The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  In Cabot Park, the cops dredged Coal Smear Creek for the remains of the male android, while another team bagged up the soggy mess in Pump Station 3. (When the female android self-destructed, flying bits of her had perforated five of the plant’s water vats. Much spillage. It was only luck the whole blessed petting zoo wasn’t washed away.)

  Similar investigations revved up all over the world—everywhere proctors got killed—and by the end of the day, detectives had accumulated enough evidence to affect continental drift. By then there was an official task force coordinating the work, trying to avoid pissing contests between federals and locals. Meanwhile, all levels of government had bitten their nails to the quick, worrying the Vigil would throw a tantrum demanding Immediate Action Now.

  Of course we didn’t. How would that be productive? But you can bet good money, there were suddenly a lot more proctors exercising their constitutional responsibility to scrutinize police activities.

  The local detectives treated me like velvet. I might have had a few less-than-friendly run-ins with police in the past, but now I was a member of the Vigil, and respectable as mother’s milk. On the other hand, the appearance of the tube of light—that thing I’d started to call the Peacock’s Tail because of its colors—well, a mystery like that set conservative cop nerves on edge. What was it? Did I have any guesses? Could the investigators maybe dismiss it as hallucination, a delusion brought on by terror, stress, and my newly implanted link-seed?

  I could only shrug; I saw what I saw. If they wanted a dissertation on link-seed side effects, ask a neurologist.

  (Of course I could have retrieved some clinical data myself. Reams of it. The Vigil’s databanks were full to bursting with case studies, every possible way link-seeds could bugger your brain. But I didn’t try access the information. You know why.)

  The reports released to the media said nothing about the Peacock’s Tail. Not that the cops wanted to suggest this tube-of-light business was a figment of my imagination. Three different detectives made a point of telling me it was Standard Police Procedure to withhold a few details of any crime.

  Yeah. Sure.

  My family wanted me to quit the Vigil. “At least ask for a leave of absence,” Winston suggested, “till they catch this bastard who’s mucking about with robots.”

  If I begged off on a leave of absence, I knew I’d never go back. And I’d still have poison ivy in my brain.

  “No,” I said.

  We were in Winston’s private dome—all seven of my spouses sitting worried around the dome’s circumference, with me in the middle. Our Faye in the hot seat. Concern pressing in on me…like the bad old days at sixteen, when my friends watched me trolling the streets for trouble. Later, age nineteen, as we kicked around the thought of getting married, all seven of them took me aside, each by each, to murmur, “You won’t be too crazy, will you, Faye? You’ve got the angries out of your system? You won’t make us all widows?”

  “No,” I told them all now in Winston’s dome. “You don’t have to fret about me.”

  Which is what I used to say in the bad old days.

  Back then, I believed myself. After every scrape, I believed I’d finally scrounged up the wisdom and willpower to keep my head straight. Eventually, it even became true.

  Now…someone was killing proctors. Maybe someone who’d be fuming I got away.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “Really.”

  They all looked back at me with old, haunted eyes.

  I swore I’d push on with my scrutiny of Bon Cty Ccl 11-28; but the mayor withdrew the bill pending amendments by the Department of Works. When the female robot blew herself up, the explosion had caused structural damage to Pump Station 3. No holes, just cracks…but enough for the place to be declared unsafe. Now the engineers were chewing their pencils, deciding whether to shore up the walls or tear them down completely, maybe rebuild something bigger and better on the same site.

  Whichever way things shook out, it meant shuffling budgets and priorities…not just for the public works, but in all city departments. The mayor’s office sent a polite note to the Vigil, saying it might be weeks before any new bills were presented to council. Ergo, we’d have no pressing scrutinies for a while. Nothing but bread-and-butter business happening at city hall: selling dog licenses, keeping the proto-nute flowing. Take a well-deserved vacation, folks.

  You had to wonder if the mayor was afraid more proctors would get blown up on city property.

  The Oolom cemetery sat a good ways outside Bonaventure city limits—in the tundra forest, where every footstep got muffled by frost-green carpet moss.

