by Steve White
So the shipping line, as a matter of good customer relations, had put a few aircars at our disposal, programmed to accept verbal commands in English. Not that we were in a position to give any but the most rudimentary commands, given the awesome extent of our ignorance concerning the city. But the software—another term that, for us, still lay in a future when Earth's culture had soaked up more of the galactic technology the Project had doled out—was quite sophisticated enough to interpret the intent behind our fumbling, self-conscious attempts to make our wishes known. Thus it was that Chloe and I were whisked away toward the central plaza that Novak had decreed to be the beginning- and end-point of all sightseeing junkets.
The aircars were low-altitude vehicles, using underpowered versions of spaceships' impellers on a principle that was analogous to vectored thrust. As we passed through the urban canyons, I found that on this second outing I was able to absorb details in a way I hadn't on the way to the Akavahn's reception, when I'd been stunned by an overload of strangeness.
Then, with an abruptness that would have been unsettling for anyone with agoraphobic tendencies, we emerged from between the walls of towering buildings and swooped over the plaza—I suppose I have to call it that, even though the word has a cozy connotation, suggesting something far less vast than that expanse, like an artificial valley surrounded by equally artificial cliffs. The artistry of its pattern of alternating walkways and gardens was obvious even across the gulf that yawned between two species' artistic precepts. It was circular, and wide avenues radiated away from it like the spokes of a wheel—sort of like Pierre L'Enfant's original design for Washington, but on an incomprehensibly grander scale.
The aircar set down beside a kind of kiosk that was a subsentient artificial intelligence more or less on the level of the aircars. It was a guide to the city's transportation systems, programmed to receive verbal questions and respond in kind. With our earphones and pendants, it was an oracle waiting to reveal the wonders available to us. But I hesitated before consulting it, content to stare around at the plaza itself . . . and the beings that walked among the intricate arbors of vegetation the Delkasu had brought from their unimaginably remote homeworld, filling the galaxy with it as well as with themselves.
Most of those beings were Delkasu, of course, but by no means all. This city (whose name I never learned, nor even if cities had the kind of personalized individual identity among the Delkasu that they do among humans) was the port of entry for shipping from outside the Selangava Empire. So even among the Delkasu majority, there were various styles of dress . . . and also physical variations among the wearers of those styles, barely discernible to us but doubtless charged with ethnic significance in Delkasu eyes. And, here and there among the crowds, there were others . . . enough sorts of others that Chloe and I weren't particularly noticeable.
As Dr. Fehrenbach and others had repeatedly drummed into us, the number of toolmaking races was limited. And so was their exoticism. The more outrŽ science-fictional speculations about extraterrestrial biochemistries—silicon in place of carbon, chlorine or fluorine in place of oxygen, and so forth—were all very clever, but for various reasons they just didn't work. For one thing, they required planetary environments that were either flatly impossible (planets around blue giant stars) or vanishingly unlikely (massive concentrations of uncommon elements). Still, that left a lot of room for variety, quite a bit of which was on display in the plaza. I saw a biped even shorter than the Delkasu but seemingly almost as broad and thick as he was tall, with thick wrinkly brown skin and a snouted face currently wearing a device that compressed the air of Antyova II to the density to which he was accustomed on his own high-gravity planet. He walked in the careful way one adopts in low gravity. In contrast, a group of tall, attenuated, deep-chested beings with pale-gold skin and crested copper-colored ruffs of something that was neither hair nor feathers were walking laboriously and seemed to be experiencing some discomfort from the air pressure. Maybe, I thought, they thought it undignified to wear respirators that would reduce the pressure for them—or maybe I was just anthropomorphizing again, reading aristocratic superciliousness into the smoothly aquiline curves of their features. There seemed three varieties of them, and I wondered if they were one of the very rare races Dr. Fehrenbach had mentioned that possessed three genders—and, I imagined, very complicated lives. . . .
I felt a tug on my sleeve. Chloe pointed wordlessly at another group of beings—in this case, beings we both recognized, for our briefings had included holograms of the Agardir.
