“Why should I?”
“Don’t eat, don’t learn, kid.” Andro yawned and picked up another robe from the neat stack nearby. Jocelyn came through the fog-wall, muttering, her breasts swaying like two angry red eyes looking for a fight.
“What was that?” she demanded.
“Customs inspection,” the dwarf answered, looking over her shoulder at nothing.
“You little worm, don’t talk to me—”
“Cover yourself, madam—”
“Think you can—”
“—or you’ll be cited for false advertisement.”
Jocelyn blinked, turned red, and seemed to be deciding whether to stay angry. Toby got out of the way, trotting down the passageway Andro had fingered.
A cafeteria, simple and bare. Big tubs of fragrant vegetables, sauteed and fried and steeped in odd sauces. All bubbling under odd, slanted lamps, served up by auto-arms. To his surprise—and there seemed to be nothing but surprises here, though few answers—he liked the food. It gurgled and slid around while he tried to bite into it, sending heady aromas shooting through his sinuses. Enticing. Provocative.
Food it was, he was sure of that, but it wasn’t just difficult to catch with his teeth; it was impossible. The stuff slithered out of the way, as if it could read his mind. (Later, this seemed a distinct possibility.) He got tired of hearing his incisors click together uselessly and accepted the situation, just swallowing the smooth, delicious thing. It went down easily—almost happily, he thought, a crazy notion. In his stomach it exploded into warm waves of satisfaction. He sat back and enjoyed the sensation, which was even better than the eating had been. He was still like that, eyes unfocused, when the dwarf sped by, snorted, stuck a fresh spoonful in his mouth, and said, “Keep studying.”
The other Bishops seemed to be enjoying themselves equally. After hardship and strain, some were celebrating. They sat at the too-small tables and dug in. Shipboard chow on Argo had never been very exciting. Variety lifted the spirits. Chatter, hilarity, cleansing laughter.
This set off Toby’s alarm bells. He wondered if they were being drawn in, doped—but the dwarf seemed bored, not calculating. And after a while his mind cleared. He felt better—zesty, in fact, filled with bristling energy. And his robe had started to rub and massage him in very agreeable ways. He rolled up the fluffy sleeve and was surprised to find that his deep tan was a little lighter. His armpit hair was neatly trimmed back, too. He studied the fabric. Small bits of skin were caught in its tiny fibers. As he watched, the matted weave of the robe worked away on the particle, until finally he couldn’t see it. Gone. Digested.
Well, he thought, it was sure a funny way of getting a bath.
Andro came strutting by, stubby legs scissoring fast, saw their bowls were empty, and snapped his fingers. “Now we get down to business. Who has the license?”
Killeen said, “We bear no authority but our own Family’s.”
“Uh huh. Now, I never held with the whole Family scheme, myself—Cap’n, uh, Killeen, isn’t it?” The dwarf held out his right hand and Killeen reached to shake it. Instead, the dwarf peered into his own palm, ignoring Killeen. From Toby’s angle he could see the dwarf’s skin turn into a little screen showing a document. “Ummm. No record of you, I’m afraid.”
“Bishops of Snowglade,” Killeen said testily.
“There are plenty of Bishops, a batch on most planets. Aces and Treys on others, Blues and Golds on more. I’m—”
“Most planets?” Killeen asked incredulously. “You mean we share our name?”
“Genes, too.” Andro didn’t look up. He tapped the ends of his fingers on his display-hand. Toby could see the image change in response, yielding more documents.
“You mean we got relatives on other places?” Jocelyn demanded.
“That was the strategy of the Hunker Down.” Andro sniffed with disdain. “Don’t you people teach history any more?”
The Bishops all looked at each other, startled. Toby said wonderingly, “We thought we were the only Bishops. Our line went back to the Chandeliers, some said.”
“Oh, you do. But a whole Family line, we couldn’t risk getting it wiped out. So we had to spread it around. Say, you got any Pawns with you?”
Killeen blinked. “Naysay. They were obliterated by mechs.”
“See, there’s the risk. Too bad, though—I’m half-Pawn myself.”
