The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  Such as a machine for making peacock tubes appear out of nowhere?

  Speculation, I told myself. But worth discussing with someone. With Tic? Not right now—he’d already scooted away to watch a ScrambleTac officer poke at a lump of dirt. Tic was not in a stand-steady, rational-discussion mood at the moment.

  So who to talk with? Cheticamp? Festina?

  Or should I just think hard? Peacock, I seek advice as your humble petitioner and maidservant…

  A voice sounded clearly in my mind. Po turzijeff. Kalaff.

  Not maidservant. Daughter.

  I damn near screamed.

  A blank few seconds after that. Next thing I can tell, I was cowering tight against a cold rock wall, my hand jammed into my carry-bag and clutching the old cold scalpel. I hadn’t pulled the blade out…just grabbed it like a talisman, razor-sharp stability. Made me wonder, was this some blind impulse to defend myself, or to knife my own skin bloody in a lunatic self-aimed panic attack?

  Even a link-seed can’t answer some questions.

  I quick yanked my hand from my purse and looked around, feeling the hot-guilt blush in my cheeks…worrying someone might have seen me. Tic, Festina—were they wondering what scared me, wondering what I’d been clutching in my bag? No. Not even looking my direction. They were both paying attention to someone new coming up the tunnel: the medical examiner, Yunupur, flown in from Bonaventure as soon as Cheticamp reported Iranu’s corpse.

  You can tell by his name, Yunupur was Oolom…and a young one at that, all hustle-bustle energy. New enough he could still tell you where he kept his accreditation certificate. I’d met him several times—his mother was Proctor Wollosof, one of the Vigil members who’d been scrutinizing Bonaventure since the plague. Thanks to her, Yunupur had grown up in the city among humans, and he’d bought into our culture with bubble and bounce…the roiling breathless enthusiasm only an outsider can muster.

  “Mom-Faye!” he cried. “Catch!” He launched himself across the room and made no attempt to slow down as he whumped into me, wrapping his arms round my neck. Kiss kiss, one on each of my cheeks. Oolom lips are stickier than Homo saps’. “Looking sexy as always,” the boy beamed. “That parka does things for your shoulders.”

  Festina boggled at the two of us. I muttered, “I know his mother.”

  “And she wouldn’t be caught dead down here,” Yunupur announced, right cheerily. “If she knew this job made me go underground, she’d have a spasm. Old folks, right? They go totally Pteromic over the least little thing.” He rolled his eyes, then noticed Tic. “Present company excluded, of course. You look like you’re holding up okay, down here in the dark and squeezy.”

  “I’m not ‘okay,’ I’m magnificent,” Tic answered; but his voice was tight enough to choke. “I also happen to be Proctor Smallwood’s supervisor…which makes me concerned to see her fraternizing unprofessionally with civic officials.”

  “Ooo,” said Yunupur, “chilly. But if you want professionalism, I can give you professionalism.” He detached himself from my neck and put on an expression of mock seriousness. “And where is the unfortunate deceased I must examine?”

  “How ‘bout the guy lying on the ground?” Cheticamp suggested. He pointed toward the corpse.

  “Certainly a popular locale for the lamented,” Yunupur agreed as he bounced toward Iranu’s body. “I see ‘em in beds and I see ‘em in chairs, but flat on the floor still wins as the position of choice for those with a love of the traditional. You found him exactly like this? With his hands neatly folded?”

  Cheticamp nodded.

  “Then someone wanted to make a statement.” Yunupur knelt beside the body and reached into his carrying bag for a scanning device, much like Festina’s Bumbler. He held the machine a few centimeters above the corpse and moved it slowly from Iranu’s head down to the feet, then back again. “Nothing immediately obvious,” he said. “Have you taken all the pictures you want?”

  Cheticamp nodded again.

  “Then let’s start getting personal.”

  Yunupur produced a small vacuum cleaner and ran it lightly over Iranu’s parka—not that I could see any hairs or fibers that might have come from the killer, but it paid to be thorough. Then, wearing sterile gloves, Yunupur carefully shifted the corpse’s hands enough to clear the parka’s fastener strip. Or at least, that’s what he intended to do; as soon as Yunupur unclenched the hands from one another, Iranu’s dead arms slapped limply to the ground.

