by Janet Morris
"Contributory to what?" she said icily. "Sir," she added, "I must tell you that Customs and the Secretariat acted in accordance with the law. And I hate to remind you that your son and . . . Ms. Forat . . . were breaking that law when they disappeared. So I don't see what any negligence on our part could have contributed to, that you'd find helpful." She had to protect her people. Her reputation. Her office' . . .
Mickey Croft, Threshold's horse-faced chief executive, got out of his chair and said, "Richard, what is it you think happened that could possibly be laid at our doorstep?"
Croft had big ears, a lank, thin frame, a mobile mouth, and long-suffering eyes. He put that frame between Riva Lowe and Cummings, and looked fondly down at her.
"Riva's people helped save those kids' skins. Ms. Forat's father, the Imam, was intent on having both lovers executed, according to Medinan tradition. And you know it. So get off our backs, Dick, or we'll climb all over you and yours in return. Customs has been thinking of tightening up import/ export regulations."
Thank you, Mickey.
Riva Lowe would never have dared threaten Richard Cummings, Jr. The NAMECorp honcho, aka Richard the Second, was on Threshold specifically to make Mickey Croft's life a living hell. As Customs Director, Riva was catching some of that hell, but she wasn't qualified to deal with Cummings the way Mickey was.
It took years of experience to know when to threaten and when to make good on threats, when to finesse and when to smooth feathers. Lowe's job didn't call for much diplomacy. She checked manifests. Sometimes she found problems. In the case of the Cummings boy, who'd been smuggling controlled life-forms and contraband life-forms as well, she'd only been doing her job. The way she was doing it now. She needed to get Mickey alone and tell him about Keebler and the hostage-taking out at the Ball. The last thing they needed was for Cummings's attention to be drawn to the Ball.
The silvery sphere had been right in the path of the Cummings ship that disappeared. They had log tapes of the event. The sphere had behaved strangely, then all of the intervening spacetime between the ship and the sphere had behaved strangely, and then the Cummings boy and his NAMECorp freighter were gone—along with the daughter of the Ayatollah Beni Forat, the girl who was the lover of this man's son.
So you didn't want Cummings nosing around when you didn't have any answers to the real questions. Questions like what happened out there, and how, and why.
If Richard Cummings, Jr., realized there was an ongoing investigation to determine what, if any, effect the mysterious sphere had had on the kids' disappearance, then not only Riva Lowe's career but Croft's as well might hang in the balance.
If TTT—Trust Territory of Threshold—authorities could be found negligent in their decision to park that sphere at Spacedock Seven, the consequences were unimaginable.
One thing Riva knew about Richard the Second was that the NAMECorp exec was an inveterate womanizer. Maybe she could distract him from the real problem.
And maybe she was doing just the wrong thing by drawing attention to herself, she thought, as she uncrossed her legs and stood up to face the chief executive officer of humanity's most powerful corporate entity.
But Cummings's attention was already clearly fixed on her. So what did she have to lose? "Mr. Cummings, we did exactly what was necessary to defuse a situation that threatened the lives of those children. We also showed leniency in dealing with serious Customs infractions. When you're done here, if you'd like to come to my office I'll be glad to go over their files with you."
Get Cummings out of here, so Mickey could take Remson's report. He had to know that the sphere was doing its coruscating act again. Know that Keebler had gone off the beam. Know that Reice was bringing Keebler in for observation.
That meant that South was coming in, too. Riva Lowe wasn't just sacrificing herself for the good of Threshold when she offered to babysit Cummings. Joe South made her increasingly uncomfortable. It wasn't the pilot's fault. But dealing with the man who ruled the Earth might be dangerous, but it beat trying to deal with a walking artifact from ancient times like South, who made her feel guilty and inadequate and . . .
Cummings had finished staring at her. He said, very slowly, as if he were noticing her for the first time, "Well, well, then let's do that, Ms. Lowe. After dinner, if you'll allow me. And if the Secretary wants to join us . . . ?"
