’That’s all right. We’ll wait.” Mondrian turned to the woman with him. “Lotos, this is Godiva Lomberd. Godiva, Lotos Sheldrake. If you two don’t mind I’m going to leave you here for a few minutes. If Luther comes out, don’t let him get away. He has to wait until I come back.”
Godiva nodded. “Where’s Tatty?”
“Down on Earth again.” Mondrian hesitated. Godiva was still looking at him expectantly. “She’s helping me.
I needed images and recordings of a few places. She ought to be back here in a week or two.”
Godiva nodded. She seemed faintly puzzled, but she said nothing more as Mondrian left and Lotos settled down to sit opposite her. There was an awkward silence.
“Are you involved with Adestis?” said Lotos at last.
The other woman smiled and shook her head. “Just heard about it, enough to convince me I don’t want anything to do with it. How about you?”
“Once, and never again.” Lotos related the details of her experience at the termite nest. She underplayed the danger, but emphasized her own terror and discomfort. She did her best to be humorous and self-deprecating — and she watched closely for Godiva’s every reaction.
Since hearing of the contract with Luther Brachis, Lotos had put her own information service to work. Their efforts had been pathetically unproductive. Godiva Lomberd had popped into view a few years ago on Earth, officially as an ‘artistic performer’. The peerless Godiva Bird, Model, Consort, and Exotic Dancer, said the publicity. In fact, she was a rich man’s courtesan.
All the digging since then had turned up nothing more specific. Godiva was simply a woman, background and age uncertain, whom men found irresistible. She exploited that fact for money.
Looking at her now, Lotos could see why Godiva had been so successful. She moved like a dancer, every gesture natural, easy, and flowing. She had the clear eyes and skin of perfect health. She laughed easily, throwing her head back open-mouthed to reveal perfect teeth and a pink, fleshy tongue. Most of all, she listened to Lotos with total, focused attention, as though what the other woman was saying was the most interesting thing in the solar system.
And still Lotos was uneasy. Godiva had never formed more than a temporary and commercial relationship with any man — until she met Luther Brachis. And then she had formed a permanent contract with him.
True love? That was not in Lotos Sheldrake’s vocabulary of the possible. Her intuition told her that something strange was going on between Godiva Lomberd and Luther Brachis. She lacked Mondrian’s previous acquaintance with Godiva, but she trusted his instincts, too. “She is changed,” he had said, as they whipped through the Ceres transportation system on their way to the Adestis Headquarters. “Different. She wasn’t like that when she was on Earth.”
“Changed how?”
Mondrian had looked angry — with himself. Lotos knew how much he valued his ability to read out the motivations and secret desires of others. “She’s … focused,” he said at last. “You would have to have met the old Godiva to understand what I mean. It used to be that Godiva always paid close attention to the man who was buying her time, and she certainly gave him his money’s-worth. But at the same time she was aware of other men, and somehow she made them aware of her. It was like a magnetic field around her, one that said, ‘I’m busy right now. But I won’t always be busy. Sometime in the future, I could be yours.’ Of course, in practice there were conditions. Everyone wanted her, but not everyone could pay the price. But there was always that possibility, if a man were lucky enough to get rich. Now … now she pays attention to Luther. Only to Luther. The other men around her are hardly there. That’s what I mean by different.”
“Maybe it’s love,” suggested Lotos. She gave Mondrian a quick sideways look from her dark eyes.
He had not bothered to reply. Mondrian’s opinion of true love as the agent for a profound change of personality was perhaps even more cynical than Lotos Sheldrake’s.
Lotos watched now, as other men and women wandered through the lounge. Mondrian had been exactly right. Godiva would look up, as though to check that each arrival was not Luther Brachis. Then at once she returned her attention to Lotos. There was no eye contact, no trace of coquetry. Godiva flirted no more than Lotos herself did.