  “Oops,” Yunupur said. “Usually corpses are stiffer than that.”

  “Do you know anything about Freep cadavers?” Cheticamp asked.

  “My med courses covered all the Divian species,” Yunupur replied, confident as a rooster. “I haven’t had much practical experience, but still…Freeps advance slowly into rigor over the first twelve hours after death, stay steely for three days, then ease off into something inelastic yet movable.” He looked up at Tic. “My professors never said Freeps went totally flaccid.”

  Tic didn’t answer. His expression showed what he thought of people who blamed their professors for their own clumsiness.

  I was thinking something totally different. Something that scared me left, right, and sideways. I prayed rare desperate that Yunupur would find some blatant cause of death—a stab wound through the heart, strangulation marks round the throat.

  “Well, let’s keep looking,” Yunupur said, still perky. He opened Iranu’s coat to reveal a thick white shirt and red trousers; both looked like normal Freep apparel, upscale but not all the way to obscenely expensive.

  No obvious bloodstains.

  Iranu had a black knit scarf tied loosely round his throat. Not tight enough to choke, just protection against the cold.

  Yunupur undid the scarf. No signs of violence.

  “This just makes my job interesting,” Yunupur announced. “Where’s the fun if the cause of death is obvious?”

  “Can you give us a time of death?” Cheticamp asked.

  “A corpse this limp has been dead more than three days,” Yunupur replied. “And in this cold, natural processes take longer than usual…including going in and out of rigor. I have to make more tests, but I guarantee this mook’s been dead longer than a week.”

  “Which puts it before Chappalar’s murder,” Festina observed.

  “Could it be as much as three months?” Cheticamp asked. “That’s how long he’s been missing.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Yunupur said. He lifted his scanning device and ran it over the corpse again. “Yeah sure, three months could work. There hasn’t been much decay, but it’s cold, and there are precious few insects this far down the mine. A corpse could stay intact for a long time.”

  “Considering how cold it is,” Festina murmured, “I’m surprised the body isn’t frozen stiff.”

  “It’s not quite as cold as freezing,” Cheticamp replied, “and this far underground the temperature doesn’t change much, no matter what happens outside.”

  “True,” said Yunupur. “Now let’s keep looking for cause of death.”

  He opened Iranu’s shirt. No injuries.

  Ditto the trousers. No obvious damage.

  He rolled the body over to examine its back. Nothing unusual.

  When Yunupur rolled the body faceup again, the eyes slumped open and the jaw sagged. “He is a limp bugger, isn’t he?” Yunupur murmured.

  “Slack,” I said. “He’s slack.”

  I looked around the room. The ScrambleTacs were young; Yunupur too. They wouldn’t remember. Cheticamp was old enough, but maybe he didn’t have much contact with the sick and dying back then. Festina came from offplanet. Tic had fled into the jungle, hoping he’d die before the Explorers found him; then he’d lain in bed longer than almost anyone, never seeing what other slack bodies looked like.

  Only I had seen. And from the moment Iranu’s arms slumped like muscleless water bags, my skin had been crawling with déjà vu.

  Yunupur was right: Freep corpses weren’t
normally so flaccid.

  “Are you saying…” Cheticamp began.

  “Nonsense!” Tic interrupted. “The plague didn’t affect Freeps.”

  “Diseases have a way of adapting,” Festina said grimly.

  “Oh bosh!” Yunupur rippled with laughter. Or at least his gliders gave a little shimmy. “Let’s not turn melodramatic, shall we? There’s an old maxim from medical school: when you hear hoofbeats, assume it’s a leaner, not some alien beast like a horse. If this poor chump is dead without a mark on him, he was probably just poisoned. Or he overdosed on something. Or he had a garden-variety heart attack, or a stroke, or he choked on an ort bone. There hasn’t been a single case of the dreaded scourge since the epidemic itself.”

  “Let me touch him,” I said. “I know the feel of slack muscles. I remember fierce clearly.”