"No, no," said Mickey, pulling on one large ear.
Riva knew that poker face hid admiration and relief. She straightened her shoulders as Croft said, "Director Lowe is right: she can give you the background you need. When you have it, I think you'll realize that if we work together to try finding those children, we'll be using our energies more effectively than finding fault, which solves nothing, especially in a matter like this."
So it was settled.
Off she went with the universe's most deadly lady-killer, swept up in a dizzying and offhanded display of wealth and power. First an aide met them at the door of Mickey's office and escorted them to a private tubeway car. Then the car dropped them at the Cummings Building, a glittering palace of opulence and overtly displayed power.
She could see the stars from the restaurant at the top of the Cummings Building, of course. Located at the most desirable location on Threshold, outside of the administrative sector, it was where the rich and famous ate and celebrated.
Riva Lowe wasn't dazzled. She was worried. She should be dealing with her problem: the Scavenger. The fact that South was coming in from Spacedock Seven shouldn't make her want to run for cover.
And Cummings wasn't a man one should deal with halfheartedly.
At their private table, in an alcove that seemed to be floating in space, Richard the Second was telling her, "You must see Earth. I think everyone involved in government should see it. The wildlife. The plant life. The magnificence of our heritage. It will bring tears to your eyes."
"I'd love to," she said automatically, trying to remember what he'd been saying that had led up to this. She didn't understand this man's subtlety, and was increasingly sure that he thought she knew where this was leading.
If it was leading to Earth, then somebody didn't understand what was happening. "People like myself," she said carefully, "don't expect to set foot on the Earth in our lifetime. Part of our responsibilities is keeping people from spoiling what's left of Earth, not keeping it for ourselves to spoil."
For the first time since that brusque exchange in Mickey's office, Cummings frowned. She knew he was a big-game hunter, covertly; but he hunted on his own earthly preserve. Overtly he was an ecologist, a preservationist, a savior of species.
"Some people need to see where their roots are. Don't argue with me when I say that I know you're one of those people. And when you go to Earth with me, you'll despoil nothing. I have a place there. I lead one of its protective enterprises. You know, I'm not accustomed to being argued with, Ms. Lowe."
Not "Director. " All right, then . . . "Call me Riva. And I wasn't aware I was arguing. I'm not accustomed to being offered trips beyond price by men of extreme wealth. If I understand what you're suggesting, I couldn't possibly accept. It would look as if I took an outrageous gift."
"You mean it would look like bribery." The frown had smoothed. A look of amusement, which seemed out of place to her, had replaced it. Cummings had a full head of blond hair, fine features, and a square jaw in an ageless face that could as easily have been the result of microsurgery as of good breeding—if one hadn't seen his son, who so resembled him.
But he was urbane, and charming, and unpredictable. "I'll arrange it with Secretary Croft. We'll take a party of your peers, Customs people, the like. As a fact-finding expedition, nothing more. Propriety will be observed. What do you say?"
Say? The man was indefatigable. "I ... If the Secretary General wishes such an expedition, I could hardly say no. But what I'd like is to satisfy you that there were no irregularities in our procedure where Dini Forat and your son, Cummings the Third, were concerned—beyond t
hose courtesies extended from the Secretariat to your office, of course."
They'd bent the rules for this slick bastard. But he might yet ignore that and try to hang them all despite what they'd done—or because of it.
"I keep getting the feeling," said Cummings, cocking his head at her, "that there's something you people aren't telling me."
"And I keep getting the feeling," she said with her heart in her mouth, "that you're looking for someone to blame for the fact that your son is an ungovernable spoiled brat who decided to play Romeo and Juliet with a Medinan heiress. Wherever those two are, I doubt that we'll find them until and unless we stop quarreling among ourselves and join forces."
"Join forces?" Cummings reached out to take her hand amid the silver and crystal and linen of the restaurant table. "That might be the ticket, after all."
What had she gotten herself into? She had to kill at least another hour with this cocksman. Mickey and Remson needed time to get Keebler into Threshold and the whole incident under control.
