Remsons following each other in close succession, a hundred Remsons, in single file, each with hands clasped behind a bent back, each with a bowed head.

  Remson said, "Those kids didn't debark with the freighter, or with any other ship, onto Spacedock Seven. Either somebody's hiding them here for some reason or other, or they're gone. Okay. But how? Where? Here? In the Ball, if anybody can live in there? And why?"

  "All work on the Threshold move has to stop, Vince, until we have some answers."

  "I heard."

  "Find me some answers, Vince. Or at least the right questions to ask the Unity."

  Remson came toward Croft and a fan of Remsons followed, a conga line of individuals inhabiting every iota of space between Remson's starting point and Mickey Croft.

  It was too crowded in here.

  Croft said, "I'm staying out here with you until we
know what we need to do next."

  Next. The concept was central to man's survival in the universe: action, duration, event, and result.

  Were the children here now? Did it matter? Was Remson, the most efficient of Croft's staff, aware of how contaminated his own reasoning was becoming?

  Or was everything merely proceeding logically to an end-point that Mickey Croft couldn't understand, but which, when reached, would give mankind gifts beyond measure.

  Croft was too exhausted from the process of discovery to credit any speculation as to the quality of result.

  The children had seemed happy. Now they were gone. Croft should be happy, too: he had avoided yet another confrontation with Richard the Second, and the beginning of a new round of difficulties with the Mullah Forat.

  Work on moving Threshold anywhere was now stopped until Mickey was satisfied as to the risk involved. He should have done it long ago, perhaps. But time had less and less meaning, these days.

  Outside, close by Spacedock Seven, the Ball awaited, with its leonine guards watchful and, within, seen dimly through his aging eyes, dragons upon dragons knitting spacetime unto eternity.

  If the lions had greeted the vanished children, and remanded them into the hands of the dragons that Croft had seen, then he was worrying for no reason. Wasn't he? They had gone where they wished, of their own accord. Hadn't they?

  To get the right answers, one had to ask the proper questions. If Croft had been asking the wrong questions of the Interstitial Interpreter all this time, and of himself, then whose fault was that? But what were the right questions?

  All the Remsons before him closed up into one Remson.

  The single Remson said, "I'm glad we're slowing this thing down, Mickey. Too much chance for an error this way."

  And it made Croft feel much better, somehow, to know that Remson's judgment was in accord with his.

  CHAPTER 10

  Huddle

  Down in the leader Zone, at a bar Reice hadn't been in since he'd become so damned respect able. Reice poured blue beet from a pitcher and waited for his aftermarketeer contact to show.

  The place was full of camel-lipped Epsilonians and worse, dank and smokey, styled like a twenty-first-century Earth bar, complete with a jukebox that played ancient music recorded with real analog instruments.

  No chance of anything said in here being overheard, or recorded with any level of microwave directional technology, including lip-sync readers: it was too damned dark and noisy for that.

  So Reice was relaxed as could be. and the blue beer further mellowed his mood. He was thinking about ordering some food at the bar, when a hand came down on his shoulder.

  Reice was still carrying his A-POT pistol, mainly because he had the clout to do so, but at that moment he was comforted by its presence.

  The hamlike hand that spun him around on his barstool belonged to a "bioengineered person" of test-lube descent who had a grayish pelt like a beaver's and musculature suitable for a vanadium miner on a two-gee world.

  "Meesler Reez. preeze cum dis vay." said the subhuman.

  Reice delicately lifted the huge hand from his shoulder, loosening the numbing grip of its claw-ended fingers first with a light slap "Sure thine Wait till I get my beer."

  He took the pitcher, told the bar servo to bring more beer and clean glasses to his table, and followed the buck-toothed giant across the floor. It moved easily, despite its flat, spatulate tail, among the tables.

  When it came to the wall of booths, it showed all of its sharp, white teeth. "Meester Reez bring beer, oh boy." it said.

  Someone in the shadowy back of the booth said, "You take the beer, Barney, and go drink it with your girlfriend. On us."

  The aftermarketeer's human hand beckoned from the shadows. "Siddown, Reice. Good to see you."

  Reice slid into the booth, across from Sling, whose earring sparkled briefly in an errant beam of light. "I can't believe you're fond of this tourist trap, Sling. Why the theatrics?"

  "Because nobody'd believe that I'd meet you here, or that you'd come here wearing that high-ticket hardware. Every macho fool in this place is trying to figure how to get it off you."

  "I haven't had my exercise today, so let 'em try."

  "Can it be you haven't arrested anyone for doing something wrong in a whole twenty-four hours?"

