The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  I loved the sound of that. Even if the Admiralty started throwing hush money around, they wouldn’t buy off Cheticamp.

  Glad I wasn’t the only one.

  It was dawn before we said good-bye to the house in the woods. Cheticamp didn’t want to split his forces by sending me home with one set of officers while leaving the rest to gather evidence. Ergo we all stayed together, me drinking tea in that gleamy-bright kitchen, till a second squad of detectives arrived to relieve the first. By then, I’d used the police communication system to call my family and tell them I was safe as a daisy, sound of life and limb…

  …which I truly was, all things considered. The dizziness passed; the hangover headache thudded itself out; and by dawn, plain old fatigue had settled in comfortably, just a punchy up-all-night weariness that left me feeling nostalgic and companionable. Near 4 A.M., Captain Cheticamp felt himself honor-bound to bestow the Great Weighty Lecture about people who go walking alone, especially when they know they might be targets…but he was so sweet pleased with how everything worked out, he didn’t dig in the spurs too sharply.

  Cheticamp said the police had been searching for me, almost from the moment I was kidnapped. The dipshits began jamming my link-seed even before they got my unconscious body into their skimmer; and the world-soul, none too happy with me vanishing from radio contact, triggered an alarm to Protection Central. Unlucky for me, the dipshits’ skimmer sported the best antidetection equipment available to the Outward Fleet, making it impossible to track by satellite or ground-based radar. Still, Cheticamp swore they’d had the situation well in hand—the Admiralty safe house was definitely within their search perimeter, so they would have found me if Admiral Ramos hadn’t got there first.

  “You realize,” he said, “you can’t trust this Ramos?”

  “Why not?”

  “Good cop, bad cop,” he replied. “Classic technique. A pair of vicious fucks put the scare into you, then a knight in shining armor rides to the rescue. Makes you grateful. Puts you under an obligation. It could be part of a plan.”

  “A plan to do what?” I asked.

  “Blessed if I know. But this Ramos is an admiral too, even if she claims her hands are clean.”

  I’m not witless—the same thought had already crossed my mind. Still, this kidnapping incident would lead to crippling-bad publicity for the High Council of Admirals; I found it hard to believe they’d expose themselves to that, just for Festina Ramos to win my confidence.

  A nobody, our Faye. In the great schemes of admirals, I just wasn’t that important.

  7

  A TOTAL LOON

  Once again, my family wanted to chain me to the bed with leg irons till police judged it safe for me to come out. You can guess what I said to that. Though I said it politely.

  Then they had fallback positions. They could ask Protection Central for round-the-clock surveillance. They could hire a bodyguard. They could buy me my own stunner or jelly gun. They could get another dog, but a mean one this time, instead of the shake-hands-and-beg chowhounds Barrett usually brought home. (It was, of course, Barrett himself who suggested this. Whatever problems the family faced, two times out of three Barrett would explain how everything could be fixed if we just bought the right kind of dog.)

  A typical view of my family in action. I let them have their shot at bullying me, but all they could really say was, “I’m scared, Faye.” And their suggestions were just scrabbly attempts to make a gesture, even if they knew it was useless, so they could pretend the danger was avoidable if only we Did Things Right.

  I couldn’t pretend that myself; so I caught a few hours’ sleep, then went in to work.

  Unlike most offices in downtown Bonaventure, our Vigil headquarters had never got “humanized”…which meant the office still flaunted the Oolom ambience established preplague. Floor-to-ceiling windows, for example, with wide exterior ledges for easy Oolom landings and takeoffs. Instead of glass, the windows were made of transparent nano membranes: 99 percent solid to keep out birds and insects, but porous enough to let through a hint of breeze and keep the Ooloms from feeling they were totally closed in.

  As a bonus, the nanites in the membranes allowed duly appointed proctors to pass back and forth between the offices and the ledge. Walking through was like shoving yourself into a sheet of gelatin—the solid surface turned viscous where you touched it, and sucked clingy-tight to your body as you pressed forward, slurping back together behind you when you came out the other side.

  Another thing about our office: it was a tree house.

