by T. F. Grant
Kina laughed and pattered her on the back. “No, we’re good here. Why have we stopped, Zam?”
“Override.” Zam pointed at the control board. “Gotta stop for an override call from a Scholar.”
The door opened, and Tooize stepped back, holstering his shotgun. He bowed slightly. A Drift, much like Sweet-Sap-Rising, did its weird shuffling thing as it approached the open car. Unlike Sap, this one had black leaves. They were glossy and shimmered in the light. It stood taller too, almost Kina’s height and only slightly shorter than Sara. It looked old; its bark-skin was gnarled and deeply ridged, and resembled more tree than shrubbery like Sap.
Sara looked to Kina for direction, but Kina was suddenly very quiet and still. Kina dipped her head toward the Drift. “Old-Leaf-Knowing. What do we owe this honor?”
“Bring me the newcomer,” Old-Leaf said, its leaves bristling with each enunciated syllable. Its voice was almost humanlike, but so very old and ancient.
Tooize exited to the hallway and left Kina to escort Sara out. At first she thought it was some kind of sick subterfuge. Had she been set up? She turned to face Kina, expecting a gun to be pointing at her back, but Kina gave her a reassuring smile.
Old-Leaf shuffled up to Sara. Two glowing green eyes, rheumy with sap, inset within folds of bark and the black leaves shuffling about its face like giant eyebrows, bored into Sara as though seeing right into her. She wondered if it was like Reginous Phan—a telepath.
Sara kept her mind blank and waited.
With a shaking of its leaves, the woody limbs and branches of Old-Leaf appeared to relax. A particularly gnarled and withered twig reached out and touched her wrist, entwining around her gently, and then equally as gently, tugged her. “Come,” it said. “See the library. See what we do here.”
Sara and Tooize dropped behind Sara and the Drift as they headed away from the sheet-metal interior of a foyer outside the elevator. They entered a warm, inviting wood-paneled corridor. It was wide enough to take all four of them, with the ceiling at least thirty feet high. The wood panels gleamed as though from an inner glow.
“Nice place,” Sara said, unable to hide her awe.
Old-Leaf just shook his leaves in response. She noticed that this shaking or bristling meant many things. She guessed it was their body language. Over time, she expected she’d get used to their meaning like one gets used to the behaviors of a pet or a loved one.
They continued to the very end of the ornate corridor, being careful to round the various small wall tables and plant pots—none looked sentient, but Sara wasn’t assuming anything.
Old-Leaf turned right and took them into a wide, open room.
Sara let out an involuntary gasp.
The silence hit her first, then the stillness. But it was a stillness of intense mental activity. Ahead of her were a series of dark wooden pews set before wooden desks at least twenty feet in length. The room must have been at least a hundred feet wide and three times as long. Great wooden arches rose high on the walls until their ornately carved tops, in the shape of trees and other flora, touched the vaulted ceiling.
Narrow, organic lights, like glowing roots, hung down from the ceiling, giving the library a warm, inviting pale yellow glow.
Forty or so Drifts stood on the pews and considered their work: rows and rows of paper in myriad formats. Beside each Drift lay a hefty leaflike book. A tendril extended from the Drifts to the pages. The nearest Drift, a few feet away from them, with autumnal yellow and rusty-red leaves, looked down at a series of what appeared to be ancient newspapers. The paper of which lay within temp-controlled graphene sleeves.
When Sara stepped forward to take a closer look, she saw the organic leaf book fill with information, much like how the enzyme printed DeLaney’s likeness on the trade chit.
“DNA storage,” Old-Leaf said in his crackling, raspy voice. “We’re the Scholars, and this is the Hall of Knowledge, where we transpose all known information into our archival books.”
“How long do they last?” she asked, in awe at the setup.
“Eternity,” Old-Leaf replied. “Come. There’s something I want to show you. Just you.”
Sara stopped. That flush of fear came back to her. She turned to Kina, who gave her an encouraging nod. Even Tooize raised his arms to urge her on. The pair of them stepped back and took a seat in an empty pew.