  “Look, Mom-Faye, if you’re truly worried, I’ll tell the autopsy lab to put some muscle tissue under the microscope…”

  “No!” I snapped. “We have to know now, before you take the body back to the city. If it’s carrying a new strain of the plague—one that affects other species besides Ooloms…”

  “Then we isolate the deceased in a sterile body bag and take the usual precautions at the lab,” Yunupur said. “It’s not like we handle any corpse sloppily.”

  “I want to touch it. I want to know now.”

  “You won’t know,” Yunupur told me. “You can’t diagnose just by touch. Anyway, it’s been twenty-seven years since you’ve seen a plague victim…and those were all Ooloms, with a completely different musculature than Freeps…”

  “Let her touch the corpse,” Tic said quietly. “Why not?”

  Yunupur looked to Cheticamp. The police captain shrugged. “Where’s the harm?”

  “There’s harm if she gets upset over nothing,” Yunupur muttered. “I’ve heard stories about our Mom-Faye.” But he pulled out a clean pair of protective gloves and tossed them to me.

  I put them on fast, trying not to think why I was doing this. Another freckles-and-scalpel thing? My chance to catch the plague, if this was a strain that affected more than Ooloms?

  A bit of that. But I genuinely wanted to know; and I was convinced I would recognize the feel of the plague. The aura of the disease, as well the queer sloppiness of a slack muscle. I knew the enemy. I’d massaged and kneaded and rubbed down…carried unmoving bodies, alive and dead….

  I’d know. I was harsh certain I’d know. One squeeze of Iranu’s biceps, or his chest, or the limp muscles of his face…

  His eyes hung wide-open and his mouth too. Like Zillif’s face on the roof of my dome, so long ago.

  I knelt. I reached toward the dead man’s arm.

  A peacock tube erupted out of nowhere, and suddenly my hand was on the other side of the room.

  12

  WATER-OWLS

  Something you don’t see every day.

  The peacock thingy had materialized and swallowed my hand like a snake…and there at the other end of the tube, fifteen meters across the chamber, was my own plastic-gloved hand protruding from the field of rippling color.

  I wiggled my fingers. Which is to say I felt the wiggling down at the end of my arm, except that the wiggling happened fifteen meters away.

  Long-distance finger action. Rife with possibilities, that. Or was I just giddy with surprise/shock/bloody damned amazement?

  I pulled my hand back. The fingers disappeared from the far end of the tube, and my hand was back attached to my wrist as if it had never gone wandering elsewhere.

  The peacock tube winked out of existence. Job done.

  Silence. Then Festina let out her breath in a whoosh. “Do you know how many laws of physics you just broke? You can’t be half-in/half-out of a Sperm-tail. They just don’t work like that.”

  “Maybe you never asked the right way,” Tic suggested.

  She glared.

  Warily, I reached toward the corpse again. The peacock tube shimmered back into existence, and pulled its same hand-swallowing routine. This time its tail wafted down the tunnel and out of sight. I don’t know how far the tube went, but I could feel a gusty breeze pushing against my gloved fingers.

  I pulled back. Bye-bye, peacock thingy. It vanished to wherever a deus ex machina hangs out between emergencies.

  “This may be a rash hypothesis,” Tic said, “but I think the Peacock doesn’t want Smallwood touching the corpse…as if there’s some risk involved. And if it’s risky for her, perhaps it’s risky for everyone.”

  “Yeah,” Yunupur agreed, scuttling back a few paces. “Maybe we should think about this for a while.”

  I didn’t need to think. Whatever the Peacock was, I trusted its instincts. It wanted to keep me safe from something, and that “something” was likely contagious.

  The plague was back.

  Yunupur had disinfectant in his tote pack. We made him use it all, soaking his arms up to the shoulder and bathing his gliders too—anything that had come close to the corpse. Then Cheticamp ordered everybody out of the mine till a full Medical Threat Team could fly in.

  When Cheticamp radioed for the team, he told them to bring plenty of olive oil.

  Outside, it felt colder than before: that stiff wind I’d felt. (Had the Peacock really tubed my hand all the way to the surface?) The sky had turned wintry—chalk white, melancholy, sullen. A sky full of snow, and ready to dump it on our heads.