So she said, "As soon as we're done eating, we'll go over to my office and take a look at my files." That sounded provocative, as if she'd said "Look at my etchings."
"Then you'll see that I'm right."
"No hurry, Riva Lowe. No hurry at all."
But there was one. She could feel it in her bones. She shouldn't be sitting here letting this lecher ogle her. She should be down in her Blue Mid office right now, talking her people through the damage control on the hostage-taking. Be there when South got in, with whatever interim report he'd brought with him.
South was her link to the Ball project, her man in the loop.
She grinned, thinking suddenly of what Joe South would give to be in on Cummings's proposed trip to Earth.
Cummings thought she was grinning because of him and started to relax, telling an expansive tale of NAMECorp exploration among the stars.
Maybe Cummings could be reasoned with. Or maybe he was purely trying to charm her socks off. But one way or the other, she was stuck with him for the next few hours.
If she hadn't had this awful feeling that Keebler was going to blow the lid off everything, she might even have been having a good time.
But she wasn't. She couldn't. That Ball was still out there. And every time she looked at Cummings she could see his son. The kid was lost somewhere, and she'd seen the recording that South and Reice had made of the event.
If Cummings saw that recording he wouldn't be so friendly, so accommodating. So she had to keep him from seeing it, while proving to him he'd seen everything he needed to see.
And get him off Threshold before the Scavenger hired lawyers, or found out that Cummings was here and got to him somehow.
You can't be romanced when you're terrified. Riva Lowe told herself she should be thankful for small favors.
But when they left the restaurant to go to her office, she wasn't thankful for anything.
Cummings was grilling her unremittingly, and she wasn't sure she knew how to make him stop.
CHAPTER 4
To Fly Again
Following the ConSec cruiser Blue Tick back to Threshold, Joe South had his hands full keeping STARBIRD on Reice's tail.
And those hands were trembling. Reice's cruiser, with its cargo of hostage-taker and hostages, was not only breaking speed limits and safety regulations, it was bending the laws of physics themselves.
South was having trouble keeping up. He told himself his ship wasn't up to it; STARBIRD didn't have warning beacons and police flashers, but that wasn't it. STARBIRD had a new power plant, new astronics, everything that Joe South's limited Customs credit could retrofit into her. The ship probably could have handled the stresses without coming apart.
It was South who was in that kind of danger. Seeing the Scavenger tied up like that, nearly frothing at the mouth, had shaken the pilot to his core. South had been a prisoner of war in Africa once, centuries ago. He was having all the symptoms, now, of Delayed Stress Syndrome. His mouth was dry. He felt like somebody'd turned him inside-out, so that he had no skin to protect his raw nerves from grating against everything physical, mental, and emotional that came his way.
South was mourning his dead, a whole planet full of twenty-first-century people.
South hadn't felt this alone when he and STARBIRD had punched out of spongespace that first time, to behold an alien solar system, to be the first emissaries from Earth to the stars.
And found . . . what? His mind rebelled, repelled from lavender skies and soft, sad eyes, and a planet he'd never landed on but remembered as if he had.
Joe South sat safe in his acceleration couch, trembling uncontrollably.
Birdy sensed how frightened he was. The ship's AI monitored his physiology through the suit he wore, and his physiology kit was clucking at him as it tried to balance his chemistries.
So there was the occasional prick at his wrist where the pharmakit cuff was, as the artificial intelligence that provided the man-machine interface between him and STARBIRD tried in vain to get Joe South, the person, to match Joe South, the acceptable spectrum of responses allotted to the ship's human pilot.
He lay back in his acceleration couch, visor up, and stared at his control suite. The retrofitted flight-deck electronics were outwardly unchanged, more familiar than his new, augmented heads-up display. But even the familiar flight deck around him wasn't helping. Not this time.
He hadn't had the shakes this bad since he'd had the first dreams of X-3: the dreams of someplace he'd never been. Dreams of aliens he'd never met.