Old-Leaf tugged on her wrist again and took her through the study. He explained each sphere of research and archive as he went. The head Drift of each section shook their branches and leaves at her in greeting. The areas covered were Xantonian History, Culture, and Science and Technology.
A further department was responsible for Quintilian Physics, which concerned itself with the properties of Hollow Space and interdimensional manipulation and travel. The final area of study was the General Species Encyclopedia: the central repository of information on all known species.
Old-Leaf took her through the research groups and into the stacks of bookshelves. Every book was placed in a metal container to preserve it. A number and label system that she didn’t understand identified each title.
“Your people had a similar facility in antiquity,” Old-Leaf said.
“Yes. The Library of Alexandria. I remember reading about it in our cultural history lessons.”
“That’s why we’re doing this,” Old-Leaf rasped. “To preserve as much as we can. Learn as much as we can. When the Xantonian race died, some event happened and created what we now know as Hollow Space. As you may have seen with your ship, computers and magnetic forms of data do not work here. All knowledge and information that wasn’t in physical form was lost. We don’t want that to happen again.”
Sara could understand the logic. It often took a disaster to realize what had been lost.
Old-Leaf tugged her once more, indicating with a branch to enter a small nook at the rear of the Hall of Knowledge. A smaller pew rested against the wood-paneled wall. Old-Leaf indicated for her to take a seat, and when she did, he turned and pulled a screen across.
Now her senses were starting to come alive again. She wondered if she could overpower him if something happened. Could she easily get through the screen? Would Kina and Tooize hear her if she shouted out?
“Calm,” Old-Leaf said, boring into her with those spectral eyes of his. “I mean you no harm. I have a gift. But it comes with a consequence.” From within the foliage that covered his trunk, he produced a small amber orb that fitted into the palm of her hand. He placed it in her hand and covered her fingers over it.
It instantly warmed against her skin.
“What is it?” Sara asked.
“A burden. But one I know you can carry.”
“I don’t understand. Why me? Why any of this?”
“What I’m about to tell you must never leave your lips. Two hours before your ship entered Hollow Space I already knew you were coming. And so did someone else.”
“You were tipped off? By whom? And how? None of us knew we were coming here when we made that hyperspace jump.”
“The most distressing of things. I’m head of the Xantonian Science and Technology study department. We have within our possession a number of artifacts that were left over in Haven. The very first visitors after the Hollow Space incident found them, and when we arrived, we made sure they were kept safe for study. One of these artifacts I believed to be an organic receiver, or beacon of sorts. Up until now it had remained silent.”
Sara slumped back in the pew, trying to take everything in. “Go on,” she said.
“A few hours before your arrival, the beacon activated and received a signal. The signal contained the name of your ship and just one member of your crew. You, Sara Lorelle. When you came to the dock and Sweet-Sap-Rising informed me of your arrival, I knew instantly who you were.”
Sara shook her head and leaned forward. “I don’t get it. How could anyone have known we were coming? And I thought the Xantonians were extinct?”
“So did we.
”
“So who sent the message to the beacon?”
“We do not know.”
Taking a deep breath, Sara opened her hand to look at the orb. It appeared as though it had an inner light—a slow-moving vortex of particles. “And this is the beacon?” she asked.
Old-Leaf shook his branches in a way she took to mean yes. “Within the beacon is the sum of all our knowledge on the Xantonians. Their science, mathematics… everything. It is too dangerous for us to keep here. As you were named in the first and only transmission, I feel it belongs to you.”
“What do I do with it?”
“Protect it. The time to use the knowledge will come to you, or you will perhaps receive another transmission one day. I truly do not know.”
“You said it comes with a consequence, dare I ask what this is?”
Old-Leaf leaned in and gently caressed her arm with his velvety leaves. “Knowledge always comes with consequences, Sara. I believe I wasn’t the only one who knew about this transmission. Be careful whom you trust. Anything Xantonian is worth more than all the credits on Haven. And the Xantonian mystery is worth more than all the money in the universe.”