  Ooloms hated making buildings from concrete or steel. They’d do it if they had to—Pump Station 3 dated back to Oolom times, and it had cement walls. (Cement walls with a slew of windows, not to mention dozens of skylights.) Still and all, Ooloms considered such construction materials a last resort: tolerable for plebeian spots like a water-treatment plant, but out of the question for the only Vigil headquarters on all Great St. Caspian. You wouldn’t stow the Mona Lisa in a mud shack, would you?

  So the Ooloms put our office in a tree. A sign of their immense respect for the Vigil. Or for trees. This particular tree had “monumental” written all over it: an equatorial species called a reshkent or kapok elm, but dosed with so many growth hormones, not to mention bioengineered goiter-grafts and longevity sap enhancers…well, transforming the original reshkent into our offices was like changing a toothpick to a totem pole. Not just making it whopping amounts bigger, but hanging all kinds of doodads on it.

  Picture a massive central trunk twenty meters in diameter, but with a hollow core big enough to hold an elevator shaft. (Even Ooloms needed elevators on occasion: when high winds made flying dangerous, or when carting around office furniture.) Every five meters up the trunk was a bulging ring, like a fat belt around the tree’s girth. A belt that stuck out so far, it was more like a life preserver. Each such ring had enough space to hold four good-sized offices, complete with those nanite windows, plus a desk, chairs, and a darling wee latrine. (Plumbing wastes were converted to fertilizer for the tree itself.)

  Our tree had six such “floors,” six annular rings spaced bulgy up the trunk…and above all that was a gigantic umbrella of leaves stretched almost fifty meters in every direction, soaking up sun to keep the tree alive. Barely a fifth of those leaves fell each year; the rest hung on, still doing their photon-collection job no matter how crispy they became with cold. Now and then throughout the winter, a leaf grew so heavy with ice that it snapped off its branch, dropped sharp and fast, then shattered like a glass dagger on some window ledge.

  At one time, all twenty-four offices in the tree housed proctors; but that was before the plague. Now, Floors One and Two were empty, and I was the only person on Floor Three. Senior proctors filled up the higher floors…except for a vacant room on Floor Five. Chappalar’s office. I could have taken it but didn’t want to. Not even for the better view.

  I supposed our new arrival, Master Tic, would claim Chappalar’s old office. He’d also take over Chappalar’s old duties…which might mean he was slated to be my supervisor.

  Unless master proctors were too important to waste time riding herd on a novice.

  Or unless I got some say in the matter myself; in which case, I’d pick one of the proctors I’d known for seven years, instead of some goggle-wearing outsider who thought he could step into Chappalar’s shoes.

  (All right—Ooloms didn’t actually wear shoes. Just flimsy-dick things like ballet slippers made of ort skin. But you know what I mean.)

  To find out who’d become my new mentor, I took the elevator straight up to Jupkur’s office on the top ring. Jupkur was Gossip Central for our building—not only did he know everything, but he blabbed it at the least provocation, all the while saying, “Well, I don’t like to talk…”

  By luck, Jupkur was in: lying flat on his desk and staring at the ceiling. Don’t ask me why. Since the plague, our Oolom proctors had spent more than two decades immersed in our culture and ada
pting to our ways. God knows, they worked hard to fit in with our particular brand of Homo sap behavior. Now and then, though, you still caught them acting just plain alien, especially when humans weren’t around.

  I found it kind of endearing.

  “Welcome back, Faye,” Jupkur said without looking in my direction. Ooloms were nigh-on eerie when it came to recognizing people by the sound of their footsteps. (They can even tell when you’ve bought new boots…maybe the only males in the universe who ever notice.)

  “You missed an exciting night,” he told me, still keeping his gaze on the ceiling. “The rest of us got to loiter till three in the morning, inventing theories of where you might be. Some hypotheses were extremely clever…even witty, though I shouldn’t brag. Then I tried to organize a betting pool, guessing the state of your corpse when the police finally found you. Alas, the others spent too long scrutinizing the rules of the wager; you turned up alive before anyone actually gave me money.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Ah well.” He sat up and turned toward me. “I’m sure you’ll get in trouble again. We’ve all agreed you’re bot-jolor

  The word meant “cursed.” Or “self-destructive.” Which Ooloms considered the same thing.

