by John Grant
"Nice to meet you as well."
BE CAREFUL, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER, urged Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
"Aw, fu—"
DO BE CAREFUL. YOU ARE NOT A MEMBER OF A SPECIES THAT HAS BEEN ALMOST ENTIRELY EXPUNGED. IF YOU DO NOT CHANGE YOUR TUNE IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO LET POLYAGGLE DO THE REST OF THE TALKING. SHE AT LEAST WILL BE ABLE TO IDENTIFY WITH THE PREEAE.
Strider took the point.
"Thank you very much for the assistance," she said formally to the Preeae representative. "We'll get ourselves out from under your noses just as soon as we can."
"'Noses'?" said the Preeae.
#
After Kaantalech had finished eating one of her aides she wondered yet again if she should holo the Autarch to tell him the truth about the Humans having disappeared for the second time, and yet again she decided to procrastinate. All Nalla would do was get angry, then angrier. If he discovered that the Humans were in the middle of a Helgiolath fleet he would become incandescent—which would be fun to watch but would probably be personally dangerous to her. If she just left it alone he would assume that the Humans had been vaporized along with the entire ecology of Spindrift above viral level—damned few viruses would be left, come to think of it, except those that were able to live in total vacuum. Big deal. Perhaps in a few billion years a bunch of them might drift panspermically across a few hundred parsecs and seed life on a virgin planet, and some new technological species would come screaming up into The Wondervale with a view to getting revenge. Kaantalech wasn't going to waste too much time worrying about the possibility: she would have been dead herself for almost all of those billions of years—so why should she care?—and anyway she was pretty certain that viruses had lousy memories.
Not only had the aide been heinously inefficient, he had been made of meat that was so stringy that most of her teeth were now singing out in protest because of the bits of flesh still jammed between them. He hadn't even tasted anything more than passable. It was so difficult getting the right quality of staff these days.
Spitting out a ball-and-socket joint, she turned to look at her surviving aides. Most of them had continued to work away at the puters they were wired into, guiding the remnants of the fleet back across The Wondervale towards Qitanefermeartha orbit, but a few had watched the butchery of the aide. They didn't realize it as yet, but they had thereby volunteered themselves to be next. If there was anything that Kaantalech particularly disliked it was disloyalty.
"I want a position on the Humans," she said angrily. The aide really had tasted pretty poor: she hoped he hadn't been suffering from any infectious disease.
"We're doing our best, leader," said one of the aides, not looking up from his puter, "but they seem to have vanished from spacetime."
"Keep looking."
"Yes," said several voices.
She waded splodgily through the thick coating of faeces and other ordure that carpeted the floor of the Blunt Instrument's command deck. Hers was not a tidy species—never had been. It always amused Kaantalech and her kind to see the way that other species were so prim about the products of their bodies' metabolism. Every now and then the Blunt Instrument was cleared out and the valuable nitrates extracted.
"I want a fast result," she said, "but I don't want it broadcast. The first person to track them down is to contact me and me only, understood? Of course, the rest of you will know what's going on, but I don't want a word spoken." She snorted up what had once been a kneebone. "Do I make myself clear?"
There was not a word of dissent.
#
Lan Yi spent not one moment regretting that they had lost the Santa Maria: it had been a spaceship, nothing more and nothing less. What was really upsetting him was that he had had to leave his musibot behind. He himself played only half a dozen musical instruments, and as far as he could work out he was by far the most technically talented of the few musicians who had been aboard the Santa Maria. Human music was one of the comparatively few things that the species could profitably have brought to The Wondervale. Music was a peacemaker, unlike all the other things that people called "peacemakers." It was very difficult to get two people to start fighting each other while they were listening to the divine cantatas of Pastredii or the songs of L5 or the mating music of hump-backed whales. If there was any sign of aggression afterwards you could always just recycle the chip. He supposed it was all a primitive form of brainwashing, but it was not one to which he objected.