“You?” Toby could not conceal his amazement. “A short little—”
“We kept to the original specs, kid,” Andro’s mouth twisted with sardonic amusement. “We respect tradition, in case you hadn’t noticed. You ground-pounder types always pump yourselves up, never fails.”
“Those who didn’t, the mechs got,” Killeen said soberly.
“Yeasay,” Cermo put in. “We needed power, sensos, carryin’ mass, techstuff. Adds weight.”
Andro squinted at Cermo. “As is obvious. Nothing to be ashamed of, I assure you. Most Families go that way when mech competition gets bad. Hard for them to shed the mass once they get here, though. And they get nasty on their perpetual diets.”
“There are other Families here?” Killeen asked, his skewed mouth giving away his puzzlement.
“We got them all—even the original templates, somewhere.”
“The first Bishops?” Jocelyn asked, awed. “From the Chandeliers?”
“Ummm? Oh, of course—somewhere. And somewhen.” Andro stopped tapping his fingers, read his palm, and slapped his hands together with a sharp crack. When he took them apart, the screen was gone and his right hand looked just like the other one, lined and dirty. “That’s it. There’s some kind of hold-for-arrival message for you. Somebody expected you might show up somewhen.”
“From who?” Killeen demanded.
“I don’t know. I’m an inspector, not a library.”
“Where can we find this message?”
“Have to see the Regency.”
“Let’s go, then.”
He eyed them shrewdly. “You’re sure you don’t have a license?”
Killeen’s eyes narrowed. “Little one, we have just come through—”
“I know what you’ve come through—if you’re who you say you are. Fresh meat, just in from the colonies.”
“Colonies?” Jocelyn was aghast. “We were the last fragments, holding out on Snowglade until—”
“I know,” Andro said, “but it’s a story I’ve heard before. Last off your planet. Point is, you’re the best ones. You got here.”
Jocelyn said, “All the other Families, the mechs got.”
“Just what I said. We can use people who know how to scramble for their supper. Or so goes the official yam-weaving. Me, I wonder if we got too many already, never mind—”
“Why all this about a license?” Toby asked mildly.
“Kid, you’d be shocked how many traders try to dress up all country and dumb, come through here, think they can just slide by the tax man.” Andro eyed him. “They pump themselves with bioemergents, so they look big for a day or two. Then they have to pee it all away. Ummm, you’re the smallest here . . .”
“I’m no phony,” Toby said, offended.
“Um. Suppose not. You don’t look clever enough to fake it, either.”
Toby bristled. “Hey, now—”
“I’ll pass you, then.” Andro wrinkled his nose, seeming to reach a decision, nodding to himself. “You can go through. But nobody else from your ship until you’ve seen the Regency—that’s the rule.”
“Why?” Killeen’s jaw muscles bunched, visibly containing his irritation. “My crew wants out. All of them. We’ve been cooped up for years in—”
“Think the Regency wants a mob of club-footed innocents dumped into their city?” Andro waved a hand at the gray walls around them.
“This is a city?” Toby asked, thinking there must be a language problem. Cities in the old days had been elegant, airy, places of sweet music and luminescence.
Andro chuckled. “No, kid, this
is a reception cell. I’ll show you the city.”
FOUR
A Day in Court
It didn’t look like much of a city. The Land of Dwarves, Toby had christened it before they had walked two blocks.
Even in a crowd he could see far into the distance, over the heads of everybody. Stubby people, hurrying everywhere. Yakking, yelling, laughing, and all in a noisy rush. In the hazy distance was more of the same. Stubby buildings, gray and brown and black. Stubby trees, even. On Snowglade they would have been bushes.
“What is this place?” Cermo sent on comm.
From Andro’s lack of reaction Toby gathered that he could not intercept their Family line. Killeen sent a quick signal that it was all right to talk this way, so Toby said, “And who are these runts?”
Jocelyn sent a puzzled note. “They’re sure not the high-minded types I expected.”
“Yeasay,” Killeen said. “When we found humans here, I expected them to be from the Chandeliers. Or the Great Epoch, even. The heroic ones, people who could build in the sky, fought well against mechs, explored True Center.”
