by Dave Duncan
She stands in front of him, and yet speaks to the whole room. Her voice is the purr of a starving predator. “We must not forget that there is more at stake here than the fate of one commodore. Ensign Vaun?”
“Ma’am?”
“This Q ship will be arriving very soon. It may represent a considerable threat to our…to our culture. Admiral Roker reports that you are willing to attempt an investigation to confirm—or disprove—its hostile intent. If it is hostile, then it will be because it is crewed by more facsimiles of yourself.”
The green eyes have noted the sweat he can feel running on his face, and they glitter in contempt.
She has paused, though, so he says, “Ma’am.”
“In that case, they will certainly regard you as a turncoat, and you will be in extreme danger.”
Here come the big, big questions. Fortunately—oh, how fortunately!—he has been well coached by Maeve.
“You are willing to undertake this mission?”
“Ma’am.”
“Why?”
“I am loyal to the Empire, ma’am.”
She smiles sardonically. “And at the moment you really don’t have any choice, do you? If you don’t cooperate, it’s lab cage for you…right?”
Vaun says, “Ma’am?” as if shocked.
“Understandably, you prefer to keep your body cells assembled in one place, so naturally you wish this mission to proceed. So far your motives are clear. But if it does not proceed. Ensign, there must come a time when you do have a choice. You will be in communication with the Brotherhood—assuming the ship is what Admiral Roker suggests it is. You will be impersonating Commodore Prior. You will be in command of a spacecraft. So tell me why you will then continue to take our side and not theirs?”
“Ma’am, my culture is your culture. I was not reared as a unit of the Brotherhood. With respect, ma’am, you know my background. I am an Ultian, and a spacer.”
“A well-prepared one,” Frisde mutters very softly. She turns and paces toward the window. All eyes follow. This is the famous stagecraft Maeve has mentioned.
She speaks without turning, but her voice, like her personality, fills the room. “If you then defect to the other side…what then? The Brotherhood would reward you, I expect. I cannot imagine what form their gratitude would take…can you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Whatever it is, they will tender something of value, so we must outbid them. We must make you an offer they cannot surpass.”
She whirls suddenly. “So? What do you crave, Ensign? I know what most people seek from life: power and wealth and fame. But those are not entirely valued for their own sake. Partly they are the means to sexual gratification and—ultimately—the means to raise offspring in the hope of biological immortality. You are effectively sterile. There are no girls with twelve chromosomes. What promises can we give you to take with you on your mission? What will motivate you?”
The words are almost exactly what Maeve has predicted in the dark, hot nights, in the calm tutorials between the storms of passion. And he plays by her coaching.
“Power and wealth and fame, ma’am.”
The room murmurs like a nest of gishsaths.
Frisde stares hard at him. “How much fame? How much wealth? How much power?”
“You are asking me to name an exact price, ma’am?”
“I certainly am.”
Vaun takes a deep breath and wonders if it will be one of his last. Oh, Maeve, be right! “I wish to be publicly recognized as savior of the planet and promoted at once to the rank of admiral in the Patrol, with all the normal monetary compensation and perquisites, and an endowment of an estate of my choice.”
The room erupts in clamor. A few shout oaths, most just laugh—angry laughter, patient laughter, tolerant laughter. But Roker is not laughing, and neither is the high admiral. Frisde stares at the upstart, and the tips of her teeth show.
“Extremely well prepared! Have you any particular estate in mind, Ensign, or must we all tremble, awaiting your decision?”
“With respect, ma’am, unless I do save the planet and manage to survive the effort, then I shall be making no decision.”
Frisde nods slightly to acknowledge the point. But Maeve is right again.
“Nevertheless, I think exact terms should be specified, and in advance.”
“Ma’am. I want this one. Valhal.”
Louder yet—those who laughed now curse. Those who profaned now laugh. Roker’s face drains of color.
Frisde glances at the big boy appraisingly. “Whoever’s been prompting him, it wasn’t Admiral Roker, I think.”
