by David Drake
Chekoumian had spoken of his warehouse. It sounded as though he was an import-export specialist—had been one, and would certainly be something, maybe the same thing, again soon. His kind of man didn't sit on his hands just because he'd found himself rich.
"I'm glad of your good fortune, Mr Chekoumian," Blavatsky said aloud. She knew she needed to get on, but she no longer felt the pressure of a moment before. Quiet longing eased over her as smoothly as the sea across tidal flats. Commander Kneale's anger was as remote a possibility as the threat of lightning; and in any case, it didn't rule Blavatsky's soul.
"The best of my fortune," Chekoumian said, "is my Marie. She can't realize how well I've done. I tell her, but a letter is a letter, you know . . . and I didn't realize until Beakersdorff made their offer three months ago! Many women wouldn't wait five years, you know."
And some men wouldn't wait four weeks, Blavatsky thought. The length of a round-trip voyage, Earth to Tblisi and back, with the wedding planned for the day the Empress docked on her return. . . .
"That's quite true, sir," Blavatsky murmured. "I hope you continue to be so happy."
The uniformed rating walked toward the real exit framed by the pillared facade of Rome's Temple of Concord. Chekoumian's Marie was a very lucky woman. Blavatsky hoped—and doubted—that she knew it
Chekoumian settled himself into a chair. He was too absorbed in his own affairs to notice that Blavatsky had gone without leave or ceremony. That wasn't the sort of thing that mattered to him, anyway.
He touched the edge fold of the earliest letter with his chip-encoded signet ring. The envelope peeled back neatly, like tensed skin drawing the flesh open along a cut. If the seal was broken in any other fashion, the envelope would have melted with enough violence to ignite the paper within.
Chekoumian extracted the letter and began to read:
My Dearest Abraham,
Today Mother and I went shopping for Nita's baby shower. You know Nita. Oh, don't put yourselves out, she says, but if we didn't you can be sure she'll be telling everybody what cheapskates our side of the family is until she's a gray old woman! Well, we . . .
* * *
The five passengers in the Starlight Bar, all of them male, watched the clear, curving wall as tugs on ground transporters crawled toward the Empress of Earth.
Wade wore his credit chip on a bracelet of untarnished metallic chain, an alloy from the heavy platinum triad. "I'll take this round, then," he said, and inserted the chip in the autobar's pay slot.
Other men began punching selections into the pads on their chair arms. "Many thanks, ah, Wade," Dewhurst said. "The next one's—"
The autobar chirped in irritation. "I'm sorry, sir," said the machine in an apologetic male voice," I believe there's a problem with this chip. If you'd try another one, please?"
Wade withdrew the chip with a look of amazement and outrage on his aristocratic features. "Oh, good lord," he said. "I haven't recharged this from my Terran account! Look, fellows, I'll just pop down, to the Purser's Office—"
"Pretty busy just now, don't you think, Dickie?" Belgeddes warned with a lifted eyebrow.
"Never mind," said Dewhurst. "I'll pay for the round."
"Much obliged, old fellow," Wade muttered. "Very embarrassing."
"Dickie's always doing that sort of thing," Belgeddes said indulgently.
"I dare say," agreed Dewhurst as he summoned a whiskey and water. The autobar chuckled happily over Dewhurst's credit chip.
Da Silva looked up into the auroral sky. "The first time I traveled," he said, "I thought that—"he gestured toward the whispering light with a rum drink "—was what the stars would look like when we were . . ."
He paused and cleared his throat. "In sponge space, you know. But it was nothing like that."
"Even though the bulkhead shows exactly what an optically clear panel would show," Wade said, "in here we're still completely cut off from the insertion bubble. If you've only seen sponge space from the insulated interior of a vessel, you haven't a hint of what it's like to be out in the cold, twisted radiance with nothing but a suit to protect you."
Dewhurst snorted. "I suppose you've been a Cold Crewman, then, Wade?" he said.
"Oh, good lord no!" Wade chuckled. "But back long before you were born, I volunteered when Carlsbad decided to raise a sponge space commando during their unpleasantness with Jaffa Hill. Wasn't my quarrel in the least, but I thought it might be interesting."