Cermo said, “I thought the Great Epoch was when we got to True Center.”
“Nobody knows, really,” Killeen said. “Certainly no Aspect we carry remembers. It was ’way back, must have been done by humans with powers we can’t even guess. I sure want to meet them.”
Toby caught a curious plaintive note in his father’s voice, but the others gave no sign of registering it. They all marched along, giving no outward sign of this conversation, gleeful at putting one over on the dwarves. Then he felt Shibo’s Personality rise in him, welcome though uncalled.
They are rats in bow ties. But useful.
“Huh?” Toby felt the strong thread of her, ivory slivers shooting through his sensorium, masking the gray city.
An ancient term I learned from Zeno. The ancients wore constrictions about their throats to signify attitudes. A “bow tie” stood for a certain rakish tilt. Andro’s arrogance belies his true station. He is swaggering before the country know-nothings he takes us to be.
Toby relayed this to the others and they murmured in startled agreement. Killeen nodded. “That fits. He’s trying to impress us in some way. This place”—a sweeping arm—“pretty fine, sure, but it’s a shack compared with what the Chandelier folk could do.”
“Could be,” Jocelyn begrudged. “But where are the Chandelier Families? How come we’ve got to deal with Andro?”
Toby wished Quath was here to help. Part of him wanted to click his heels, happy that his father had done it, found the age-old goal of Family Bishop. The other part wondered what was really going on. Certainly this wasn’t the grand homecoming they’d all expected. He could read the barely suppressed disappointment in everyone’s eyes.
He wanted to say something to Killeen, to reach across the chasm that had slowly yawned wider through these years of flight, of the Cap’ncy. But flaming eyes made it hard to have a heart-to-heart.
Andro chattered on about the sights. He seemed to think they were hot stuff, prodigious monuments. Brown municipal buildings with heavy, ornate columns framing the tiny doors. Factories with no windows and no identifiable purpose. Squat black apartment buildings with puny balconies that seemed like stuck-on afterthoughts.
Toby sent to Cermo, “I’ll allow as how this is richer than the Citadel, sure. But the Low Arcology ruins, they impressed me more.”
Cermo replied, “I dunno. Have the feelin’ we’re missin’ something here. I mean, I still don’t figure how this place can even be here.”
At last they reached a pyramid-shaped mass of gray, shiny stone that looked a little more important. Their destination.
Andro led them into the rock-ribbed entranceway with a deep bow that was probably sarcastic. Toby gave him a curt nod, stepped into the foyer beyond, followed Andro across the marble floor—and smacked his forehead on the doorway. He suppressed a grunt. Andro’s mouth barely twitched in a smirk that was probably lost on everyone else. Rubbing his forehead, Toby followed the rest into a room with rows of hard benches. A lone figure dominated a battered wooden desk at the far end. The desk was discolored, chipped, its legs cracked. Toby supposed it was a “relic of office,” such as the ancient chairs used by elders back in Citadel Bishop.
“Fresh batch, Andro?” the squat, leathery woman at the desk asked. She wore a black robe and looked as if she had weathered a hard night. “The last ones you brought me are still debating the fine points of import-export law in jail.”
“How was I to know they could get those sniff-dream tablets through our filters?” Andro said plaintively, spreading his hands. “That’s the engineers’ fault.”
“A wise craftsman doesn’t blame his tools,” the woman said, lazily sliding her eyes over the Bishops. The sight did not seem to excite much interest; she yawned.
“These beefies are a simple case,” Andro said, stepping forward in a deferential manner. He pressed his right palm against a small jet-black area on the woman’s worn wooden desk. A breeeeet! seemed to signify data transmission from his personal files. “They’re a little hazy about where they’re from, but they don’t seem bright enough to be hiding any contra.”
“Ummm, you’re probably right there,” the woman said, looking them up and down. Out of the corner of his eye Toby saw Cermo open his mouth angrily, then close it again after a stern glance from Killeen.
