They wouldn’t know or perhaps care that the fictional plot unfolding around and with them had started as more than a welcome release of energy.
Once, it had been how Urgians went to war.
* * *
Pressed against one of the pillars supporting the gate into the Cin Embassy so he wouldn’t be swept away by the growing flood of Urgians and their guests, Evan feverishly flipped pages of his notebook. The Festival of Funchess took place over three days and one night. He’d written down the full schedule as a calming exercise and in case he could talk Terry into attending on their day off.
This was midafternoon of Day One of the Festival, featuring the “Arrival of Those In Pursuit.” There were, he read quickly, forty-three sponsored Actors in that role, each to arrive through a different access into Kateen proper.
Actors were primitive mechanicals, curiosities themselves. Their complex movements were controlled by the pulling of levers, and a single Actor required a minimum of thirty Urgians, using every arm. Those selected trained strenuously in advance, so the mechanicals—as Evan had seen from the vids—moved with impressive and convincing smoothness.
Until the operators began to lose their grips through exhaustion. One by one, they’d drop away, to be replaced by eager volunteers of any sort from the crowd. Adding to the replenishment were stations along every possible route where an Actor would pause, allowing the attachment of whatever random new element the spectators choose.
The result was, to Urgians, a delightfully creative chaos.
Since this chaos involved metal monsters the size of a two-story building, many with flailing limbs and spouting substances of, according to Urgians, an entertaining nature, “Spectators Beware” was assumed.
The Ganthor Matriarch was not, it turned out, a spectator. While his clickspeech was fluent—being able to converse with the species most likely to be involved in any conflict an essential part of Commonwealth diplomacy—at first Evan hadn’t comprehended what she was.
You did not ask a Matriarch to repeat herself, but fortunately her Seconds, one a grizzled veteran, the other bigger and as yet less scarred, were unusually outgoing for Ganthor and happily explained that their Herd were performance artists, famous on Iftsen Secundus and invited—or leased, the clicks not clear on the distinction—to participate in the festival by the Iftsen Ambassador.
How was a secret, the Matriarch clicked then, with a coyness alarming in a being typically in charge of an assault force.
Evan flipped to his next page. Day Two opened with the “Designation of Purity.” He’d made note of a city-wide street cleansing scheduled to follow the performance, implying this part of the plot involved a great deal of spouting, ideally of harmless materials. Or drinking contests. Likely both, he decided glumly.
Day Two would climax with the ominously titled “To Exhibit Exemplary Behavior,” featuring sets of ambassadorial Two of Twos, to be held on a stage in front of the Odarian Embassy, probably because they’d offered to fund it. The current city administrator was from Eyuob Province and a frugal individual.
He had to find and deliver the envelope before Polit Feen found out, and do it today, while all he had to deal with were tourists.
Masses of them. Shuttles were ferrying offworlders from the shipcity. More would soon pour through the streets ahead of the Actors. There were maps of their routes posted, ostensibly so you could reach a prime viewing spot hours ahead, have lunch, then be amazed. In reality, each mechanical was guided according to audience response, shifting its path to follow the largest and loudest crowd.
Creative chaos. The Urgians recommended spectators be healthy, carry idents and species-suitable emergency provisions, and expect to have their interpersonal space violated for the duration.
Tucking away his notebook, Evan Gooseberry drew himself up straight. If he must violate a certain large spacer’s personal space to do his duty, so be it.
Where to start searching was easy, as it was now impossible to move in any direction save with the crowd. Everyone traveled southwest, toward the all-important “Dyes, Glitter, and Glow” facility near the festival’s heart. Regardless of species, the facility would ensure you’d hit the streets looking like a true festival participant.
Forgetting to be afraid, Evan slipped into the tide of boneless beings and let himself be swept along, being careful of his elbows.
