Analog SFF, July-August 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "The thing-in-itself is a social relationship,” he said. “That is a good lesson."

  Pog smiled. Gyorgy Lukacs would be proud of him, he thought.

  "And one more thing,” he said, as he looked about for his pack to make ready his departure.

  "And that is?"

  "On Chamal, the social relationship is distributed and interactive."

  * * * *

  The ride back to the university was much easier than the trip to David Wu's.

  Winston and Neerat followed the truck with David's body, passing slowly through the gate at the end of the avenue and then at a respectfully slow ramble down the avenues and through the city squares to the campus.

  Winston followed the truck into the garage—once upon a time it had been a stable—and then watched as the university workers transferred the body onto a gurney. They rolled it down the long stone halls, into the newer section of the complex with fiberglass and plastic walls, into an elevator and up a few floors to the laboratories.

  There he left David to the tender attention of the scientific staff—four chamalians and a human technician, a serious Nigerian girl who seemed a little bit in shock over the incident.

  She would guide the chamalians as they examined the body. They would follow her instructions without knowing how the technology worked. It wasn't necessary for them to know—in fact, there were strict controls in place to prevent them from learning. The tiniest pieces of knowledge could give away much more than anyone realized.

  Technology transfer was the biggest fear of the survey team and the Space Corps military types that protected them.

  He really didn't want to discuss the issue with anyone at the moment, but he knew that putting it off would only make things worse. He dragged himself down to the elevator, up a level, and then halfway across the campus complex to his offices to make the call.

  Lieutenant Cloud was still on duty. That made his task slightly less dreadful.

  "David is in the lab,” he said. “They're giving him a full forensic body scan. It'll take a while for all the results to be integrated. You'll probably get the report before I do."

  "We'll let you know when it comes in,” she said.

  "And I've collected all of David's personal kit,” he said. “His AI, his readers and writer and autochef."

  "We'll need to do a full diagnostic on the AI,” she said.

  "I'm sorry. I left it down in the lab with everything else."

  "It can wait until tomorrow,” Cloud said. “You've done enough for now."

  He sighed, then confronted the dreary truth. “And I have a bit of bad news. David's mindpad is missing. Along with his houseboy. I think the boy took it with him."

  Lieutenant Cloud's face went through a quick series of expressions—surprise, puzzlement, then that confidence that military types were so quick to adopt whether it was justified or not. “I think you're getting ahead of me. David had a houseboy who's missing?"

  "Yes. He's not really a houseboy. Or even a boy. He's David's chamalian aide. Much more responsibility than just keeping house. He was his connection to the city."

  He spent a few minutes describing the attack by the black steamwagon gang—or the evidence they'd left behind and what appeared to have transpired.

  "And you think the houseboy has the mindpad?"

  "They're both missing."

  "But you've got everything else?"

  "Everything."

  "That's no problem,” Lieutenant Cloud said. “It's low-risk technology. All completely integrated molecular tech, so there's not much chance of reverse engineering. It's mainly an interface to other things. And if anyone powers it up, it'll ping us, and we'll know exactly where it is."

  Winston drew a deep breath and felt the weight of an alien world lifting from his shoulders.

  "Thank you,” he said. “That's a load off my mind."

  "Who do the authorities think is responsible?” Lieutenant Cloud asked, changing the subject quickly now that the housekeeping details had been taken care of.

  "They have their theories,” Winston replied. “The official in charge of the investigation thinks it's the work of some shady character he calls the Scarlet Starflower. Sort of a general scoundrel who conveniently gets blamed for everything that happens in Kar-Kar-a-Mesh."

  "Speculation up here is that there's some political motive behind it,” Lieutenant Cloud said.

  "I wish I knew,” Winston said. “The only one who could tell us for sure was David."

  "That's too bad."