He shook his head and looked deep into his drink. "It was that, all right," he said. "Bloody interesting."
"Dickie was the only member of the unit to survive," Belgeddes explained to the others. "They found that practice isn't the same as the real thing."
"Practice was bad enough, though," Wade murmured.
Reed stared at the crystalline mural over the autobar. The Empress of Earth's ports of call were sculpted as icons. They ranged from Earth—bands of rose quartz and topaz to suggest the aurora borealis—to three onion-domed towers representing Tblisi. The bead of red light now on Earth would follow the Empress's progress across the arc, while the blue indicator for the Brasil moved in the opposite direction until they merged briefly on the oil derricks of Hobilo.
"I don't like this talk about wars," Reed said morosely. "It's going to cause trouble, I feel it. I just hope that we make Ain al-Mahdi. After that, well, I wish all you other fellows the best, but it's not my problem once I've gotten where I'm going."
"We won't land on Nevasa or Grantholm if the war breaks out," Dewhurst said. "They'll pick nearby neutrals and offload passengers there."
He sounded calm enough, but what started as a sip drained most of the whiskey from his glass. "Anyway," he added forcefully, "I think it's all overblown. They'll back off, you'll see. Both sides."
"I said," Reed snapped, "that I didn't want to talk about it!"
"I wonder," Wade said, "if you gentlemen are familiar with the beach walkers of Ain al-Mahdi?"
The others looked at him. "The legend, you mean?" said Da Silva. "Beautiful women who, shall we say, make friends with men at night on the beach, but they drink them down to a hollow skin?"
"Ah, well," Wade said. "I thought it was a legend too. Still, it's a big universe, isn't it? We shouldn't be surprised when we learn that it's a little stranger than we'd expected."
"On Ain al-Mahdi?" Reed said. "Look, buddy, my company's based me on Ain going on fifteen years now. Beach walkers and flats, they're the sort of thing you hear about in sailors' bars—period."
"I should have thought that was where you'd expect to hear about them," Belgeddes commented. "From transients. If there were such a thing as a beach walker, it wouldn't prey on locals, surely?"
Wade pursed his lips in consideration. "Flats," he said. "They look like a pool of shadow, but when you step on them—"
He brought his hands together with a clop of sound.
"—like that?"
"That's the story, all right," Reed said over his gin. "But it's always the friend of a friend of a sailor who's seen it, not anybody you meet."
"Unless Mr. Wade has met one—as I rather think he may have done," said Dewhurst.
"Hmm," said Belgeddes. "You never mentioned that to me, Dickie."
"That's because I've never seen such a creature," Wade said stiffly. He pursed his lips. "Unlike the beach walker, which I met—well, I can't tell you how long ago it was." He glanced at Reed. "Certainly before your time, dear fellow. They've probably gone the way of the dodo by now."
"Of the unicorn, I would have said," Dewhurst murmured into his drink, but he spoke in a low enough voice that Wade could pretend not to hear.
"Well, tell us about it, Wade," said Da Silva. "Or—would you care for a refill?"
Wade clinked the ice in his glass. Scotch whiskey was only a hint of amber in the meltwater. "Thank you, friend," he said as he slid the glass toward Da Silva. "Embarrassing situation, as you can imagine."
"Could have happened to any of us, Dickie," sa
id Belgeddes.
"Tarek's Bay wasn't but a few fishing shacks and the warehouses, back then," Wade said. "Ain orbited its primary, and the storage bladders from the gas-mining dipper ships orbited Ain, like moons of the moon. That was before the place became primarily a trans-shipment point. I don't suppose any of the dipper ships still operate, eh?"
He cocked an eyebrow at Reed.
"There's still gas mining," the younger man said, "but now it's geosynchronous siphons and the storage is in primary orbit, not Ain's." He looked uneasily aware that by validating the background of Wade's story, he would seem to lend weight to the story itself—even in his own mind.
"Ah, that's a pity," Wade said. "On nights when the primary was illuminated, the gas bladders drifted across the face of her like soap bubbles, each of them reflecting a view of Ain itself down to the surface. I used to lie out on the beach at night, looking upward and imagining . . . well, I was young then. You know how young men are: romantics."