  I liked the quiet. Serene. Somber. No hint of maudlin.

  Homo sap cemeteries were another story. Most looked like tarted-up boneyards—young as their fresh paint and thinly populated. Our species hadn’t lived long enough on Demoth to lose our oldest generation. Just accident victims like my father.

  Dads had been buried in an empty field outside Sallysweet River: no trees, no other gravestones, just a hectare I of uncut yellow-grass with a coffin-sized hole in the middle. The only field near town with deep enough soil to dig a decent grave.

  But at Chappalar’s interment, we had moss and trees and silence.

  The thaw was four days old now. You could still see snow streaks hiding in crannies, but the open areas were clear and dry. If you pressed down hard with one foot, you could hear mud squishing under the moss. I don’t know why I kept doing that.

  All the Bonaventure proctors came to the funeral, of course. Plus an Oolom I didn’t recognize—an older man wearing shade-mist goggles. My jaw clenched like stone at the sight of those goggles; they were worn by plague victims who’d never regained use of their eyelids. The goggles kept out dust, and preserved corneal humidity by spritzing up a wisp of mist every so often. In bright light they darkened: an artificial squint.

  Simple things, those goggles. Not sinister—just a practical solution to a low-grade problem. But. They brought back unwanted memories of the Circus. A hundred and twenty white-on-white Ooloms wearing the same kind of goggles under the Big Top.

  “Who’s the stranger?” I whispered to the person beside me: Jupkur, an Oolom proctor who’d taken my arm as we walked to the burial site.

  Jupkur followed my gaze, then let his eyes slip past to pretend he hadn’t been staring. “Master Tic,” Jupkur replied, barely mouthing the words. “Just arrived to replace Chappalar.”

  “He’s a master proctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they bungholed him to Bonaventure?”

  “Yes.”

  Jupkur turned away quickly and made some lame remark about the weather to the person on his other side. I took the hint…but only for here and now. Next time I got Jupkur in private, I’d coax the full story out of him.

  Here’s the thing: the Vigil only granted the title “master” to a handful of people every generation—the keenest, the brightest, the best. Master proctors never got short-sheeted down to city politics, especially not to drowsy towns like Bonaventure. They scrutinized the world government and interplanetary affairs…like the trade treaty currently being hammered out between Demoth and the Divian Free Republic.

  So what was a master proctor doing here? Whose wife had he been caught diddling?

  Then again, you didn’t blackball an exalted master just for being caught on the wrong side of a bedroom door. And your average master proctor wasn’t interested in bed-hopping anyway—they were supposedly so near sainthood, you could use their peckers as night-lights.

  If this Master Tic had got sent to Bonaventure, it was because the Vigil dearly wanted him here. Because there was important work for him to do.

  What work? Especially with our city council on hiatus for a few weeks.

  It had to be something to do with Chappalar’s death. And with the only proctor who’d survived the robot attacks.

  My skin got a case of the goosecreeps. I had a feeling I’d be seeing a lot more of Master Tic�
�s goggly eyes in the days to come.

  At the gravesite, Chappalar’s family had already planted the roots of a snake-belly palm. It was a native Demoth tree and lightning fast-growing under the right conditions. In tropical jungles, a snake-belly would seed itself at the base of another tree, then climb that tree’s exterior in a solid sheath, like a snake swallowing the host tree trunk from the ground up. With enough water and sunlight, a snake-belly could sprout up a hand’s breadth every day— just a reed-thin shell around the host, letting the inner trunk sustain all the weight. Typical parasite behavior. Once in place, the snake-belly would digest the host trunk it had swallowed, little by little creating wood of its own from the outside in…till after a few decades, the host was fully consumed, leaving only a snake-belly with a solid wood core.

  Down south, snake-bellies could grow around other snake-bellies, growing around their swallowed-up hosts. In the Pistolet Museum, they had a stump showing five separate snake-bellies in concentric rings round a toothpick core of original raspfeather.