So. Lotos leaned back and puzzled over the evidence before her eyes. Earth’s most famous and expensive courtesan ought to be much more aware of men. Even if she no longer thought of them as prospective customers, surely the habit of speculative evaluation and subliminal come-ons would by now be built in?
Lotos had paid well for this meeting with Godiva. And it was producing more questions than answers.
Mondrian had promised Lotos a clear half-hour with Godiva. She was getting that and more, because on the way back to the lounge he stopped at the spectators’ lounge for a look at the battle area.
He stayed longer than he had originally intended. Luther Brachis and Dougal MacDougal were both in the control room, wearing their Monitor sets. Or was it more accurate to say that they were really down on the battlefield, where each of them controlled the body of a simulacrum?
The field of encounter was a small hemispherical chamber about ten feet across. A camera set into the domed roof revealed all the action to any interested observers. The usual audience would be mostly prospective players, following the whole procedure with huge interest.
When Mondrian arrived, the assault on the trapdoor spider’s lair had been in its preparatory stages. The spectators’ gallery was almost empty. There was one young woman wearing the blue worker’s uniform of a Pentecost colonist, and a tall, thin man with a full beard. He seemed more interested in the players themselves than in the quarry, the battlefield, or the simulacra.
The first close-up of the spider was daunting, even to one who never intended to play Adestis. It sat motionless at the bottom of its trap, holding in its front limbs the drained husk of a millipede. It was easy to imagine that the multiple eyes on its curved back were aware of the watchers, far above.
Mondrian stared down thoughtfully at the spider. Adestis led to real deaths, through pain and stress. If his arrangement with Skrynol for the Anabasis did not work out, and Dougal MacDougal became an impossible problem — could Adestis provide a convenient solution? How many times had it been used in the past, to get rid of a troublesome official?
Mondrian took that thought with him when he went back to Lotos Sheldrake and Godiva Lomberd. He sat down to evaluate its potential, and listened to the women’s conversation with half an ear. He had been there only a few minutes when the uproar began in the adjoining control room.
Godiva came instantly to her feet. “Luther! In there!” she cried, and dashed to the chamber door. By the time that Mondrian and Sheldrake had followed her inside she was at Luther Brachis’s side. She was supporting him and staring horrified at the scene around her.
Brachis was standing, white-faced but erect. His right forearm ended just beyond the wrist in a bloody stump. Mondrian glanced at the pools of blood and the bodies surrounding Brachis. They were beyond help. He went across to the other commander, lifted his arm, and checked the tourniquet. “No blood loss now. I don’t think much of that on the floor is yours. Take it easy. We’ll have you to the hospital in a few minutes.”
“Thanks. Sorry about the mess in here.” Brachis nodded at the wounded arm. “Injuries getting to be a bit of a habit, don’t you think?”
“It’ll grow back.”
“Yeah. Teach me not to bite my nails.” Brachis gave Godiva a death’s-head smile. “It’s all right, Goddy. Just me and Mondrian playing word games, to make sure I’m not going to pass out. Blood supply to the brain, you see.’
“Your arm — ”
“ — will be all right. Don’t worry about it. I’ll just have to sign my name left-handed for a while.”
MEMORANDUM FROM: Luther Brachis, Commander of Solar System Security.
TO: All security posts.
SUBJECT: Count
ermeasures for terrorist activities.
Effective immediately, the following special security measures will go into effect throughout the Inner System:
1) All travellers leaving Earth will be required to travel via Link Exit facilities. All other travel will be prohibited until further notice.
2) All travellers leaving Earth will be subjected to chromosome ID checks. ID’s will be compared with reference ID (attached). In the event of a correlation exceeding 0.95, the traveller must be detained for questioning by Central Security.
3) All off-Earth awakenings from storage facilities will be subject to direct supervision. Wakers will be subject to chromosome ID checks against reference ID. In the event of a correlation exceeding 0.95, the waker must be detained for questioning by Central Security.
4) Any traveller using Link facilities and whose appearance resembles the margrave of Fujitsu (image attached) must be detained for questioning by Central Security.