  “You’re so kind,” I muttered. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Of course. Although if you’re looking for guidance on official Vigil business, Master Tic is your new supervisor and I don’t want to valk him.”

  Valking was gliding into another person’s flight path. The Oolom equivalent of stepping on someone’s toes.

  “That was one of the things I wanted to ask,” I said. “Whether Tic was my new mentor. And what he’s doing in Bonaventure.”

  Jupkur winked at me…which didn’t look any better on him than it did on Oh-God. Some gestures just don’t transfer from one species to another.

  “Master Tic is pursuing his own agenda,” Jupkur said. “That’s one thing you can be sure of. He has a reputation in various circles…well, one doesn’t like to gossip.”

  “You love to gossip,” I replied.

  “True,” he replied. “And what a treat you’re a full-fledged proctor now…I can reveal juicy tidbits about everyone in the Vigil, and it won’t be telling tales out of school. Do you know how long it’s been since I polished up my stories for somebody new?”

  “Just tell me about Tic,” I said.

  “Well, now…Tic.” Jupkur smiled. “Tic’s a master proctor, isn’t he? Which means he’s the cream of the cream, as you humans say. The best. The acme of perfection.”

  He kept smiling. Or should I say smirking? Seated on the edge of his desk, simpering like a man with a secret. A secret about Tic.

  “So what’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “Think about his name, Faye. Tic. Hardly a conventional Oolom name. And not his original one, oh no. He began calling himself Tic a year back. It’s short for tico.”

  Tico = crazy. Mad. “So he’s saying he’s insane?” I asked.

  “A raving screwball. A total loon. A person of addled wits.”

  “Why would he call himself that?” I said. “Is he nuts?”

  “Faye,” Jupkur answered, “Master Tic is Zenning out.”

  “Ahhhhhh.”

  To Zen out. The human phrase for a condition that sneaked up on some proctors if they lived long enough. A side effect of long-term link-seed use. These people had achieved a state of…well, damned if I know what went on in their heads, but they’d stopped functioning on the same mundane wavelength as the rest of us. If you’re a glass-half-full person, you could claim they’d reached a higher plane of consciousness; if you prefer the-glass-is-half-empty, you’d say they’d gone gibbering round the bend.

  Except that they didn’t gibber. Zenned-out proctors acted happy enough. Blissful even. And when they deigned to pay attention to the world, they seemed keenwitted and shrewd, full of insight. Brilliant, perceptive, intuitive, wise. Most of the time, though, they were cabbages. Not catatonic or delusional—just shifted to a set of priorities that didn’t mesh with the rest of us. Eating strawberries while being attacked by tigers, that sort of thing.

  Or so the stories went. It’d been a long time since we’d actually seen a Zenned-out case on Demoth—the most elderly proctors had all died in the plague, and the survivors weren’t old enough to have their brains go soupy.

  Till now.

  “So,” I said, “does this mean Tic is unstable?”

  Jupkur shook his head. “Not the way you’re thinking. He’s just dancing to a different drummer, as you humans say. Not dangerous, but not very useful either.” Jupkur hopped off the edge of his desk and shook out his gliders to get them to hang more comfortably. “Have a look at this.”

  He turned his back to me and spread his gliders wide like a triangular sail, point-down. In a moment, printed words appeared on the surface of the membrane—an effect that freaked merry hell out of me the first time I saw it. As I’ve said, Ooloms don’t have conscious control over their chameleon abilities; but Jupkur (at flamboyant expense) had coated the back of his gliders with pixel-nano under command of his link-seed. At parties, he could give himself moving tattoos…which he did at every opportunity. Flagrantly. And don’t ask me the subject matter.

  A right tease, our Jupkur.

  I looked at the writing on display, as he used himself for a projection screen. “What is this?” I asked.

  “Part of a report,” he replied. “From the coordinator of the team who are scrutinizing the trade talks between us and the Freeps. That was Tic’s last assignment.”

  I skimmed the words. About Tic. The phrase “inattention to duty” stood out…possibly because Jupkur was making it flash bright red.