  "You know, Lieutenant Cloud, I can tell you a tremendous amount about the way chamalian evolution works,” Winston said. “Genes are just an excellent chemical system for storing and passing along information. Our Mendelian genes are simple binary systems for dominants and recessives that produce marvelous diversity, capture useful mutations, mix and match traits and pass them along. But Chamal has a much more complex system—a double-jointed kind of information-storage scheme. Instead of a two-by-two matrix, it's based on a four-by-four matrix. And that means sixteen outcomes for every allele, and that multiplies out and cascades down. The mind boggles at the complexity.

  "I can tell you root and branch of how different phenotypes weave and wend their way through the population. Their histories and pedigrees. Where each phenotype picked up self-conscious intelligence. How it spreads. Nature is much more clever than we give it credit for. The planet's entire population of warm-blooded creatures all belong to a single species, but nature manages to sort it out so that there are stable populations of each genomorph for every ecological niche over evolutionary time—and despite the most strident efforts by the intelligent genomorphs to interfere.

  "But David could do something much more amazing. This city down here is a one big slice across the skeins of inheritance that make up that vast chamalian pedigree. A cross-section. A moment of evolutionary time. The political economy is a mosaic of competing eugenics. A series of overlapping Venn diagrams. A web of intrigues and rivalries. A struggle for advantage and profit.

  "And he knew how it all worked. Who the players were. What the rules were. How the games were played. What happened to the winners and the losers."

  Winston caught himself. He was lecturing again. This wasn't a classroom. This was a conversation with a pleasant young woman who happened to be a Space Corps officer. He had let his professorial habits get the better of him.

  Then the awful truth of David Wu's death spilled over.

  "And now it's all gone. Like a discarded memory card. All that knowledge just erased. So many neuronic pathways turned back into acids and sugars."

  "What a waste,” Lieutenant Cloud said.

  "What a waste indeed,” Winston said.

  * * * *

  After a while, when he was done talking to Lieutenant Cloud, Winston returned to his apartment. He went into the kitchen and rummaged around in the cabinets until he found the brown bottle with the gold label that David had given him as a birthday gift. Irish whiskey. Real, not synthesized.

  As he recalled, it was like drinking firecrackers and razorblades. But that seemed appropriate.

  "To you, David Wu,” he said as he poured a small amount into a glass. “May we remember all the good and forget everything else."

  He swallowed quickly. It was just as he had remembered. He poured another small amount into the glass and carried the bottle and glass into the salon, where he dropped into an easy chair.

  He knew he wasn't going to be sleeping for a while. His mind was full of memories of David, pouring out of some wellspring of grief.

  A few hours later, his AI alerted him to a call from Lieutenant Cloud.

  "The forensic report is in,” she said.

  "What's it say?"

  "Dr. Wu was already dead when he was shot."

  Winston was thankful he'd had a few drinks to keep the shock from knocking him over.

  "Already dead? That would explain why there wasn't more blood. So what killed him? Was it s
omething he drank? He was always trying exotic chamalian concoctions."

  "Maybe. Some kind of toxin. The AIs are still working on it. They're going to wait for a datadump from Earth to nail it down."

  "Curiouser and curiouser,” he said. “Good-bye, feet."

  * * * *

  Pog was still awake when the sun leapt up out of the Meshkar Sea with tropical suddenness and splashed golden sparkles from the horizon to the harbor. His vantage point—in a guard tower in the forestfolk slum—allowed him a view of the waterfront and the water on one side of the city and the high mountain cliffs on the other.

  Kar-Kar-a-Mesh—the jewel of Meshkar.

  The sun burnished the rows of whitewashed villas that lined the high bluffs at the base of the mountains. And it blazed off the ice and snow that capped the peaks high above the morning clouds.

  It flashed off the copper domes of the city center, polished by early rising crews of halflings with abrasive clothes who scampered across their heights. It caught the flags and the hulls and the deckhouses of the Red Fleet as it sailed outbound past the breakwater trailing black smoke behind it—the admirals were not about to be caught unprepared if the assassination of an angel was the opening move of a play for power by Shemrak, Mar-Kesh, or the lesser states that ringed the great bowl of Meshkar.