5) Any off-Earth disposition of assets from the estate of the Margrave of Fujitsu must be reported to Central Security.
Luther Brachis stared at the stump of his hand. The nubs of new fingers were already beginning to bulge under synthetic skin. He wiggled them experimentally.
“Itches like the plague.” He tapped the sheet in front of him with his left hand. “Think this will do it? I don’t think so. I’m willing to wager we don’t catch him.”
Mondrian shook his head. “No takers. Not if he was as smart as you seem to think. He must have planned this for years, ever since he created his first facsimile Artefact. The next one could look like anything.”
“I know. That’s why I’m worried.”
“You’ll be all right. Stay well-armed. You’ve got the training to handle any number of Margraves, one-handed or two.”
“You don’t understand.” Brachis placed his hand on the gun that sat on the table in front of him. “I’m not worried for myself, I’ll blow ’em away before they get near me. But suppose that bastard takes a shot at Godiva?”
Chapter 22
Dear Chan,
This is a letter that I never expected to write, a message I never dreamed I would send, especially (don’t misunderstand this) to you. But it’s our first night down on Travancore, and I’m flat out scared. Tonight I wish you and I were still down in the Gallimaufries, watching Bozzie preach self-denial while he gobbled down a dozen waffles with honey.
If we can’t be together, at least let me babble at you for a while. We — the team, I mean, they gave us a rotten name, Team Alpha, but I hope we’ll come up with something better for ourselves — anyway, my team, Team Alpha or whatever, we weren’t allowed to bring a Martin Link ship anywhere near Travancore. No matter what happens here, Commander Mondrian won’t risk the Morgan Construct having access to a Link again. So this message will be fired off to the ship, a million kilometers away, then through a Link back to Sol, then through the Censor’s office, and then, if everything works out right, you’ll get it before you leave Barchan. Good luck down there. The last word I had, you have the hottest Pursuit Team they’ve seen since training began. I hope so — and I hope you will never have to visit Travancore. Because if you do, it will mean that we have failed.
I said that we are “down on Travancore” but that’s more like a figure of speech than anything else. We don’t know where the true surface of the planet begins. No one does. We’re hanging in a sort of half-balloon tent with a flat, flexible base, about a hundred feet down from the topmost growths of vegetation. There’s another five-kilometers-plus of plant life underneath us.
Animal life, too. We saw the first signs of that on the low-altitude automated survey. The whole planet is riddled with holes, circular shafts about five meters across. They dive down from the top layers, and at first we thought they might be natural rain channels because it rains every day over most of Travancore. But now we’re not so sure. S’glya — she’s the Pipe-Rilla on our team — saw something Dig wriggling away down one of the tunnels when we were flying in. Scary. But I was mainly happy that it wasn’t the Morgan Construct, because we were a sitting target. I tried to hide my panicky feeling but of course it didn’t work. S’glya has this absolutely uncanny ability to read human feelings and she told the others.
They didn’t seem worried. It’s an unpleasant thought for me, the idea that soon we’ll be heading down one of those tunnels, but the Tinker feels quite different about that. It argues that the tunnels are a big boon to us, since without them it would take forever to explore the vertical forest on Travancore. Maybe it will take forever anyway. We’ll know, as soon as we get down to the interior.
Even before we made the final descent we decided that the training program had missed the point. We were sent to Dembricot for final training, because it’s a vegetation world like Travancore and everyone thought it would be good experience for this place.
Logical idea, but totally wrong. You must have seen the training films of Dembricot by now. Flat, water plains of plant growth, but they’re no more like Travancore than Barchan is. This planet is dense, tangled hillocks of jungle, boiling up in swirls and breakers like one of Earth’s seas in a bad storm.
One good thing: I can breathe the air with just a compressor. I should be able to manage without even that when we get down to a lower level where the pressure is higher. We’re all doing well. S’glya needs a heating unit, and Angel had to do some mysterious interior modification before the atmosphere was acceptable, but that’s all.