* * *
“I think,” I told Paul and Rudy, “this could be where they put the final touches on festival floats.” Or made sausages on a grand scale, but the very warm air wafting our way reeked of floral notes with a significant undertone of glue. I tugged on their hands. “If we hurry, we can look around first.”
The pair exchanged amused glances over my head. “Go ahead, Old Blob,” Paul said, laughing. He pretended to shoo me on my way.
Rudy’s hands landed on my shoulders. “We should stay together.”
The former patroller knew what I was; that didn’t make him immune to those inconvenient instincts when it came to this form. I gave Paul a pleading look.
“We’ll keep in view,” he suggested tactfully, then gestured me to lead the way. “Even if this is the staging area, Diales will have found a quiet corner.”
Before he’d finished, I’d slipped from Rudy’s hold and joined the Urgians. A tactile-reliant species, they normally weren’t fond of unintentional touching—individuals who lived in the city’s tighter quarters learned to accept the inevitable bump and slither while using transit, though they’d rhyme testily later. Festival goers went to the other extreme. Complete strangers draped arms over one another in euphoric sharing. The moment I was close enough, two wrapped overts around my waist, drawing me along.
Sensuous beings, the Urgians, inspiring my birth-mother, Ansky, to compose a lengthy series of poetry. When I’d been younger, Ersh had kept out the more erotic passages, citing my lack of maturity.
Ansky had died trying to save her last Urgian lover, a moment seared in my memory. I’d take it as proof I wasn’t alone in caring for someone not web-kin, but Ansky hadn’t comprehended death as possible.
None of them had, until it arrived.
We’d only gone a few steps into the building when, with a whoosh like wind, the air filled with multicolored glitter and music.
And Ansky-memory told me exactly where we were. “Dyes, Glitter, and Glow.”
Dress up time!
My Humanself let out a most excellent squeal of joy.
* * *
Not even diplomatic immunity could protect him from the glitter raining from the central overhead dispenser, so Evan kept to the sides to avoid the brunt of it and continued forward. He shielded his eyes with one hand, scanning ahead for a large, potentially-now glittering Human.
The first thing he saw was the Pink Popeakan ahead and in the midst, stuck among Urgians, glitter sliding from ril’s raincoat to pool in leg joints.
Evan couldn’t breathe. Urgians pressed against him from every side, holding him in place. To add to his horror, the Pink Popeakan fought free and began to run atop the crowd.
Away from him.
Stumbling along with the Urgians, who kindly wrapped overts around his waist, Evan drew a ragged desperate breath. Then another. With the third, as the Pink Popeakan disappeared behind a group of cheerful Grigari, came coherent thought.
What was ril doing here?
* * *
I wanted to watch Rudy and Paul’s faces, but my Urgian companions continued on, pulling me with them in such high spirits I hadn’t the heart to argue.
Not that I wanted to, for this was where spectators transformed into participants. The bundles proved full of personal glitter, the Urgians applying it with gay abandon. While it adhered nicely to the film of moisture coating their scales, adding depth to their natural iridescence, excess glitter flew everywhere.
Fabulous! Though I kep
t my lips closed.
Others had different concerns. A distraught Heezle stood directly under the dispenser, but as glitter poured down on it, the brilliant flecks spun away, repelled by the oozing pillar. Attendants hurried to help. I hoped they brought buffered glue.
Ahead, tall curtains divided the open space into wedges, each funneling would-be participants through a different personal adornment option.
While Urgians could let glitter adhere, be coated in glowing dye, and otherwise allow their bodies to be used as a canvas by cheerfully hardworking staff—it being a part of personal grooming to slough off the mucus layering over the scales after indulging, not that you’d mention it in public, and what went down the drain headed for waste treatment—others here, including Humans, could not.
I could, if it came to it. Form-memory wouldn’t retain glitter or dye—or poison, for that matter—but anything permanently incorporated into the molecular structure of this body could be a nuisance later. Not something I planned to test, simply to sparkle, so when my Urgian companions edged toward the wedge filled with luminescent gas, I tapped their overts twice and was released.