"Not a lot of romance about Tarek's Bay in the early days," Dewhurst interjected. "Not from the old-timers I've talked to."
"Also," said Reed, "the beach is gravel."
"No, not much romance at all," Wade agreed without dropping a stitch. "That's why I went out alone with nothing but an air mattress for company."
He took a sip from the refilled glass Da Silva brought him from the autobar. "And you can imagine how surprised I was when one night a young lady spoke to me."
"I'm not surprised," Dewhurst said into his drink, but he was listening too.
"Well, we talked," Wade continued. "You know how it is. I was young, and there was no doubt what I had in mind . . . but remember I'd been looking for romance. "And there was something odd about the girl. I mean, there couldn't be much doubt what she wanted either, or she wouldn't have come up to me that way . . . but she didn't seem like a professional. She was quite young and quite beautiful, and, it seemed to me, quite innocent."
"How young?" Da Silva asked with a hard underlayer to his voice.
Wade met the other man's eyes. "Old enough," he said. "Not twenty standard years, though. You'll remember that I wasn't much older than that myself."
Da Silva dipped his head in curt approval.
Reed grimaced, interested despite himself. "What was she wearing?" he asked. He faced slightly away from the storyteller to keep from seeming too eager.
"Cast offs," Wade said crisply. "The light was poor—"
"I thought you said the primary was full?" Dewhurst said in a verbal pounce.
Belgeddes raised an eyebrow. "I don't recall you saying that, Dickie," he said.
"No?" said Wade. "No, I don't believe I did—"
He smiled at Dewhurst. "But it's true nonetheless. I don't suppose you've been on Ain, my friend? Reed—"
Wade clicked his gaze sideways, like a turret lathe moving from one setting to the next.
"—how would you describe the way Ain's lighted under the primary?"
Reed shrugged and said apologetically to Dewhurst, "There's quite a lot of light, actually, but Wade's right—it's blotchy, multicolored pastels from the gas bands in the primary's atmosphere. It conceals as much as it hides, to tell the truth."
"Quite," Wade said primly. "So while it appeared to me that the girl was dressed in little better than wiping rags, I couldn't be sure. And fashions differ, you know."
Dewhurst snorted.
"I had a miniflood clipped to my sleeve," Wade said. "But it didn't seem the time to switch it on."
"You have been out in the evening with young ladies, haven't you, Dewhurst?" Belgeddes asked.
"Yes," said Dewhurst, admitting defeat. "Yes, I can see that."
"So we chatted—"
"Sitting on your air mattress, I suppose," Reed said.
"Sitting on my air mattress," Wade agreed with an appreciative nod. "She said she was local but from another island. A fisherman's daughter, I assumed. Not professional, I was sure of that now, but not disinterested either. I put a hand on her shoulder, and she slid open the front closure of my shirt."
Wade leaned back in his chair, savoring perhaps the memory and certainly the focused interest of the others in the lounge. Belgeddes smiled like a father watching his youngest perform in a church pageant.
"Well," the storyteller continued, "I thought I knew where matters were proceeding. Now, of course, I think they were intended to proceed in a very different fashion. But her fingers touched the garnet locket that my mother had given me on her deathbed. I always carry it, you know. Mother said it would protect me from harm. Silly superstition, I suppose, but there you are."
"And I suppose you're wearing it now?" Da Silva asked, more precise than hostile in his tone. "The locket?"
"At this very moment?" Wade replied. He patted the breast of his tailored gray-and-black shirt "I believe it's in my cabin. I can go get it, of course."
"Shouldn't say he was in much risk at the moment, would you?" Belgeddes said. He chuckled. "Unless you fellows are a syndicate of starship gamblers preying on poor innocents like Dickie and me?"
"Huh! Catch me playing cards with you two!" Dewhurst muttered.
"Well, she touched the locket and she pulled back like she'd been burned. 'Why, that's nothing!' I said, pretty hasty as you can imagine. Not wanting anything to spoil the moment, so to speak. So I flipped the locket out, and I turned my light—I mentioned having a light, didn't I?"