With that, the Drift turned and opened the screen. “Go now, receive the Gift of Language to go with your Gift of Knowledge, and may your roots remain strong and unbroken.”
In a daze, Sara made her way back to Kina and Tooize. They looked at her with expressions of concern, but she faked a smile and said, “Okay then, shall we continue on?”
“Are you all right?” Kina asked.
“Perfectly fine, just a little tired. Let’s get moving. I don’t want to hold Tooize up any further.”
The kronac whistled an affirmative and led them to the elevator. When Sara stepped inside and turned to watch the door close, she saw Old-Leaf turn into the library. Sara placed the small beacon inside a zip pocket within her jacket. Despite weighing physically only a few ounces, she felt it pin her to the ground with the weight of a planet.
EIGHTEEN
“I’ll call you Ishmael,” Bookworm said, staring out the window at the massive white ship pushing at what was left of the bow of the Venture. He grinned to himself and glanced at the other tug, equally massive but a lurid shade of yellow. “As you wish, Buttercup.” His short bark of laughter brought an annoyed-sounding whistle from the kronac Lofreal.
Bookworm ignored her and the two nasty-looking creatures he had found in the hulk during one of his little walks. The creatures were hexapods, their six limbs attached to a body about the size of a large dog, but with an almost humanlike torso rising from where the head should have been on any normal animal. They had two muscular arms with surprisingly delicate-looking hands, which had four fingers and two thumbs, below powerful shoulders and a slightly too-long neck. Their snout-nosed faces had long jagged mouths with two large saber-like fangs extending beyond the lips. Shaggy striped fur covered their heads, but Bookworm couldn’t see if it covered their whole bodies because they remained in their spacesuits at all times. Nobody seemed to fully trust the strange rubbery sealant plastered all over the breaches in the bridge. Which was no big surprise.
Yet the creatures’ eyes, large and expressive with golden irises and slitted pupils, showed real intelligence, Bookworm thought.
Not that he could know for sure, because he couldn’t speak their bloody language.
They had communicated with sign language, laying what Bookworm assumed were weapons on the deck, when he found them in the airless section of the hull. He’d thought about shooting them anyway, but he wasn’t really a murderer. Not of people who hadn’t really pissed him off. So he brought them back to the bridge and pushed them through the bladder seal ahead of him. If the kronac killed them on sight, then he would have learned something new.
She didn’t, and they made some sort of deal—of course—and settled down to yakking at each other in whistles and growls that he couldn’t understand.
Should have shot the bloody things.
The two tugs he had named for a rogue whale and a true love’s princess were attached to the Venture with long wires. They wound tight or slackened off depending upon whether the tugs were pushing the Venture with their overpowered main drives, or slowing it with the equally large retro-thrusters pointing forward from their center lines.
“The push and pull of love and hate, will make me wail and bemoan my fate,” Bookworm quoted to himself. God, he had to get off this damn ship. He’d be quoting sacred books soon, and all that begetting got on his bloody nerves. He was slowly going stir-crazy stuck in a bubble of air with a lizard-faced kong and two toy centaurs with dental overcompensation.
Why couldn’t they have just left him on the hulk alone? He’d have been fine. He’d have had time to read and reflect and clean his damn guns. Frecking aliens, frecking Hollow Space, frecking Markesian scum-faced insectile erectile-dysfunctioning freckers, frecking DeLaney, and those frecking twins. Freck the lot of them.
“Why can’t people just leave me alone,” Bookworm yelled.
The larger of the two centaur-like creatures growled at Lofreal, who whistled something back. And then they laughed.
Bookworm had learned to identify their laughter.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “And I quite agree.” He sighed deeply and sat back down on one of the two cases he had filled with some of the doubles and triples from his library. He didn’t want to sell them. It was sacrilegious to him to sell books; there was a special place in hell for those that threw books aside after one read.