He looked upwards, and his lights illuminated Strauss-Giolitto's suited bottom descending towards him.
Once upon a time . . . he thought, before a stirring of interest told him that he was lying to himself. Yes, I'm being guilty of the most acute form of dishonesty: dishonesty of the self. He smiled wearily at the way fate had treated him. First a wife who had strangled herself rather than continue the existence she shared with him. Now a woman who he was virtually certain was not interested in him for the most fundamental reason of all. After Geena's death he had assumed there would be occasional—hell, after a while, frequent—sexual liaisons. The idea that bloody, nuisanceful, pestilential love might hit him was something that had never occurred to him. Now he found himself not only fonder of Strauss-Giolitto than he had been of anyone since Geena but also wanting to build a partnership with her. He had a couple of times lightly, as if joking, broached the notion to her, and each time she had taken it as the joke it wasn't.
He looked back at the slick stone surface behind the rungs. He was too old to be looking at women's rumps and thinking carnal thoughts.
No he wasn't. Never too old.
The thing he was was too old to go about falling in love with women who were a fraction of his age and who weren't remotely interested in him. Back in the Solar System, of course, he could have done something about it. He could have opted for the Artif way of life, taken up a female body, and then reintroduced himself—no, by that time herself—to Strauss-Giolitto, and waited to see what happened.
Except that the whole thing would have been a lie. Lan Yi loathed the notion of Artiffing. And he was a man, not some kind of sexless/sexed being. He wished the SSIA had chosen to board a load of sexbots, so that personnel like himself could at least try to fuck themselves into some kind of self-understanding; but the SSIA had been preoccupied with the notion of procreation. The idea of sharing a night with anyone other than Maria Strauss-Giolitto had become increasingly repugnant to him; although of course he would never say as much, the thought would be constantly in his head: Second best. You're not the one I really want. Thanks for the mutual masturbation, but . . .
With sexbots there was no need to pretend.
It was an odd time to be thinking about all this—or maybe it was the best time of all. Climbing downwards he was, for all he knew, likely to be dead within a few minutes. Perhaps there was nothing better to do in these putatively final few moments than to wonder why it was that the human species had since the very beginning of eternity managed to make a mess of things through confusing love, which was an emotion, with gender, which was a physiological fact.
He looked up once more—irritated to find himself feeling slightly guilty—at Strauss-Giolitto's buttocks. It wasn't particularly important to him whether or not he stuck a bit of himself into a bit of her for a while, although that could be a pleasurable conclusion to their lovemaking—if it would be pleasurable to her.
What he wanted to do was to make love with her, so that when they woke up together they could share a joke or give each other a massage or listen to some music or just lie there together, half asleep and half awake, enjoying the fact that they were in each other's arms.
It would take him an hour and a half to explain all this to Strauss-Giolitto, and even then she would probably either laugh it off or throw away his friendship, as if the latter had been polluted by the fact that he wanted to get that single stage closer to her. It was so much easier for most of the rest of the contingent that had come here on the Santa Maria: the normal con
versation discussing such complexities consisted of "Wanna fuck?" followed by "Yes" or "No" or "If I can bring along a few friends."
The light was growing brighter beneath him.
He'd lived a long time and solved quite a number of the mysteries of the Universe. Now, sadly, he faced the fact that he'd failed to solve some of his own mysteries.
What the hell?
He was probably going to be dead soon.
#
Among the Preeae, it was very evident, things habitually happened very quickly. Polyaggle spoke a spurt of noise through her suit radio that Strider could not understand and which Ten Per Cent Extra Free chose not to translate. At once the boxlike room filled with more Preeae, all armed with weapons that looked as if they could do substantially more damage than even a lazgun. The aliens lined the walls, their weapons unwaveringly directed towards the humans. Strider made an instinctive move for her own lazgun, and then realized the stupidity of the action.
"What's happening?" she said to Polyaggle.