“No, ma’am, it was not!” Roker’s glare bodes no good for Vaun when the admiral can get him alone. “Of course I agree, ma’am, that the ensign’s continuing loyalty should be ensured by a promise of a generous reward if he succeeds. But his ambitions seem somewhat excessive.”
“Do they?” Frisde glances thoughtfully around the room. The power-infested chamber has gone very still. Vaun almost can hear his own turmoiled heart.
Then she strolls forward again, across the downy carpet, stalking him. Drawing close, she lets the fear and hatred and contempt burn up in her eyes, for him alone to see. And her words are soft enough that only he can hear. “So that is your price for saving the world, Ensign?”
He meets her glare steadily. “Yes, ma’am.”
Quieter yet…“No pay, no play?”
“Highest bidder wins, ma’am.” He speaks without moving his lips, and the insolence draws color to her face.
“I can have you destroyed, you know.”
Cold rivulets run down his chest. “You need me.”
“You think I don’t have any real choice?”
Choice is power and power is choice. After more than a century, she has been cornered at last, and cornered by an artificial pseudo-person, a peon from the mud of the Putra. If she could scratch him to tatters with her nails, it would be a great joy to her.
“You’re bidding for a planet…ma’am.”
Then neither speaks for a long lifetime, as Frisde weighs duty against personal satisfaction…and finally it is Frisde who blinks, and turns away. “Dismissed.”
Fighting to conceal his exultation, Vaun salutes. He is sure now that another of Maeve’s prophecies is about to be fulfilled. Who can put a price on a planet? Frisde must support Roker. His friends certainly will, and his enemies need settle for whatever diey can get, even if it is only a chance to spite him by throwing Valhal into the pot. So Ultian Command will argue and discuss and debate for hours, and then accept Vaun’s terms.
After all, his chances of collecting are barely more than zero, and Roker himself will do his best now to see that they become even less.
THE SUN HUNG close above the sea, splashing red on the breakers that rushed suicidally to death on the sand. Gritty-eyed with fatigue and still mildly hung over, Vaun stood within the gaggle of assembled sycophants, and listened with all the calm he could muster to their oily insinuations as they taunted his impotence. “I do find surprises exciting!” Boorior told Legarf, peering around her bony nose to make sure Vaun was listening. “I wonder who this mysterious Quild boy is?”
Vaun chose not to spoil her fun by explaining. Few of Roker’s lackeys were effective enough to be killers; they would be genuinely shocked by the tragic accident Roker must be planning.
Long shadows scored the sand like wounds. Bandor wore pink and peach before a darkling sky.
A couple of senior officers were tossing a football. The flirtatious Admiral Gargel, head of the Medical Corps, was clowning with Lepo and Tawlet and screaming shrilly as they tried to force sand down her cleavage. That was clearly foreplay, and any minute now all three of them would vanish into the bushes.
There were several other people huddling in the wind—unnamed civilians whose presence had not been explained. Mostly they seemed awed by their distinguished companions and were staying very quiet. One or two looked unnervingly apprehen
sive.
Feirn stood a little back from the beach, half-hidden in the trees, and Vaun wished she weren’t there. Whatever the nature of the child’s peculiar fixation on him, the forthcoming disaster would upset her mightily. The inevitable Ensign Blade was with her. Blade’s protection might well be fearless, but he would be less use than a giant sea slug if she needed comforting.
Valhal’s largest thicket of pepods was rustling around on a shingle bank not far away, stirring into life as evening cooled the air. Security should be herding them off to a less-populated area and obviously wasn’t, so there could be no doubt that Blade’s information had been correct, and pepods were the business of the day.
At last a hovercart came whining down the trail and squirted out onto the beach in a blinding cloud of sand. Roker’s massive form was squeezed aboard beside a boy even larger, undoubtedly the cryptic Professor Quild. Vaun distrusted all academics on principle, and any who consorted with Roker would be worse than most.