The hand that found my shoulder this time was welcome. I looked up to see Paul, his cheeks and forehead decorated with intricate patterns in sparkling blue-green glitter. His aptly-chosen vividly striped tunic and pants were free of the stuff, but he’d gone for red glow-disks on the backs of his hands.
He grinned at whatever was on—literally—my face. “You look great! Doesn’t she, Rudy?”
Rudy, standing at Paul’s shoulder, managed a wan smile that cracked the liberal coating of sparkly pink from hairline to chin.
“Shouldn’t you have waited until after the meeting?” I asked.
“No, no. This was a great idea. This way,” Paul said. He had to bend and half-shout in my ear as the happy rhyming around us rose to a din of birdlike song mixed with sporting chants. As I followed Paul and Rudy, I noted a couple of particularly hilarious combinations before being distracted.
I wasn’t the only one following them.
While bright shiny pink wasn’t an unusual color here, a Popeakan was noteworthy anywhere. They didn’t leave Popeak unless—I slowed. It couldn’t be.
Quick, too. The instant ril—I assumed ril—was aware of my attention, the being was off in a flash of black legs and pink, scampering wildly over Urgians, Rands, and whatever else was in the way. My final glimpse was of pink climbing one of the curtains and then disappearing down the opposite side.
We had to seal our data breach and get the Library open. Sooner than that, I needed current information. About Urgia Prime. About a species that shouldn’t be here.
About a festival that could be something else entirely, if what I suspected were true.
In Pursuit of the Most Pure, We Must First Ourselves Be Found.
I grabbed Paul’s hand to voicelessly urge him to move faster.
* * *
Where had the Pink Popeakan been sighted? Evan Gooseberry worked his way, as politely as possible, through the throng of Urgians intent on personal adornment, his mind so occupied with the problem he’d no room in it for slimy snake arms.
The caf shops. Restaurants. Drop-by stalls. Terry had seen the Pink Popeakan in his favorite spots. Others in theirs. He’d paid attention, and, by Evan’s estimate, the creature had appeared in every one. After a meal, they’d assumed quite naturally, because they were.
Blind. Blind. None of them had given thought to the other common factor, that those were all places where Humans could be found.
Evan paused to return a dropped bundle of glitter. The crush was lessening as incoming spectators moved through the various costume stalls; presumably those sufficiently coated in glitter and glow left through other doors.
Humans could be found in abundance at the shipcity, but there weren’t many within Kateen itself. He should know: it was part of his job to keep a running total. An assortment of academics on rotation, four present at the moment. A trade delegate from Ruductan XIII. The embassy staff. Family members, of senior staff only, lodged in the shipcity, as did all other Humans, hot water a species preference.
Was it a question of access from the Popeakan Embassy? In that case, the arrival of an uncounted horde of Humans for the Festival must have been a bonus.
None of it explaining why this Popeakan would have the remotest interest in their kind.
Unless ril was a junior staffer, like himself, tasked with gathering information. Cosmic Gods, he hoped not. Seeing Terry swallow whole boiled rast eggs, with hot sauce, was not how he’d want Humans to be represented.
Evan stopped in his tracks.
Ril witness to how he’d flinched and fled, every time, was incalculably worse. What had he done?
A chant from behind him. “There once was a Human so slow, He cost us our best chance to glow—”
How dare he believe himself a diplomat, here to serve the Commonwealth and represent humanity, when he’d let his weakness, his FEAR, be how another species must judge his?
Other voices joined in, “—With Actors in Sight, It’s our time for delight! Silly Human—”
Evan looked around the hall, unsurprised he couldn’t see the Pink Popeakan.
What he did see were other Humans. In common with two thirds of known sentient species, they tended to gather in clumps. Maybe where they were going, he’d find the spacer, his envelope, and, just maybe?
The Pink Popeakan.