It was between the circle of hell where philosophers were forced to actually look at reality rather than just play word games to make themselves seem clever and the circle of hell where religious nutcases were slowly broiled alive over a low flame with the words “It’s the spirit of the law not the letter that matters” branded into their foreheads.
No, he didn’t want to sell his books, but he needed cash.
He liked Sara, she was good people, but she really didn’t have a sodding clue what was going on here. These people were ragamuffins, pirates, capitalists red in tooth and claw, and the crew of the Venture was simply lunch. He had to get some distance between himself and the others. He’d look out for Sara, of course, and probably the twins. Not the twins’ fault that they were the way they were. Frecking Crown did that to them with its nasty little experiments in genetics. But he had to get some distance from them, find a place somewhere quiet, so that when he blew DeLaney’s frecking head off, they didn’t get caught up in the fallout.
He was nice like that, considerate.
***
Tai waited for the air tube through to the Venture’s bridge to be connected by Scaroze. The Venture was far too large to be brought inside this smallish dock. The first job would be to make better repairs to all the holes in the hull so that the demolition crews could work without spacesuits. No point in paying danger money if it wasn’t needed.
The air tube was connected to the bladder seal in the bridge, and Scaroze clambered back inside the station via a smaller personnel airlock.
“It’s sealed,” Scaroze whistled when he pushed back the visor on his helmet.
Tai nodded and checked his own suit. No way he was trusting his life to a rubber seal and a few bits of sealant. Satisfied, he walked through the tube.
The first thing he saw when he stepped through was the two chyros chatting amiably to Lofreal.
“He”—she pointed at Bookworm—“found them aboard. He kept going off the bridge, wasting air every time, bringing back those cases.” She pointed at the two cases Bookworm was sitting on. They were not too large, had handles which allowed them to be carried with one hand, and were made of some sort of high-tech graphene material. Worth a few credits those, Tai thought, if he could get Bookworm to do a deal.
Even as he was thinking this, he smiled broadly at the smaller of the two Chyros and said, “Shegas, what are you doing on somebody else’s hulk?”
Shegas did that strange chyro
s bow, which involved legs and torso and neck. “Our ship broke down,” she said in Anglic. “We took refuge on this new hulk.”
“You speak Anglic?” Bookworm said in a shocked voice. “You never said two words to me, and you speak Anglic!”
Shegas, with her front legs still bent and her torso parallel to the floor, turned her head—much further than a human neck would turn—and said, “You did not seem to be the chatty type.”
“Yeah,” Bookworm said. “I can see why you might think that.”
“He talks to himself,” Lofreal whistled. “A lot.”
“What does he say?” Tai asked.
“Nonsense,” Lofreal replied.
“Poetry,” Shegas said in Anglic as she stood upright again. “Poetry and quotations, by the sound of it. He is a very erudite man, despite appearances to the contrary.”
“You can’t judge a Books by his fleshy cover,” Bookworm said.
“See.”
“Yeah,” Tai said. He smiled at Shegas. “Such a shame about your ship.”
“It is, yes.”
“Somebody,” Lofreal whistled, “had been pulling up a whole pile of grav-plates too.”
“I have no idea who would do such a thing,” said Shegas.
“Of course not,” Tai said. “You’re good at pulling up stuff like grav-plates, though, so tell you what. You pull up some more, and we’ll get your ship all fixed up for you. Can’t say fairer than that.”
“Ah.” Shegas gave a very human-looking shrug with her hands extended. “I’m afraid it floated away after we boarded the hulk.”
“Oh.” Tai pursed his lips. “That is unfortunate.”
“Very,” Shegas said. “We have no idea where it is now. You know how things drift in Hollow Space.”
“Only too well, my friend, only too well.” Tai sighed, then smiled again. “You know about black powder bombs, don’t you? Of course you do. What am I thinking? You’re chyros. Chyros know all about things like that.”
“Our ship floated away. We were stranded.”
“I know.” Tai leaned forward until he was looking Shegas straight in the eyes. “I understand. You haven’t seen any vuls about, have you?”