Quild, when he grasped Vaun’s hand in what he obviously expected to be a crushing grip, was a most unlikely-looking scholar. Not only was he as tall as Roker, and even bulkier, but he had hair hanging to his shoulders and a primitive’s beard trailing almost to his waist—an obscenity that belonged in a swampy jungle rather than an ivy-coated college. Moreover, his arms and legs were coated with black fur, and and black curls sprouted from his neckband like weeds. Any normal boy cursed with such a pelt would get his booster adjusted.
Vaun turned a bland face to the smugly sneering Roker and waited to hear what mildly risky fate was in store for him. The gang of accomplices clustered in close to listen.
“Professor Quild,” Roker announced loudly, “is Dean of Aboriginal Biology at the University of Stravakia.” The beribboned sycophants all nodded delightedly, watching Vaun and waiting for his reaction when enlightenment finally arrived.
Vaun looked along the beach at the spreading thicket of pepods. Had the long-lost Cessine and Dice been creeping around disguised as pepods all these years?
“Silisentiens horribilis,” boomed the hirsute scholar. “What do you know about our pseudosentients, Admiral?”
“Less than I shall know in a minute, I expect.”
“Quite.” White teeth showed in the jungle of beard. “Have you even been close to one?”
“Twice.” Conscious of the forest of eyes and ears around him, Vaun schooled his poker face.
“What did you do?”
“Ripped off my clothes, and then groveled.”
That was last night. But the first time I ran away screaming, and Nivel…
Quild nodded grudgingly, as if a bright class was failing to live up to expectations. “The undressing tactic is sound. We have not established why garments incite them, although we suspect that they view any extrinsic augmentation as weapons, but our recent tests have amply confirmed the aversive reaction.”
“I hope you didn’t kill too many students in the process?”
The bushy brows dropped in a shaggy frown. “This is a serious matter, Admiral. We used convicted felons, if you must know. Those who survived received reductions in their sentences.”
“So did those who didn’t, I expect. Can we get to the point, Professor?”
“Groveled, you said. Why grovel?”
“Asa child I was taught that the pepods were less likely to attack anyone who crouched down as small as possible.” But I forgot. I ran. Nivel screamed and screamed…
“Ah! That is where the conventional wisdom is at fault. It is not the posture that matters.”
“It feels right to me,” Vaun said, recalling his narrow escape the previous night.
Quild scowled. “What matters is the aspect you present to them. What do they see—although of course pepods’ perception is keyed to frequencies we cannot appreciate, but ‘see’ is an adequate approximation…What does a pepod see when you grovel before it?”
Oh, of course! “Hair?”
“Exactly! Hair. Being fibroid themselves, they may associate sentience with filamentary texture. Hairy, in other words, although of course this is anthropomorphic speculation. When we shaved the convicts’ heads, the effect of groveling was below the five percentile confidence level. In other words, not significant.”
Perhaps it was fatigue, perhaps it was fear, but Vaun felt a virulent dislike for this oversize anthropoid pomposity. “I think I see why you have met with success in your researches, Professor.”
An angry flush showed above the monstrous beard, but Roker broke in impatiently. “Professor Quild made the initial discovery quite serendipitously. He—” Quild tried to interrupt and was quailed into silence by one of Roker’s sneers. “He was challenged to a duel. A pepod duel. Illegal, of course, but an old Pharishian custom. Perhaps you have heard of it?”
Vaun hadn’t. Nivel screamed all the way back to the village. There were eleven of them carried back screaming, and even Nivel’s withered foot, which had never moved before, was twisting and writhing.
He shivered in the cold sea wind. “I can guess. Am I being challenged to a Pharishian pepod duel?”
“It would be murder,” Quild snapped. “They would react aggressively to you long before they did to me. I could go much closer.”
“And I would let you.” Vaun shot an exasperated look at Roker. “Sir, is this relevant?”
Clearly, Roker was enjoying the game, playing to his pet audience. Even Gargel and her playmates had come back to enjoy the show.
“Tell him about the standing wave, Professor.”