  "That could change, any time. What's up, Sling? I got things to do and people to see."

  "Important people, I hear."

  "Sometimes I wonder whether that's an earring in your ear or a transponder."

  Sling elaborately took off the earring and put it between them. Reice took an empty glass and put it over the earring. Sling said, "Okay?"

  "Okay," Reice agreed, and said. "What's up?"

  "Two kids, a black box. a joy-ride out to the Ball locus. a short spacewalk from which they never returned. . . . Who knows, might have the makings of a folk ballad.;*

  "Might have the makings of a jail term." Reice disagreed.

  "Come on. You know I came straight to you. soon as I could without arousing their suspicions. They didn't need my extraordinary technical skills: they had their own key to the highway with them."

  "Alien manufacture?"

  "You be

  "Get a good look."

  "Memorized it, for what good that's going to do. No obvious power source. Fiberoptics that terminated in n-space." Sling shrugged. "I'd draw it for you on the table in condensate, but the result might work and we'd end up in some other dimension—and me without my space time suit."

  "So, what else?" Reice sat back and put up one knee as if Sling hadn't just given Reice the most valuable bit of information in the universe at this particular moment. "I don't suppose you ran a trip log?" Aftermarketeers ran close to the edge of legality. They usually had the brains not to leave incriminating evidence lying around in their electronics.

  "I kept a running log of the trip on my little gray cells." Sling tapped his forehead, leaning forward. "What do I get? Paid, maybe? You have a slush fund for this? Or is it just blue beer for subhumans, and thank you very much, buddy."

  "I'll go suggest a pension, a government contract, and a Secretariat medal. You never know what those UNE pukes will do."

  "They ought to get Joe South and Riva Lowe back here, have you suggested that? Before any more weird modes of transportation crop up. Or before we're hip-deep in something we can't handle. Those kids were purely weird, and I know weird when I see it."

  "I know you do, Sling." Reice felt nearly paternal to the aftermarketeer. "And don't worry, I'll take care of your missing persons report somehow that won't get you arrested for leaving the scene of an EVA without your passengers—some people would call that attempted murder." His voice was very low, now. "But we won't. And we'll keep the whole thing to ourselves. Assuming you'll help me make a good case to my bosses that we ought to do some damned thing to control that Ball access point to Unity space—especially considering what the runaway kids are like ... were like."

  Sling stood up. "Your place or mine?"

  Reice stood, too. "Your place. I don't want anything official about this. I got my own channels, now."

  At Sling's workshop, they could dummy up any kind of read-once-only deposition for Croft and his assistant secretary. And wouldn't that just make Remson's day.

  The key to the puzzle might be staring at him out of the only slightly drunk visage of Sling, the aftermarketeer, who'd been on the periphery of happenings at the Ball since it appeared out by Spacedock Seven.

  Reice was whistling as he followed Sling out of the bar, into the anonymity of the Loader Zone. Some days, fate just gave you a break. Once Reice showed his new evidence to Remson and Croft, Reice was going to be the new fair-haired boy around the Secretariat.

  Just leave it to the aftermarketeer to come up with the missing piece: he'd actually seen the kids do whatever they did when they got near the Ball. Seen them disappear, if that was what they did. Seen them use the conveyance mode that
the Unity aliens used, if that was what they did.

  An eyewitness. My, my, what a coup. All Reice had to do was keep Sling nice and safe now, out of the clutches of the Cummings dynasty or the Forat clan, and everything was going to be grand, just grand, from now on.

  CHAPTER 11

  Cold Feet

  The next time Croft visited the modeler bay. the simulation had replicated itself.

  Self-replicating machines were nothing new to Croft, but self-replica ting psychometric models? His fears of a virus penetrating the Stalk computer net nearly choked him. He could barely greet the Interstitial Interpreter model property.

  Now. in the light cone where the holographic image under scrutiny was customarily displayed, the simulation had company.

  And what company! A bit behind the primary model of the Interstitial Interpreter were two more aliens—the honor guard, complete with their ceremonial smoking pots—that Croft had first encountered aboard the Unity flagship.

  Three beings stared mournfully at him—or sympathetically. The odor he'd smelled in here earlier—of incense like woodmoss, jasmine, and copper—now had a real source.

  Mickey was tumbling as he said to the creatures in the light cone. "I can't keep on this way. I need real contact with you—contact that's creditable. And I need answers.

  Now!"

  "Now we have not your questions," said the Interstitial Interpreter, if said was the right word: the movements of the II's harelipped mouth had no direct relationship to the words Croft heard.

  He withstood the impulse to clap his hands over his ears.