  In the Bonaventure Cemetery, we’d soon have a single snake-belly round a core of Chappalar.

  They’d wrapped his body in a shroud of froth white silk. Half a dozen Oolom mourners had turned white themselves, though they stood on light green moss…the phenomenon of sympathetic transference, taking on someone else’s color in moments of heart-deep emotion. I wished I could go white with them, to show Chappalar/ his family/myself that I truly felt the grief. But I stayed lumpishly Faye-colored as the pallbearers eased the body onto a wooden support stand atop the snake-belly roots.

  A single Oolom child toddled forward and splashed soupy brown juice on the plant at Chappalar’s feet. Jupkur whispered that the liquid was fertilizer, laced with a mix of growth hormones. In a week, the tree would have swallowed Chappalar up to the ankles. By fall, the whole corpse would be wrapped in a snake-belly sheath. In thirty years give or take, my friend Chappalar, the man who died saving my life, would be entirely absorbed by the tree.

  Even his bones. Ooloms have such precious lightweight bones.

  Around us, no ornamental landscaping, no headstones, no crypts—just a forest of snake-belly palms, each one the height of a person.

  By the end of the burial service, every Oolom was sympathetic white…all but Master Tic. That irked me: a peevish indignation on Chappalar’s behalf. I’d turn white if I could; why didn’t Tic?

  To be fair, it wasn’t Tic’s fault: Oolom color changes aren’t consciously controlled. For Tic to turn white, he’d have to be overcome with grief—not likely, considering he’d never even met Chappalar. Tic had come to the funeral out of courtesy, showing polite respect…who could ask more?

  I could. Seething-steaming-indignant.

  Whenever I go to a funeral, there’s always something that makes me furious.

  Ooloms don’t do tea and sympathy after a funeral. Instead, Chappalar’s family and the Oolom proctors glided off to the cemetery chapel, where (Jupkur said), “We’ll pray for just hours and hours. The priests’ major source of income is selling knee pads.”

  Jupkur hated to speak seriously about anything; but he wasn’t the only Oolom who turned jokily offhanded when the subject of religion came up. Ooloms didn’t talk to humans about what they believed—none of them did. Maybe that was an article of their faith, keeping mum in front of outsiders. An article of all their faiths, I should say…because whatever their religion was, it had three major denominations, plus various splinter groups. Each sect identified itself by a gobbledygook name that no one ever translated into English.

  Secretive bunch, those Ooloms.

  So the Ooloms went off by themselves, leaving me to walk home alone. A couple hours on foot through the countryside. Of course, the other human proctors offered me rides; but I hadn’t trekked through open tundra in years, and the quiet of it suddenly called to me. Being out among the trees, breathing the wet smell of spring, I’d been grabbed by a bubbly heartache for girlhood—for times long ago in Sallysweet River, where you could follow the Bullet tracks five minutes out of town and feel all alone on the planet.

  Solitude. The rustle of trees. The pip-pip of crawler-birds slinking over the forest floor.

  Just me.

  Just me and my link-seed.

  Okay. I can almost hear you groaning, Where’s your head, woman? Three days ago some slip-wit tried to kill you, and now you want to isolate yourself in an empty forest?

  Good point.

  I could make up excuses. I could put on the blather, how Demoth was a peaceful planet where assassinations didn’t happen…not often, anyway. Women didn’t need armed escorts to spend a therapeutic afternoon walking through the woods. What happened three days earlier was a fluke, the once-in-a-lifetime act of a crazed fanatic who’d soon be caught by the cops.

  I could surely lie to you. But damn my link-seed, I couldn’t lie to myself.

  Here’s the thing: deep down, I wanted to give the killer another shot. To see what would happen. It was another freckles-and-scalpel thing.

  So I walked alone. Just to see.

  I avoided the road—the woods were dry enough for walking, both the carpet-moss parts and the spots where yellow-grass could get a foothold. (Yellow-grass always grows close to water. Seen from a flying skimmer, every lake and river on Great St. Caspian has a lemon-colored fringe, like fatty buildup on the wall of an artery…but the yellow stretch fades to the frost green of carpet moss the farther you go into deep forest.)