  Cheticamp took Yunupur and the ScrambleTacs off to the police skimmers…either to discuss Iranu’s death, or to start making contingency plans if we really were facing a plague outbreak. Tic went with them to play scrutineer. I suppose I should’ve gone too, but I didn’t. Tough.

  Instead, Festina and I hiked down to the shore of Lake Vascho. Neither of us spoke as we walked. We both seemed to have a fondness for quiet.

  The wind died. The snow came. Big white flakes sifting down onto the lakeshore. They settled onto the sand, the trees, my hair…Festina’s hair…her eyelashes…

  She looked at me looking at her. I pretended I’d been staring at the lake beyond her.

  Hard to believe it was the middle of the day. Close to noon, but the clouds were clotted so thick, the world seemed two-thirds to twilight. Everything had got muted down gray. If the wind picked up, started swirling the snow around, we’d have trouble seeing our way back to the skimmer. But why should I worry about getting lost in a blizzard? The Peacock would save me, wouldn’t it?

  I’m too tired to think about that, I said to myself. Which would have been a good enough excuse to let my old brain coast away from confronting the issue. Didn’t work now. My link-seed’s cruel inability to shut anything out.

  Po turzijejf. Kalajf. Not maidservant. Daughter.

  Scary enough to knock the breath out of you.

  Festina’s voice broke into my thoughts. “What are those things out there? In the ice.”

  We were standing hard on the edge of the lake—where the sand ran up against the lid of ice covering the water. The things Festina had seen were dark blobs as big as my fist: water-owl eggs, laid in the fall, incubated/frozen all winter long, but due to hatch in another few days, after the ice was gone. The owls were ugly as sin when newborn, slimy oversize tadpoles—nothing a bit like birds. They needed three more months to mature out of their amphibious stage; then they finally became little hoot-fowl, hunting rodents on land and small fish in the water.

  I started to tell all this to Festina; but the second she found out she was looking at eggs, she got a happy-crazed look in her eye.

  “Eggs?” she said. “I collect eggs! I’ve got…” She stopped herself. “I have a collection,” she went on, now trying to sound offhanded and only managing stiff. “A collection I could talk about for hours and bore you completely to tears.”

  I looked at her keenly. For some reason, I said, “I bet you don’t talk about your collection to anyone.”

  She gave a small laugh, half a second too late to be natural. “True.” Her eyes flicked in
my direction, but jittered away again the instant she met my gaze. “Look, Faye, I want to try to get one of those eggs. That’s all right, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Water-owls are as common as bloodflies around here. Nature won’t grudge you taking one.” I stepped toward the lake. “We can get a stick to break a hole in the ice surface…”

  “You stay here,” Festina said. “I’ll do this.”

  “Sure you don’t want help?”

  “You stay back to pull me out if I go through the ice.” And she slipped down the shore a ways, making a show of heading for a big branch of driftwood.

  A shy and private one, our Festina, at least when it came to eggs. A shy and private one in general maybe, anywhere outside her job.

  Made sense to me.

  I watched her crouch on the shore, jabbing at the ice with one end of her stick. She’d break a hole through soon enough—it might be snowing now, but five days of thaw had thinned down the ice surface pretty well. Once she got a hole, she could use the same stick to scoop out the egg; after which, she’d have an ugly little owl-pole of her own.

  Dads had given me a pet water-owl once upon a time. “Starts off icky, ends up flying”…that’s what he told me. Nature hands us yet another parable. And my owl, Jilly, served up a lesson of her own when she got out of her cage one day and never came back.

  Lesson: one by one, things vanish from your life. Pets. People. My father, who I sometimes slapped in the face.

  Light flickered beside me. I turned and saw the peacock tube, hovering above the lake, just out of reach…thin at this second, no wider than my outstretched hand. A glance over at Festina; she hadn’t seen it. Snowflakes were falling thick, and she wasn’t looking my way—drawn in on herself, all shy and private.

  Fair enough.

  The Peacock’s Tail was long now, stretching far over the water till the gold-green-violet disappeared amidst the snow. Its body swayed placidly back and forth, like an eel swimming lazily in calm water.