The Spindrifter looked at her in evident incomprehension. Then, a moment later, Ten Per Cent Extra Free performed the translation.
"They are escorting us to one of their underground shuttlecraft. This is not going to be a very pleasant journey, but most of us should survive. They want to get rid of us as soon as they can."
"I don't much like the sound of 'most of us'," said Strider. "How many people are likely to die?"
"Two or three. Acceptable losses."
"They're not acceptable to me."
"You left three people out on the desert," said Polyaggle.
"I had no option."
"You don't have any option now. These people will help us if we move fast, but if we stand here bickering they're going to start having second thoughts about helping us at all." Through the Spindrifter's visor Strider could see the tips of Polyaggle's wings briefly behind the tufted head as she touched her gloved claws together delicately. "The Preeae's sign of acceptance is a stroke of one hand over one eye. I think you would be wise to perform that action now."
Feeling that she was betraying something but not quite sure what that something was, Strider wiped a glove across her visor.
The gesture seemed to be enough. The Preeae gathered around the humans. Again Strider had to stop herself reaching for her lazgun. A triple-jointed arm, colored green and red and yellow and one or two complicated colors whose names she could never remember, coiled around her waist. She forced herself to relax into the quasi-embrace.
"We'll be safe?" she subvocalized to Ten Per Cent Extra Free. "Or should we start to fight it out right here and now?"
The Preeae will not harm you. Probably. Would you prefer to be back up on the desert, Captain Leonie Strider?
The question was unanswerable.
The Preeae herded the humans towards a gaping hole in the room's floor. Strider shoved herself to the front, trailing behind her a clutching Preeae. A captain should lead her troops into each new hazard. "Can you bring up the rear again, Pinocchio?" she asked the bot over her radio.
"I'll do my best," the bot replied. The Preeae beside him looked at him sharply. Pinocchio had clearly not intended to speak out loud.
The Preeae which had its arm around Strider suddenly picked her bodily from the floor, swivelled her over its shoulder, and peremptorily threw her face-first into the hole.
Oh, well, this is it, thought Strider as the darkness closed around her. She felt like a pacifist torpedo: it was much against her will that she had been launched. She wouldn't explode, of course, when she hit her destination. Actually, come to think of it, she almost certainly would explode, but in a different sense of the word. The images in her mind weren't appealing.
And then she wasn't in darkness any more but in a wash of silvery light, as if the air were made of mercury. The visor of her suit automatically dimmed the glare, but did not change the color. It seemed that she was floating down slowly, but she couldn't be sure because there wasn't any background against which she could measure her position. She floundered her limbs a few times and then realized the uselessness of the manoeuvre. Better just to watch the pretty light, Leonie, she thought, spreading her body into a star-shape, hoping she was right about which direction was down.
"Are any of you Images there?"
YES. YOU'RE PERFECTLY SAFE. Ten Per Cent Extra Free sounded more than usually supercilious.
"It might be a good idea if you told everyone else about this before they were flung down here."
The silvery light abruptly vanished. Hundreds of meters beneath her she saw a hard stone surface rushing to meet her.
"I thought you said I was perf—" she began.
But she was flying. So this was what it must be like to be Polyaggle, except that she didn't have to make any physical effort at all to move herself from place to place. If she wanted to drift to the right then to the right she drifted. If she wanted to hover she hovered. It was the greatest freedom of movement she had ever known—better, far better, than free fall, where you always had to bear in mind that a minor motion here or there might have a major consequence later on. All she had to do was to think her position from one place to the next, and her spreadeagled body would take her there.
She was in a cavern, carved out of the rock, of such vastness that it was impossible to appreciate its size. All around her she could see yellowy brown stone walls, but they were too far away from her for her to be able to make out any details. She lazily turned herself over on to her back and saw that what she had been falling through earlier was a brightly white cloud. Another suited figure was just emerging from it.