After the learning-food, Andro had given them all language slip-chips to insert in their spinal ports—complaining all the while about how antique their spinal insert collars were. Toby’s chip was working well already, even though Andro had scornfully referred to the slip-chip wafers as “dumb-downs,” apparently meaning that they translated the speech of Andro’s people into sentences simple-minded enough for Bishops to understand.
The woman glanced down at her desk top, which flickered and was not worn wood any more but a glossy display. Toby saw number-thickets and long lists, all from Andro’s file on them. He couldn’t read the language, but it looked like a lot of information, all neatly sorted out. Yet Andro had never seemed to be taking anything down, or even paying much attention to them.
Killeen stepped forward, “If you are in authority I must ask that you tell us how to find some relatives of ours, Bishops, and a man—”
“I am a judge,” the woman said with a flinty, casual air. “And you will remain silent until I ask a question.”
“But we’ve come—”
“Don’t listen real well, do you?” She twisted her hand a funny, helical way. An electrical jolt streamed through the air, sending Toby’s internal sensorium reeling. It was a stomach-churning, startling effect.
Killeen tottered, looked green for a moment, then pulled himself together. “I . . . see.”
The judge gave him a wolfish grin, all knife-edge and strung-wire fine. “I have taken the trouble to chip-process your speaking patterns, so can state in firm voice familiar to you the consequences of your actions. I am assuming that you will spend an annum, maybe two, in the work-house for your violation of our tax codes. If you wish to improve on that figure—”
“Violation?” Killeen bristled. “We sailed into this place in search—”
“Appearing out of the Far Black like that, you set off alarms. The Regency had to muster defenses. You might have been mech, after all.”
“We fly an ancient human ship!”
“Deception runs rife in the Far Black. And you sent no forward-hailer to let us know. Defense costs money, rebble-dep, time, trouble. A debt that must be paid in the work-house.” The judge shrugged. “Simple social justice.”
Killeen stiffened. Bishops were not merely scavengers; they had always traded with the other Families, to good advantage. There had even been a time, the infamous Accommodation, when Families bargained with mechs. Killeen said shrewdly, “Maybe we’re carrying something of interest to you.”
The judge tossed her hair with feigned disinterest. “What could you possibly
have?”
“Fresh samples of space plants from a molecular cloud.”
Killeen waved forward Cermo, who added, “We’re regrowing them. Good eating.”
“Ummm. Regional delicacies? Marginal at best.” The judge looked off into space.
Killeen said quickly, “We carry tech we’ve picked up from our homeworld.”
“Ummm.” No reaction.
“And from another. Some strange artifacts. Ancient, maybe.”
“More planet-level goods?” The judge looked bored. “We get rafts and rafts of it when immigrants pour in.”
“Well . . .” Killeen glanced at Toby. “We’re carrying an alien.”
The judge brightened. “What phylum?”
“Myriapodia.”
Her mouth turned down with surprise, then snapped back into a canny flat line. “You’re sure?”
Not a good recovery, Toby thought wryly. And how could anybody mistake Quath for something else? Killeen said offhandedly, “She captured me on the last planet we visited. I got to know her pretty well.”
“She? I didn’t know they had sexes.” The judge blinked, plainly dumbfounded.
“Several, as far as I can tell.” Now it was Killeen’s turn to fake disinterest. “They’re complicated. Good memories, too. She’s told us a lot about the Myriapodia’s heritage.”
“Excellent, excellent. There is certainly a market for that information.” The judge thumbed her desk, glanced at a fresh display in the top, nodded. “I could probably negotiate a suspension of your work-house duties if the proper authorities could have some time with this alien. I assume you’re holding it under strict arrest?”
Killeen looked shocked and Toby knew it was real. “She’s a friend.”
“Sure, fine, no offense. You realize this will take some delicate negotiations? Experts will have to journey here from ’way out in the esty. Given the cross-shifts, we’ll have to—”
“Good. See to it.” Killeen was his commanding self again. “We’ve got other business here and we’ll pursue it.”
The judge glanced at her desk again and seemed to receive a message. “The alien, that is an important issue. We would prefer to have it under our control until—”
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