The view from the top layer of vegetation is spectacular at the moment. Travancore’s primary, Talitha, is close to setting, and when it’s low on the horizon it shines through mile after mile of ferns and leaves and vines. No flowers, I’m afraid — Travancore wouldn’t please old Bozzie. Everything in sight is greener than green, except for the Top Creepers. That’s not their official biological name, but it’s a good description. They are purple, gigantic lateral creepers that snake away across the top of everything as far as you can see. And I mean gigantic. They’re only a few meters across, but each one is many kilometers long. In spite of their size they are not at all dense and heavy. I tried to take a sample from one, because I couldn’t see how the rest of the vegetation could possibly support that much weight.
When I cut into it there was a hissing sound and a horrible smell, and the level of the vegetation around the Top Creeper went down a fraction. The whole thing has to be nothing more than a wafer-thin shell stretched out over a hollow center full of light gases. Now I suspect that they are actually holding the other plants up.
I told you I was going to babble, and I think I’m doing it, but I hope that I’m justified. If you do have to come here, the more you know about the place ahead of time, the better. We were trained as well as we could be, but it surely wasn’t enough. No one has ever looked closely at Travancore before. With no defined surface and no open water, no one thought that it was worth it. We have more questions than answers.
More about those mysterious holes. They keep preying on my mind. Angel’s imaging organs (can’t call them eyes) can be tuned to the thermal infra-red. Angel took a heat-wavelength look down one of the shafts, and claims that it isn’t vertical at all. It spirals down in a helix, which rules out the natural rain-channel idea. We’ll soon have a better explanation, I expect, because we’ll be going down one. I hope that I’m around after that, to send you a description. Anyway, whatever happens to us our ship ought to be receiving a full record of it.
And more about Travancore, too. Naturally we’ve thought about nothing else since we got here. There are plenty of mysteries not even mentioned in the briefing documents. For example: gravity and air. The surface gravity is only a little more than a quarter of Earth’s. So now can it hold onto a substantial atmosphere, and support this massive cover of vegetation? The air should have bled away into space long ago.
Well, according to S’glya, Travancore has its atmosphere because of the strange vegetation layer. The canopy of plant life i
s so dense and continuous that it can trap air molecules within and beneath it. We know there is something close to a pressure discontinuity up near the top here.
And of course it’s a chicken-and-egg situation because the atmosphere is absolutely necessary for the vegetation to exist! The plant cover must have developed very early in Travancore’s history. And if S’glya is right, the shafts we saw can’t go down uninterrupted all the way to the solid surface, because otherwise they could act as escape vents for the air. So we may have to cut our way through barriers, one more little difficulty. But just to add to the confusion, Angel says that S’glya’s idea about the relationship of the atmosphere and the vegetation is wrong — for six reasons still to be specified.
Well, what’s the good news? The team is the good news. We’re an odd assortment. We have a Tinker whose real name sounds like a breaking window, but who asks me to call it Ishmael. Its big ambition in life seems to be to snuggle up to the rest of us. Then there’s Angel, who won’t stop using human proverbs and clichйs, and who insists that Angels don’t have names. And last of all there’s S’glya, who seems to know what I’m thinking and feeling without being told. S’glya’s not her real Pipe-Rilla name, either, because that’s unpronounceable too.
Weird. But it all works! Once we got to know each other we’ve been achieving an unbelievable level of communication and cooperation. It seems as though anything that one of us can’t do, another one can. We first noticed it back on Barchan, and it has just gone on getting better and better.
Better and better — but God only knows if it will be good enough. Angel says that the Morgan Construct is a superior being, beyond even Angel.
Full night here now. Time to sleep.
Keep your fingers crossed for me, Chan, wherever you are. I love you, and I’ve always loved you since you were a baby. I can’t forgive myself for running away and refusing to speak to you when you were on Ceres with Tatty. But it was awfully hard for me to admit that I don’t own you any more.
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