Careful not to think past that point, Evan started in pursuit, heedless of the Urgians united in a loud,
“—oh, good, there he goes!”
Followed by high-pitched applause.
* * *
Somewhere between the glitter zone and the wedge supplying adhesive décor suited to all skin types—which I would have liked to test—Paul had received a ping on his com link directing us out of the costuming zone, to here.
The softly lit area of tables and benches was free of any adornment option. It did feature a corner ice bath wallow for those so inclined or already overheated, and open space with pillows for those whose anatomies simply didn’t work with furniture. I approved. As a temporary respite space this was remarkably species-diverse for the Urgians. Rudy could be right, that our hosts were responding to the popularity of their festival. Aliens were starting to show up everywhere, if still outnumbered.
I thought it more likely the Urgians wanted to gather those near collapse in a central location so that they wouldn’t impede movement through the streets.
This early, the respite was full of freshly glittered beings keenly interested in the beverage offerings along the walls. The only tables occupied were ours of Humans and Hurn, and a set of three on the far side consumed by the members of a large squabbling crèche group of Ervickians who weren’t using the benches and seemed to have misplaced their great-great aunt-sib.
I’d have preferred their company.
But we’d come to see the Hurn. Diales. Where he’d been born—on Klugen something or other, though my admittedly unflattering guess would be Klugen Who Cares, that being a nasty overheated piece of rock even Skalet considered nonstrategic and of no value—our expert in comp system security and the bypassing of any alarm system thus far invented would have gone by another name.
It being impossible to replicate the sound without being Hurn, Diales had to do, though I called him other names inside my head. I could have done it aloud. As a juvenile, prepubescent Human, I was relegated to the far end of the bench seat because I didn’t sweat enough to interest him.
Diales took up most of the other bench. He’d been waiting, was impatient, and not happy with our sparkling appearance. “Front entrance? Brainless heads, the pair of you,” was the nicest thing he’d said since we’d joined him. Rudy made fists under the table.
Used to the Hurn’s need to posture, Paul simply waited, a g
raceful vision in sparkly blue-green.
Outwardly, a Hurn was built something like a Ganthor: heavyset, with a thickened torso and large paired limbs. Below the shoulders. Above? A Hurn’s paired blue eyes and single vocal organ were clustered together on a rosy retractable “head” with an unfortunate resemblance to an apple from our trees on Botharis. It held no brain, making Diales’ insult the Hurn version of funny, for his thinking part was nestled deep inside his torso. A rugged, admirable design suited to a species whose precursors evolved as sly ambush hunters in sand, and who still preferred the occasional self-burial for relaxation.
Ersh would have used the form more, if it hadn’t been for a Hurn’s mouths.
They had brains, too, of a sort, able to react before the body. Hurns were born with one mouth, tucked under what would be a chin on the tiny bead of a head—had Hurns necks. Instead, they’d a collar of fat mouth buds, maturing as their bodies grew, and required more sustenance. Each mature mouth was the span of my Humanself’s hand wide, containing a red rasp of a tongue and an extrudable beak.
Tucked between full, juicy, mobile lips.
Polite Hurns kept their lips quiet and shut, breathing through hidden spiracles between their mouths and under their armpits, letting their vocal organ and its delicate membrane do their elocution. Polite Hurns thus appeared to wear tidy neck wraps of bright yellow, quite fetching against the shiny red of their wee heads.
Diales?
Most of his mouths presently dangled at the limits of their cartilage-ringed esophagi, unpleasantly like so many hoses, yellow lips smacking. Especially loud and mobile were the lips aimed in Paul’s general direction, though a few fixed longingly on Rudy.
Diales’ “dark corner” turned out to be directly under the full glare of glue-drying lamps. While I appreciated how they helped adhere the pretty mauve glow-disks I’d found to my tunic and cheeks, the result on my adult companions was, well, it would have been entertaining if not for the Hurn’s predictable reaction.
The Only Thing to Fear Page 5