Despite a certain number of "incidents" in out-of-the-way frontier systems, there was—so far—no official state of hostilities between them and Selangava, of which they were still technically a dependency. To date, their aggression had been limited to the spheres of colonization and commerce. (Although one heard complaints that their tactics recalled the old saw about how to tell a pirate from a merchant: if you're armed, he's a merchant.) So there was no reason for them not to be seeing the sights like the rest of us. But I don't think it was entirely my imagination that the local Delkasu shied away from them as they moved through the plaza with their distinctive sinister gait, half-loping and half-prowling, as though prepared to instantly sprint at prey.
They were bipeds approximately the height of tall men. The resemblance to humanity stopped there. There was something odd about the way their limbs were jointed. Their forms were covered with an off-white integument resembling flexible bone, if that makes any sense at all. The faces were long and narrow, reflecting the whipcord leanness of their bodies, and the heads high and flat-backed. The hands had three long, multiply jointed, mutually opposable fingers, which didn't look all that well adapted to tool-using, although the Agardir evidently got along. The feet, likewise, were three-toed, with nasty-looking claws that they kept unconsciously extending. The latter were visible beneath the saronglike garments they wore under a short jacket, in angular patterns of muted colors.
There were three of them, all male. Agardir females, I recalled, were kept almost completely secluded. They glided (no, that's not quite the right word, for the motion was quicker than that) through the crowd, which parted for them. Their heads swiveled from side to side, taking in the sights like any other tourists. . . .
Only, as I watched, it seemed as though those tiny, glittering black eyes kept coming back to Chloe and me, only to swing away as my own eyes met them.
"Come on," I heard Chloe say. "We haven't got all day, and I want to see this 'Museum of Worlds' we've heard about."
She evidently hadn't noticed the Agardir's surreptitious attention. I decided not to trouble her with it. "Yeah, sure," I replied, and began to ask the kiosk for directions. By the time I was through looking at the holo display that obligingly appeared in midair, the Agardir had moved away. But, I noted, not too far away. And their route seemed curiously aimless, as though they had no particular destination, and no purpose except to keep us in sight.
"Okay, let's go," I said to Chloe, and struck out at a pace that drew complaints from her.
Public transport in the city was designed to be usable by a multispecies clientele. Everything was coded with a simple set of symbols. (Not color-coded, for not all races saw in exactly the same range.) We found our way without difficulty to the moving walkway we wanted.
Those walkways were wide, and moved at a rate that would carry you to your destination at a rate that was just short of being unsettling . . . at least in their central segments. But stepping onto one of them from the adjacent pavement to either side wasn't hazardous at all, for what you stepped onto was moving at a bare crawl. As you moved closer to the center, the speed rapidly but smoothly increased, in bands marked out by brightly colored laser light-strings. And no, it wasn't a series of parallel tracks. It was continuous. It just happened to move at different rates depending on where you were. And it was all perfectly solid—it was like walking on hard plastic.
No, of course I don't know how it was done. I'd been
told about a substance which could be made solid in the vertical plane but fluid in the horizontal, in the presence of an electromagnetic field. Izzy Berman claimed to understand it, but his explanation, full of words like "anisotropic," had left me more confused than ever. Still it was a very convenient way of getting around, if a little disconcerting at first. Chloe was obviously appreciating it to the hilt. I might have done the same, if I hadn't been constantly looking back over my shoulder.
We saw wonders beyond imagination in the Museum of Worlds, presented in holographic vividness. We saw the galaxy's blazing core, seen from inside the Sagittarian dust-veils. We saw beings of every possible form life could take. We saw the remains of a long-dead race's attempt to build a Dyson Sphere . . . and also working, contemporary orbital constructs not too much less impressive than that, far beyond even what we'd seen there in the Antyova system, beyond even what seemed the ultimate limit of engineering possibilities. We saw other things less easily described—many other things.
If only I could have concentrated.