Quild grew suddenly coy. “Well, this is a little premature for publication, but we do have evidence that the pepods’ long-range, low-frequency radio communication is a much less discontinuous behavior pattern than has hitherto been appreciated. There seems to be an ongoing form of…well, our working terminology is continuum…of emission and response. A sort of background murmur, if you like. And at times it may even have a holographic quality to it. Standing wave is a relatively—”
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with me, sir,” Vaun snapped. But it did. Oh yes, it did.
Roker rolled up his lip as if about to wrap it around a juicy bunch of grass. “Where are Dice and Cessine, Admiral? Where are the cuckoos?”
Vaun waved a hand. “Out there somewhere, among ten billion other people. Working as salesfolk or bakers or painters—who knows? Staying in the slums, where spacers never go. Nor pepods, either! I expect plastic surg—”
“Plastic surgery would be quite ineffectual!” Quild boomed. The interruptions were annoying him. “At the wavelengths used by pepods, such detail would be quite undetectable.”
Crazy! Vaun wheeled on him. “Are you saying you can talk to those vegetables, Professor? You think they have the sensitivity and the brains to tell the difference between one human and another? You—”
“Not brains, but the answer to both your questions is yes.” The big boy smiled and stroked his beard with a furry paw. The sycophants were all smirking. “We have established quite clearly by simple reinforcement conditioning that they can distinguish between human beings. They ‘see,’ to use that approximate term, deep within the human physique, certainly to the cellular level, probably to the molecular. They may even be able to read DNA itself. They may not be quite as discerning as you are, Admiral, but they have surprised us several times.”
“I hope they don’t surprise us tonight.” Vaun turned to the high admiral. “Sir, have you considered the dangers in this?”
Roker exchanged amused glances with his entourage. “Your personal courage is a legend in the Patrol, Admiral Vaun. Your annual address to the recruits inspires—”
“Not to me, dammit! This boy is claiming that there is some sort of worldwide pepod network, isn’t that so, Professor? I don’t believe him, because in ten thousand years we should—”
Quild could shout louder. “There are many early records of simultaneous pepod outbreaks on a continental scale.”
“And th
at’s exactly my point! A massacre’s exactly what you’re risking. We’re within range of the mainland—you know that, Roker! There was a pepod eruption on the coast back in ’98 or thereabouts, and the Valhal thickets rampaged also. If you start messing about with these, then you’re endangering all the coastal settlements from Asimfirth to the cape and God knows how far inland—”
“Your concern has been noted, Admiral,” Roker said, leering.
The sun had set; the salty wind from the sea was as sharp as a knife. Vaun shivered again. What a frigging horrible way to die! And if he refused to obey orders during a state of emergency, then Roker could have him shot. That might be preferable.
“Let’s get this clear,” he said, while his mind raced around the problem in search of escape. “First, you claim you can actually talk to these creatures? Secondly, you think they are sufficiently intelligent to provide useful answers? Thirdly, you think they will then oblige you by going off to look for replicas of myself, and fourthly, that they can somehow direct you to where those replicas may be found? What sort of gullible half-wit would believe all that? What sort of motive can you provide them with that they will give one damn about your problem? What—”
“I repeat, Admiral,” Roker barked, “that your concerns have been noted. After all, the concept of a group mind may be alien to us…but I would have thought that you could comprehend it more easily than most.”
Boorior cackled merrily at such wit, and some of the others followed her lead.
Several of the pepods were wandering in the general direction of the human spectators. Security would never have allowed them to come this close had Roker not already tampered with Vaun’s standard orders.
The high admiral’s sneer told Vaun he was beaten. The smirks on the faces of Roker’s toadies confirmed it. They all thought they were safe, because Roker’s armed band had arrived now, and because Security could call down a firestorm if there was trouble. Had they any idea how fast an angry pepod traveled? Well, he would not give them the satisfaction of hearing him plead. All mortals died in the end. Defeat was inevitable, but to go bravely was the closest a boy could come to victory.