  “Tic never did what he was told,” Jupkur said, as if I couldn’t read it for myself. “The coordinator would assign him to review some paragraph overnight, and in the morning, Tic would have looked at a completely different section. Mind you, his insights were often brilliant…but that didn’t make him any friends, considering that someone else was probably reviewing the same text without the same degree of inspiration. If the coordinator asked, ‘What do you want to look at, Tic?,’ he’d answer, ‘I don’t know yet. Whatever feels important.’ Which is not exactly helpful when you’re trying to keep things organized.”

  I nodded. People sometimes get the notion proctors are rampant individualists, boldly charting our own paths to track down corruption. But mostly, we’re methodical as mustard—you only get to follow your hunches after you’ve done days of preliminary donkey work.

  “So Tic got booted from the trade-treaty team?” I asked.

  “Depends who tells the story,” Jupkur said, lowering his arms and letting the words on his back fade away. “Most of my sources think that’s what happened—he got the old leave-ho. But one friend at Vigil HQ says this was Tic’s own decision. A day after the killings, Tic suddenly announced he was needed in Bonaventure. And when a master proctor wants a transfer, he gets a transfer…especially when his current team won’t be sorry to see him go.”

  “You think Tic might be coming here to investigate Chappalar’s death?”

  “Heaven forbid!” Jupkur said with mock horror. “That’s police business, isn’t it? The Vigil has no mandate for criminal investigation. But it’s just possible that such a quibble slipped Tic’s mind…whatever shred of mind he has left.”

  “Lovely,” I said. “The man’s senile, and you’ve made him my supervisor.”

  “He asked to be your supervisor. And how could we say no to a master proctor?” Jupkur grinned. “Besides, what’s he going to do, Faye? How much trouble can you get into in placid little Bonaventure?”

  “Chappalar got murdered,” I said.

  “Point taken,” Jupkur admitted. “But Chappalar didn’t actually get himself in trouble. He was a victim of circumstance, nothing more. Someone decided to kill proctors because they were proctors. It’s a global matter, Faye, and whatever Tic does, how can it make yo
u more of a target than you already are?”

  “Gee thanks,” I muttered.

  Jupkur waved his hand airily. “You’re a target, I’m a target, he, she, and it are targets. Surely you don’t think anyone is singling you out, Faye? This is political, not personal. Some weak-minded local has obviously bought into the Freep propaganda that the Vigil is undemocratic…we’re a wicked unelected body of petty dictators, who do nothing but interfere with free representation. Heaven knows, the Freeps have been harping on that theme ever since we started getting under their skin at the trade talks. So some tico crackpot decides, yes proctors are Evil Personified and must be stopped. In time, the police will catch the culprit; I hope before another attack. But in the meantime, I don’t intend to change the way I do my duty. Do you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I’m just worried about Tic.”

  “Don’t be. At worst, his mind wanders; at best, he’s still a master proctor. Tic could teach you a lot. And I’m sure you can help him too.”

  Jupkur freighted those last words deep with meaning; and I caught the hint. A senile old fart just got himself posted to Bonaventure, and someone had to baby-sit him. Surprise, surprise, the senior proctors sloughed off the job on junior me. Crap flows downhill.

  “All right,” I said, trying to keep the grumbles out of my voice. “Tic and I are a team. Anything else you want to tell me?”

  “Just one thing.” Jupkur—Jupkur of the thousand-and-one smirks—suddenly lowered his gaze to the floor, abashed. “Tic was chief scrutineer over the Global Health Agency. During the plague.”

  Oh.

  Ouch.

  “No one blames him for anything,” Jupkur went on hurriedly. “He demanded a review when it was all over, and the tribunal absolved him of all culpability. Actually, they wanted to give Tic a commendation for swift and decisive action. Things would have been even worse if he hadn’t driven the government to move quickly. But Tic didn’t want a gold medal—he wanted to do penance for all the deaths that happened on his watch. People say he hoped the review panel would crucify him: expel him from the Vigil, rip the link-seed out of his head. When they exonerated him instead, it sent him into a screaming fit, swearing he’d kill himself.”