We finally left, dazed. Chloe shook herself and found her voice. "Well, let's see . . . The next item on our list is—"
But I wasn't hearing her. I'd retained enough presence of mind to scan the crowds as soon as we emerged into the Antyova light. In the distance, vainly trying to be inconspicuous among the shorter Delkasu, were three familiar tall, rangy forms.
"Right," I interrupted suddenly, grabbing Chloe by the arm. "Let's go!" I set out at a pace that required me to practically drag her.
"Will you slow down?" she demanded. "What's the matter with you? For God's sake, you're pulling my arm out of its socket!"
"We're being followed," I muttered into her ear. "The Three Agardir Stooges. Don't look back. Just keep up with me." I speeded up, as heedless of her struggle to match my stride as I was of the dirty looks I was getting from the Delkasu pedestrians I was making our way through with my superior mass.
This wasn't going as I'd expected. Not that I'd really known what to expect. But one thing I certainly hadn't expected was Agardir. What connection could they possibly have with the Ekhemasu Empire, or anybody in it? Unless, of course, the Ekhemasu—or some faction of them, for whom Khorat was working—were trying to use them to weaken Selangava from within. Yeah, that might make sense. Only . . . what the hell did it have to do with us? That part made no sense.
Chloe fumbled at her little star-shaped pin. "Let's get out of sight of them somewhere and ditch these things," she gasped.
"No. I still haven't learned a damned thing. I want to play this out a little further. But," I continued, seeing the moving walkway ahead, "getting out of their sight isn't a bad idea in itself. . . ."
Without further warning, I pulled her forward in a lunge that took us onto the slow-moving outer segment. Farther in, our fellow passengers—almost all Delkasu—streamed past us at varying rates of speed, up to about fifty miles an hour in the center. As Chloe and I steadied ourselves, I risked a backward glance. Our three shadows, moving in their usual predatory way, had gotten on behind us.
I put my lips beside Chloe's ear and whispered what I planned to do. Her eyes widened. "When I say 'Now,'" I repeated.
She opened her mouth to protest. I didn't give her the chance.
"Now!" I snapped. I grasped her arm, bunched my legs under me, and leaped across several of the speed bands. Gamely, she leaped with me. Expostulations exploded from the Delkasu we were bowling over, who had been ignoring us with the blasŽ indifference of the urban sophisticate. Of the comments my earpiece picked up, "barbarians" was the mildest. But then we crashed to our hands and knees on one of the innermost bands. From the standpoint of the nonplussed Agardir trio, we must have shot away from them like the Road Runner from Wile E. Coyote.
Of course, I had no illusions that they'd stay nonplussed. They'd deduce which band we were on, using whatever it was they were using to track us, and get on it themselves. So they'd be ready when we started to cross the low-speed bands to get off. We needed to get off before they could do that . . . which meant immediately.
I led Chloe across the walkway to the opposite side, and we darted away toward a narrow side street. At least I darted; she did more of a fast hobble, favoring her right leg as she'd been doing ever since we'd landed so ungracefully. I had no idea where I was going. I just pressed ahead, telling myself that we'd eventually be able to find one of the kiosks and ask the way back to the central plaza. At random, I picked another corner to turn. It was a quiet street of relatively small establishments, with a kind of down-at-heels look about it that made it less intimidating than most of this city . . . not that I noticed any of that at first.
"Face-to-face" is the wrong term, for the long, pensive-seeming face atop the centauroid body was too high for that. But the being stood directly in front of us, clearly waiting.
"You!" I blurted. Even with my limited familiarity with the Ekhemasu, I was somehow certain which individual this was. When he spoke, the voice in my earpiece confirmed it, for the tiny brain assigned individual voices. And this was the voice I'd heard at the Akavahn's reception.
"Come with me," said Khorat.
We goggled at him. "You've got to be kidding!" Chloe blurted.
"Yeah," I chimed in. "Why should we follow you when we just got through shaking your Agardir friends?"