  I didn’t fret about getting lost—I could track myself by the sun. And come evening, there’d be the lights of the city to spot by the glow. This was a tundra forest…not thick stands of timber blocking the sky, but individual bluebarrel trees, well separated from each other. Any seed that rooted too close to an existing tree just wouldn’t grow. Wouldn’t get enough light, wouldn’t get enough nutrition from the gaunt soil.

  In my mood, that seemed like a metaphor for something.

  I dawdled away the afternoon. Nothing to see but stunted bluebarrel trees and lumpy-bumpy moss interrupted by the occasional upthrust of stone.

  In one slab of rock, I found a house-sized rectangle cut straight into the stone. At one time it must have been two stories deep, though now it was three-quarters full of dirt and weeds. A leftover from pre-Oolom settlements some three thousand years old. Demoth never evolved intelligent species of its own, but aliens from the League had visited now and then in the past—setting up outposts for a while, then moving on when they lost interest in our poky little planet.

  Great St. Caspian had hosted thousands of such visitors; their householes were everywhere, mostly filled in and earthed over now, with whatever had spilled into them during the past three millennia. The aliens dug mines and tunnels too. In Sallysweet River we used to play “Archaeologists Bold,” excavating the nearby holes to find rusty metal junk of all shapes and sizes. We’d badger our parents to call the Heritage Board, convinced that we’d dug up priceless alien artifacts…but nothing ever came of it. The board had long ago surveyed a handful of sites and found nothing of interest. Nothing worthy of publication in a good academic journal. So now the Heritage Board ignored the ruins—dismissed anyone who wasted time snooping about in them.

  Mistake. The Vigil would never have allowed such book-blinkered sloppiness. But the Heritage Board answered to the Technocracy, not local government, so it was beyond our scrutiny.

  Mistake, mistake, mistake.

  Sunset was coming on purple and peach when a skimmer flew over my head. It wasn’t the first I’d heard in the day, but the others were distant hums tracking the ocean coast or the Bullet tracks to the interior—probably families off on an outing, playing hooky now that the thaw had come. This new skimmer was sailing straight over the treetops of barren forest…and it had Outward Fleet insignia painted on its side.

  Queer thing, that. The navy had only one base on Demoth, way down by the equator near Snug Harbor. And navy personnel seldom found cause to venture out to the res
t of the planet; the base was mostly a dormitory for safety inspectors who met incoming starships at our orbitals.

  A loudspeaker boomed from the skimmer’s belly: “Faye Smallwood?”

  Damn. So much for a quiet walk in the woods.

  Steeling myself, I did the obvious—stoked up my link-seed and contacted the world-soul. Has the Outward Fleet filed flight plans for craft in the Bonaventure area?

  The world-soul didn’t answer with words; but my brain suddenly knew for a certainty, no plans had been filed. Some other time I’d worry how creepy that was, having knowledge planted straight into my head. For now, the skimmer was my immediate problem. Either the Admiralty was running a secret op with my name on it, or I was on the verge of being ambushed by a wolf in fleet clothing.

  “Faye Smallwood!” the loudspeaker called again.

  “Who’s asking?” I shouted back.

  The skimmer was hovering now, its engine wash vibrating the bluebarrels around me. Their fat, hollow trunks began to resonate, producing deep growly notes as pure as a forest of bass viols.

  The skimmer’s side hatch opened. A man wearing gold fatigues leaned out with something in his hand.

  Yet another pistol. Not a jelly gun this time; a hypersonic stunner, like Explorers use in fic-chips.

  In the chips, stunners make an edgy whirring sound. I didn’t stay conscious long enough to hear it.

  Headache. Muddy. 6.1 on the Hangover Scale. What you get from mixing wine, tequila, and screech.

  I’d had worse. And this time I woke up alone, with no beer-breath stranger lying comatose on my arm, cutting off the circulation.