  The shore of Meshkar curved in great arcs to the north and south, where, unlike Kar-Kar-a-Mesh, the mountains plunged steeply into the turquoise water with no purchase for landholders. The mountains that cradled the great sea had been thrown up, the angels said, by a small moon falling from the sky. The resulting caldera filled with water in some vastly ancient time, forming a sea that stood two full leagues above the surrounding soggy rainforest astride the chamalian equator.

  Tropical rains kept the basin filled, despite great rivers that carried the water through clefts in the mountain ring, cascading down in colossal waterfalls.

  And in the niches of flat ground around its six-thousand-league circumference, chamalians had created cities and city-states and mercantile bands. In typical chamalian fashion, the cities and states and mercantile bands formed and reformed constantly changing arrays of alliances and rivalries. Each turn of the Great Wheel brought new permutations of friend and foe and new combinations of economic and political winners and losers.

  Through it all, the great cities, Kar-Kar-a-Mesh and her sisters, maintained their fleets and their banks and their trading companies in the face of constant battle and conflict.

  In the last few centuries, the desire for wealth and power had sent the cities down from their mountain fastness into the rainforests. The need for more and more resources and more and more markets had fueled an imperial expansion as armies from Meshkar conquered the boundless patchwork of warring states that stretched out across the tropics between the desert belts that circled the planet. Beyond the reach of the armies, their commercial tendrils invaded bog and marsh, ridge and hilltop, with the more seductive and irresistible power of currency and exchange.

  But since the arrival of the angels put an abrupt and unappealable end to chamalian military operations, things had changed.

  The struggle continued, but through the political economy of tropical Chamal instead of the military matrix.

  One result was the flood of workers into the cities of Meshkar from the rainforests below. Cheap labor, easily controlled, readily exploited, rode the cog trains up the steep slopes to find new homes in shanty towns that filled the interstices of old and new Kar-Kar-a-Mesh.

  The xenophobic myths that the new migrants spawned among the old inhabitants of the city depicted the forestfolk as a lawless, undisciplined, uncontrolled mob. But the myths only existed to serve the political ends of the city's masters.

  In truth, they had brought their own mechanisms of social control, their own militias and guards, their own committees of public order and safety. Many ramshackle towers—all much like the one where Pog had taken refuge for the night—rose above the slums, holding guards who protected the forestfolk against their new neighbors and against one another.

  Pog had asked Barkinflas to find a safe place for him until daylight, and his father had sent him here. His companions, a pair of pointed-ear nighthunters armed with spring-powered dartguns, had welcomed him into their post without hesitation. They had cousins who worked the docks, and that meant a favor to Barkinflas would be repaid one way or another.

  Below the guard tower, Pog watched as a four-legged shambler with shaggy black and yellow fur lumbered up the alley behind a row of shops and eateries. A dozen steplings scampered for cover at his approach, scrambling under boxes and behind trash bins.

  The shambler stopped at a pile of frog bones, picked a tiny femur from the pile with his teeth, and approached one large trash bin. He dipped his head, threw the bone at the bin, then leapt back into a crouch, ready to spring into action at whatever issued from the bin. What emerged was a family of purple stingers, which rushed off with bits of fruit rind in their mouths.

  Pog was impressed by the presence of mind that the shambler obviously possessed. He had formulated a plan, had an expectation of consequences, assumed a stance based on that expectation, and executed the whole operation. There was true wisdom there, even in the least of Chamal's creatures.

  He was nevertheless surprised when the shambler made a hooting sound that could have been words if there were only a bit more modulation to it. In response, the steplings came out of their hiding places and surrounded the bin—which the shambler brought down by putting his forepaws on its rim and pulling hard.