"They are hardly my friends. A little thought will cause you to realize that there are any number of reasons why they are not . . . only one of which is that my species is purely herbivorous, and we therefore tend to feel somewhat ill at ease around carnivores. And you should come with me because that is the only way to get all the questions in your minds answered." Without further ado, Khorat turned and walked away with a horselike motion that might have been amusing in other circumstances.
Chloe and I exchanged a look. She said nothing, but I could tell she was as mystified as I. Wordlessly, we set out after Khorat.
Chapter Eight
As Khorat led the way along the street, the leisurely pace he was setting began to worry me.
"Hey, Khorat," I called out, "I know we've only got two legs apiece, but we can move faster than this! And I somehow doubt if those Agardir have given up."
"You need not concern yourselves with them," the Ekhemasu replied over his shoulder. "You did a quite effective job of losing them. My compliments."
"Thanks. But they shouldn't have much trouble picking up the trail again, with these little 'gifts' of yours. Of course, I suppose we could throw them away—"
Khorat stopped abruptly and turned to face us. "Oh, don't worry about that. The Agardir have no idea that those devices exist. They have been following you by conventional means, as well as unconventional ones of their own, involving olfactory sensors. They're quite good at tracking, you know. Being descended from predators, their heritage predisposes them to it." The translator software faithfully reproduced the shuddering distaste he couldn't keep out of his voice. "And they were awaiting your arrival there in the plaza. They've been doing so for some time, in shifts, on orders from their Tonkuztra employers."
"Tonkuztra?" Chloe exclaimed, bewildered.
I shared her bewilderment. In fact, I excelled it. Unlike her, I was used to thinking in terms of multilayered intrigue . . . and Khorat had just added a whole new layer. "Are you saying the Tonkuztra and the Agardir—?"
"Not 'the Agardir' in any collective sense. These individuals are . . . 'renegades' is too strong a word. Say, rather, 'freelancers.' But everything will be explained in good time. For now, come with me. The Agardir might reacquire your scent by a stroke of luck." With the first motion I'd ever seen him make that suggested impatience, Khorat turned and continued down the street. There seemed no viable alternative to following him.
The street opened abruptly onto an open square . . . except that it was more like a single building enclosing a square, for the space was too vast to be thought of as a "courtyard." Khorat struck out across the expanse without hesitation, heading
toward the building that closed off the square's far end.
That building, though long and low compared to this culture's soaring norm, was far taller than those that enclosed the square's other sides. It rose in tier upon tier of terraces and loggias, with the combination of massiveness and airiness that galactic materials technology permitted. We passed through the hangarwide portal into a space that architectural artifice caused to seem even vaster than it was—rather like St. Peter's in Rome, although there was absolutely no resemblance beyond that. All around were the indoor faces of the tiered exterior, with lift tubes based on an application of artificial gravity rising through many levels of galleries. Everything was proportioned on a larger scale than the Delkasu needed, in a way that reminded me of the Akavahn's establishment.
I finally realized where we were. Delkasu cities were dotted with such establishments—a recognized municipal utility, provided by the government, providing space for a wide variety of functions, both commercial and civic. This one was unique because its interior spaces were adaptable to any of the races that frequented this cosmopolitan city. Anybody could rent premises there, and the building—a near-sentient entity in itself—would provide environmental conditions to the tenant's specifications.
I'd wanted to see the place ever since I'd heard about it. Now, as Khorat led us to one of the lift tubes—freight-sized, on Delkasu standards—I realized I was going to get a more in-depth look than tourists normally got.
We drifted upward—a sensation I'd never gotten used to, and still haven't—to an upper level which afforded a dizzying view of the hall or concourse or whatever. But Khorat was disinclined to let us rubberneck. He led us on, along the galleries with their storefrontlike facades behind which were suites of rooms. Each was identified by a set of the universal Delkasu ideographs floating immaterially in midair before the entrance. He reached one such portal, which slid open in obedience to a tiny remote-control device he carried.