"A miniflood," Belgeddes agreed approvingly.
"I switched on the light—aimed at the locket, mind, but there was scatter from it and through it, though the garnets. And when that red light flickered across the girl, as I thought she was, she simply melted."
"Melted to nothing?" Da Silva demanded.
"Not at all," said Wade. "Into a pool of what I suppose was protoplasm, but it seeped at once down into the soil."
He nodded toward Reed. "The coarse gravel, as Mr. Reed noted."
"I suppose the clothes melted with her?" Dewhurst said.
"No," Wade answered equably, "they were there when I came back the next morning. As was my mattress. I didn't stand on the order of my going, as you can imagine."
"Cast offs," Belgeddes said. "Saw them myself when I came back with him. Sort of trash you could pick from the town midden in Tarek Bay back then."
"What I believe," Wade said, "is that the beach walkers are—or were—"he nodded toward Reed again "—if Mr. Reed is correct in believing them extinct—"
Reed opened his mouth to protest at being misquoted, but he swallowed the words before speaking.
"At any rate, the beach walkers were a life form indigenous to Ain al-Mahdi that mimicked other species," Wade continued. "When men colonized the planet, they mimicked men—or women, at any rate, for the same purposes."
"Which we can guess, easily enough," Belgeddes interjected. "Dinner, not to put too fine a point on it."
"Food or reproduction," Wade said. "Survival of the individual or survival of the species. The basic drives of all forms of life. But its mimicry broke down under intense red light."
He looked at Reed and raised his eyebrow for confirmation. "You've heard that only a ruby laser can kill a beach walker, I suppose? Well, that's not true. It's the angstrom range, not simply destructive energy. And it's not fetal, only—disconcerting to the creature."
Dewhurst's mind riffled the guidebook through whose images he'd browsed in his cabin's bathroom. "There aren't any large animals on Ain," he said. "Except men. There never were."
"Not in the seas, old boy?" Belgeddes responded. "That's not what I recall. I seem to remember some of those arthrodires weighing tonnes, with jawplates spreading wide enough to swallow a catcher boat on a bad day."
"Well, yes, I suppose. . . ." Dewhurst mumbled. "But a—a sea creature doesn't just come up on land!"
Wade got to his feet and smiled at Dewhurst. "Fish don't, that's true," he said in gentle mockery. "At least they usually didn't on Earth."
Belgeddes stood up also. "Time
we got back to the cabin, Dickie," he said. "We've still got some unpacking to do before we lift off."
He gave the other men a finger-to-brow salute. "Be seeing you later, I'm sure, chaps."
"One lies and the other swears to it," Dewhurst said when Wade and his companion had left the bar.
"Yes . . . ." agreed Da Silva judiciously. "But I think that story was worth the price of a few drinks, do you not?"
"The funny thing is . . ." Reed said.
The others waited for him to pick up where his voice had trailed off.
"Yes?" Dewhurst prodded.
Reed shook himself and punched in a refill for his gin. "I've lived on Ain for fifteen years," he said. "But you know, he had me believing that for a moment?"
* * *
Ran Colville had programmed the three walls of his office alcove to show a Terran country scene. A road of yellow gravel, crushed chalk from the Cretaceous Sea of North America, wound over a hill. The side ditches were bright with Black-eyed Susans and the rich blue of chicory flowers.
Ran didn't talk about his background so that he wouldn't have to lie. He didn't mind easing others into their own false assumptions, however.
He'd attached his transceiver to the alcove terminal while he took a hypnotic crash course on Szgranian language and customs. Shards of light coalesced behind his eyes, then fanned outward into an external reality which was disconcertingly flatter than the roil of images still churning within his mind.
The terminal chirped again.
"Go ahead," Ran muttered. The effort of speaking brought vertigo. He was supposed to be off duty . . . .
"Sir," said a voice. In Ran's present state, it took him a moment to recognize it as Babanguida's. "There's something funny going on. I passed six guys in Corridor Twelve with a float full of equipment—electronics. Not our people or the company's either. They unlocked the hatch into officers' country—"