  The shambler and the steplings dived into the feast of discarded food with energetic appreciation.

  Not just wisdom, but a social order. Pog couldn't have done better himself.

  He looked up at the two militiamen and saw that they had watched the scene unfold with him and were smiling in admiration. He thanked them for their hospitality and climbed down the ladder.

  He had much to do today and far to go.

  He walked quickly through the slums of the forestfolk, down dusty paths to the cobblestone paving that marked its boundary. He strode down a broad plaza of steps to Admiral Preekat Square, where a clot of green-furred diggers wearing tool belts and orange hardhats were assembled.

  The broad avenues of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh were already teeming with the ranks of the various leagues and bands and committees of workers that he had ordered into action. Before leaving Barkinflas, he had drafted orders to the machinists, the factory leagues, the transport crews, the telephone and telegraph switchers, and a dozen other organized groups.

  They had prepared for this day for a long time, but had never had the opportunity to put the plans into action. There were details of timing and positioning that had to be worked out—details that he had never had the chance to spell out.

  But with typical chamalian insight, the various groups were sorting things out on their own. They were already on the march.

  The raucous sound of their voices shook the stones and rattled the windows of city.

  They had come equipped with signs and banners. The slogans had nothing to do with the day's business—which wasn't exactly clear to anyone at this point.

  "Factory working together!"

  "Dockworkers united!"

  "Information wants to be free!"

  The general strike he had always envisioned was meant to be part of a larger struggle, the capstone of a more complex plan. It was not an emergency measure designed to hold ground while unseen plots unfolded.

  But theory and practice were never meant to coincide, something that one learned early on Chamal.

  At the center of the square stood a statue of Admiral Preekat, twice lifesize. The admiral stood before the splintered remains of a ship's mast, rendered in bronze, a sword in his hand, wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a belt and a buckle around its crown with sprig of larkleleaf marking his rank. Pog took up station atop a stone bench in the admiral's shadow, looking for a trio of arms-men he was mean
t to meet.

  "They seek him here."

  "They seek him there."

  "The admirals seek him everywhere."

  Each voice called out from a different quarter.

  One belonged to Albrett, a scaly creature with large eyes, a wide snout, and a long, thick tail. Another to Kurch'll, a shorter fellow with a long neck, no chin to speak of, and a thick leather shield strapped across his back. The third was that of Porkle'pi, a bearish beast of middle height, rich fur that made his face seem to blend into his chest without pausing for a neck, and a plaid cap atop his head.

  "Is he in heaven? Is he in hell? That damned elusive Starflower,” Pog replied. In the street language of Kar-Kar-a-Mesh, the verse rhymed, as it was intended.

  "Well met, mates,” he added. “We have weighty work before us today."

  Albrett grinned and brandished a sword. “I'm ready."

  Kurch'll pulled his head down beneath his shield and nodded. “I'm with you."

  Porkle'pi flexed his muscles, bringing an array of nasty quills that lay hidden in his fur up to the surface. “Bring them on."

  "Then let's go,” Pog said. “The Scarlet Starflower has an appointment to keep at the War College."

  "A walk across town,” Kurch'll said. “What could be easier?"

  "On a day like this,” Porkle'pi said, “what could be more difficult?"

  * * * *

  By midday, they had conducted a biopsy on David's liver.

  And after spending the night draining the bottle of Irish whiskey, Winston felt like they'd done the same thing to him. He didn't know how his friend had done it. He was always drinking potions and poisons from chamalian grog shops. And when he wasn't, it was fast-cultured wines or quick-distilled spirits from his autochef. Winston had come to appreciate a fine pinot noir that David had managed to crank out of the machine, but the rest were just nasty tonics.

  And David Wu's liver told the tale of them all.

  The liver was where toxins went to die—or to keep you from dying. And the list of toxins in David's biopsy went on and on. The forensic analysis had flagged most of them as unfamiliar.

  "That's useful,” Winston said aloud.