His mouth tasted like a sneaker soaked in urine. He could barely croak when Reice called back to find out what was holding him up.
He told the voice in his com, "Common sense. You want to cowboy around in traffic, you're ConSec. If you hit something, the Threshold government pays the bills."
Reice's voice crackled back: "You ought to get a real job, South. You were a test pilot once. You ought to get a real ship and do some real piloting, not toodle around in that old heap. Or expect the rest of us to make allowances for everything you can't handle. I'm goin' on ahead. Catch up when you can."
"Yeah. Okay. See you in Blue Mid. South, out." What could you say? STARBIRD was South's personal property—his only personal property of any real value, so far as he was concerned. He and Birdy and the ship around them were all that was left alive of South's entire society. When he'd signed on with Customs, he'd leased the ship to the service through a complicated set of government regulations. But if it were totaled, the loss would be his. No amount of money would replace Birdy, or the physical hull of STARBIRD herself. Like South, the AI called "Birdy" and the ship that enabled it were relics of a vanished civilization.
STARBIRD had been an experimental wonder in her day. But she was five centuries out of date. Just like her pilot.
Reice accelerated away from South so fast that his sensoring packages couldn't do better than give him a receding dot trailing an acceleration plume. No way was South going to try accelerating like that in a traffic lane. His reactions weren't up to it, even if Birdy's were and STARBIRD's power plant could take the stress.
He told Birdy to plot a discreet course back to Threshold, ignoring Reice. He'd dock at Blue South, the way his Customs credentials required, and take the tube up to Blue Mid. Keebler wasn't his collar. He wasn't a cop, like Reice.
He wasn't really anything, except a curiosity that had gotten lucky enough to draw the attention of some high-rollers in the Threshold government.
Sometimes he felt like an imposter, but never more than when he called Sol Base Blue Control for docking clearance.
Surrounded by STARBIRD's tightly packed flight deck, artifactual evidence from his own time, the displacement he felt when he contacted Threshold, either visually or on audio, was always the worst.
"Sol Base Blue, Customs Special STARBIRD, requesting docking clearance."
The voice in his com was unconcerned, but attentive. The aftermarketeer who'd worked o
n STARBIRD's retrofit had put a standard com system in South's heads-up. So when he flipped his visor down he could see the traffic controller's diagrammatic display, with his vectors highlighted in red, among all the other incoming traffic.
He muttered, "Declutter," as he'd learned to do, and the diagram simplified, showing just the relevant traffic, the interior slot he'd been allotted, the Customs' entryway, and Threshold itself.
Even in the diagram, the sight of Threshold's Trust Territory still took his breath away. The Terminal. The Stalk. A quarter of a million souls lived out here, between Mars and Jupiter, servicing the UNE and Threshold itself.
The habitat still looked to him like an old-style TV antenna with toys strung on its lateral struts. Threshold had tried its best to accommodate him, but it would never make him one of its own.
The matter-of-fact voice of the traffic controller told him that, every time he made contact.
Birdy locked on to the telecontroller, and South dumped his display mode. The rest was automatic, unless he wanted to interfere. Birdy had adapted to Threshold so much better than he had, because Threshold interfaced artificial intelligence more comfortably than intelligence like South's. Birdy might be dedicated to keeping Joe South alive and functioning, but the AI was so completely at home with Threshold systems that sometimes South got jealous.
Which just showed how crazy he'd gotten, out there alone on an interminable test flight with only Birdy for company. He'd begun to think the AI was a person.
It wasn't. He was alone out here. The last of his kind. Alone except for the Ball. And if he wasn't careful he'd end up like Keebler, trussed and dragged off, doped into submission, because he couldn't adjust to the way things had to be done out here.
Keebler, the greasy, dirty, crusty old Scavenger, was becoming a symbol of all of Joe South's worst fears: losing his grip, losing control, losing his freedom, losing his mind.
For Keebler was losing his mind, if he hadn't lost it already—because of the silver sphere he'd towed in and parked out at Spacedock Seven.