She continued the rotation so that once more she was looking downwards. A ring of about a dozen Preeae were gazing up at her as she made her languorous descent. The trouble was that she wasn't sure how much she wanted to make that descent. If she'd had total freedom of choice she'd have opted to stay here for the rest of her life. She wished she weren't wearing her spacesuit—she wished she weren't wearing anything at all, so that she could feel the air moving against her skin and her hair.
It was her duty to be down there among the Preeae. She was the captain of the Santa Maria and she had to take command of matters on behalf of her personnel. But the temptation to stay here, wafting to and fro in the air, was almost irresistible . . .
She came to ground smoothly beside the group of Preeae and was immediately shoved a few meters to one side. What she hadn't noticed from aloft was that three of the aliens were pointing those ugly-looking weapons skyward.
"Tell everyone else they mustn't think of flying around too long," she said urgently to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
We've already done so.
"Thanks for telling me."
The next person to arrive was Holmberg, followed rapidly by Senskatachowan—a bacteriologist from whom Strider had over the years done her best to conceal her dislike—and Hilary. Even through the spacesuit one could detect the child's sense of exhilaration. Strider grinned. She still felt that same exhilaration. If the Preeae suddenly changed their minds and decided to massacre the humans, she would thank them in her dying breath for the experience they had just given her.
More and more of her personnel glided into the ring of Preeae and were manhandled across to join her. A couple of them had obviously been terrified by their brief encounter with flying, and had to be supported by others.
She keened her eyes and looked around her. The cavern's walls were still impossibly distant: she could see only enough of them to know that they were there. No, that wasn't quite true. Here and there, in whichever direction she looked, there were circular or semicircular patches of darkness that were presumably the mouths of yet more tunnels leading to yet other parts of the Preeae's domain.
Once the last of the Santa Maria's personnel had arrived—it was Pinocchio—the party was ushered unceremoniously across the floor of the huge cavern. The Preeae were not averse to using their weapons as goads with which to hurry the humans along. Som
e of the children began to shriek in fear, and most people switched off their suit radios and commlines.
Strider assumed that they were heading for one of those tunnel-openings, but suddenly the Preeae called a halt. One of the aliens moved ahead some fifty or sixty meters and made quick, complicated adjustments to the weapon he carried.
Oh, no, thought Strider. It's going to be the firing squad for us.
But instead the alien turned the modified weapon towards the ground. He did something to it, and then the floor just in front of him began to split open like the skin of an over-ripe fruit. The noise would have been deafening to the humans had it not been muffled by their suits. The vibrations underfoot were violent enough to make Strider stagger backwards and collide with Holmberg, who himself almost fell over from the impact. This is what it must be like when an earthquake hits, she thought. The jagged line of the split extended swiftly in either direction from them for almost a minute before the vibrations calmed down—for all Strider could tell, the opening ran the full width of the cavern. Then the noise started again, as the two puckered edges of the crack slowly pulled themselves apart.
The Preeae hustled the humans forwards.
As Strider looked down from the lip of the opening her first thought was that what she was seeing was a row of coffins.
"You're going to bury us alive," she spat at the nearest Preeae guard.
He gave no reaction.
YOU ARE PERFECTLY SAFE, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free again. I TOLD YOU THAT THE PREEAE HAD A TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM. THIS IS IT.
"Why didn't that bastard hear me?"
WE DECIDED THAT IT WOULD BE MOST POLITIC IF WE TEMPORARILY CEASED DIRECTLY INTERPRETING YOUR CONVERSATION, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER. FOR REASONS THAT MUST BE OBVIOUS.
"Whaddya mean, 'obvious'?"
"That bastard."
"If someone's jabbing you around with a lethal weapon, what other term would you ascribe?"
IF SOMEONE'S SAVING YOUR LIFE, BUT MIGHT VERY WELL CHANGE THEIR MIND, WHAT TERM WOULD YOU ASCRIBE?