Something about the fat-necked bloodhound at the curb caught Ryll’s attention. The dog reminded him of a hated proctor at the school for gifted children. What was it about that dog?
He saw differences between the dog and Proctor Shanlis, but the four legs and the dog’s facial expression struck a spark of memory. The dog’s face recalled Shanlis, Ryll decided: hang-jowled and morose, a wide Dreenish nose.
The animal sank onto its haunches and howled.
Ryll, seeing a vision of Proctor Shanlis doing this, laughed and heard the sound in the rickshaw, realizing he had forced this reaction on their body.
“Will you stop that?” Lutt shouted.
Sam on the vidcom screen looked startled. “Stop what?”
“Not you,” Lutt said.
“Are you all right, dear?” Phoenicia asked.
“Of course I’m all right! Sam, you know what to do?”
“Get things going. When will I see you?”
“I’ll call. But in the meantime I want you to send four sling-loaded turbocopters to retrieve what’s left of our ship.” Lutt glanced at the directions from Zone Patrol and repeated them, adding: “You’re my number-one assistant now, Sam. We’re going to build a better Vortraveler.”
Lutt sent the vidcom back into its concealed slot and looked at Phoenicia. She was smiling at Morey, responding to some exchange Lutt had missed.
She said she was glad Morey is more refined than you, Ryll volunteered.
Yeah! Morey the diplomat. Morey the kiss-ass. He even gets along with L.H.
Its way once more clear, the limousine accelerated.
“What’re you going to tell Father?” Morey asked. Definite signs of fear.
“Only what circumstances force me to tell,” Lutt said.
“He’s pretty angry,” Morey said. Gloating.
“I think he’s mostly concerned for your safety,” Phoenicia said. “And he doesn’t want you wasting time on insignificant projects.”
“He may not even dock your allowance,” Morey said.
“The hell with that!” Lutt said. “I want more money! Damn it! I deserve more money.” Lutt grinned at Morey. “Isn’t that the Hanson way, dear brother?”
Phoenicia smiled warmly. “Now, isn’t it better when you get along like gentlemen?” She blew a kiss to Lutt. “We’ll have you right as rain very soon, just as soon as the doctors ‘ray you and do the other things they should.”
No! Ryll objected. You mustn’t allow anything that would reveal internal differences—our swiveling eyes, for one thing. Stay away from doctors. Too many questions we can’t answer. Tell her you’ll see your own specialists.
Lutt saw the wisdom in this and obeyed.
Phoenicia appeared mollified but still concerned. “Get the best money can buy, dear. I’m sure your father won’t object to that sort of expenditure.” She leaned forward and peered at Lutt’s glasses. _ “You have new glasses.”
“That’s very observant, Mother.”
“I remember warning you about scratches on your lenses. These are quite clear.”
“I got them just before the accident.”
“They’ve come through it remarkably undamaged.”
Hoping to divert her, Lutt asked about her carrying case.
“Oh, I don’t think I’ll be staying at You Gee One, dear. This case contains a replica of a Byzantine vase.” She pronounced it “vazz.”
“What’re you doing with a replica?”
“That is embarrassing, dear. I purchased it last week at Shigg’s Auction House. Mr. Shigg himself assured me it was an original and one of a kind. Very rare. But when I got it home, I discovered I already had the original—or what I think is the original, purchased four years ago in Singapore. I now have two of them and two sets of papers purportedly authenticating each of them. I want your father’s help looking into this.”
“He’ll break some heads,” Lutt said.
Phoenicia put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I do hope . . . not.”
Lutt and Morey exchanged knowing looks—another point of accord. Phoenicia was not above using L.H.’s muscle when it served her purposes. Lutt sighed. He wished he, too, had time to devote to art collecting. A fascinating hobby. Profitable, too, when you went at it right.
But I have too many other priorities.
You do seem to use your time well, Ryll intruded.
This voice in his head hit the mark that time, Lutt agreed. In common with many successful people, Lutt knew he had learned a great secret: the ability to use small bits of time.
Observing now that the limo was entering the southbound freeway, Lutt estimated they would be at You Gee One in about fifteen minutes. Well, at least this mobile monstrosity carried all of the essential necessities to make those fifteen minutes useful. Lutt leaned over and flipped a tab near the floor. A wide, shallow drawer extruded itself between his feet. An electronic news receiver unfolded from the drawer and lifted into position in front of him.
“Look at him!” Morey sneered. “Can’t leave the Eleanor alone for five minutes.”
Lutt smiled. At least Morey knew the news jargon. These receivers were known technically as “ENRs,” and the initials had shifted easily into the vernacular “Eleanors.” In front of Lutt now stood a titanium frame with thin LCD screens for pages. He spun a black dial one-quarter turn and the top screen came alight with the Enquirer’s front page and the masthead he had ordered:
“L.W. Hanson, Proprietor.”
So the old man had not yet objected.
Lutt flipped through the pages, scanning headlines and bits of copy. One headline offended him.
INDY 5000 GIVEN
A NEW LEASE ON
ITS SPEEDY LIFE
Using his override, Lutt changed the headline to read:
INDY 5000 GETS
A NEW LEASE ON
THE FAST LIFE
“Can’t even use verbs right,” he muttered and, suddenly angry, he keyed a memo to Anaya Nelson, knowing the city editor must obey his orders in this but would do it with resentment and reluctance. She also would get the message of his anger in the fact that he bypassed Ade Stuart and made her do the dirty work. The memo was direct and curt:
“Whoever wrote the headline, today’s fourteenth edition, top of column five—fire that person!”
“You’re so full of energy,” Phoenicia said. “Just like your father.”
Lutt returned the Eleanor to its concealed drawer and grimaced. “What a shame I won’t step into Father’s big, stinky shoes and run his interplanetary business empire!”
“Who says he wants you to do that?” Morey demanded.
“He does, little brother. He does.”
Morey lapsed into sullen silence.
Phoenicia patted his arm and looked out at the brightly garbed robots pulling the limo. Lutt was right about the empire and the limousine, of course. The rickshaw and robots were garish. But she liked the limousine and using it was an indulgence she could justify to her friends:
“It was a wedding present from L.H. He’s really very sentimental about it and keeps it in superb condition.”
The vehicle was decelerating for an exit ramp. She could see broken-down shanties built of scavenged metal, cardboard, wire, bits of plastic and scraps of wood. The shanties, looking as though a light breeze would blow them down, were crowded into a narrow strip here along the city’s boundary.
“Lowtowns,” they were called wherever they sprang up around the earth and the other planets—low for the height of the decrepit buildings and the status of their occupants.
Poor creatures.
Taking the regular route Phoenicia preferred, the limo skirted Lowtown. She gazed out at ragged women crouched in doorways. Some of them nursed naked babies. All of the children she could see appeared sickly.
The women watched her pass. They always watched. No men were visible. The men, Phoenicia had been told, were busy at various curbsides hunting cigarette butts, or they haunted alleys and du
mps scrambling for usable garbage.
Phoenicia thought it obvious that many of these people were mentally ill. The Enquirer said they were brain-damaged by undernourishment or bad genes. The eyes of these desperately impoverished people all looked alike to Phoenicia: forlorn, dull, without hope, almost lifeless.
Lutt gazed dispassionately at Lowtown through the side windows of pelletproof glass. He thought of the people there as life’s bystanders. They lived in a distant world of slower motions and accumulated filth.
Phoenicia opened her side window, letting the clamorous sounds and repugnant odors into the limo’s perfumed isolation.
She’s going to do it again, Lutt thought. When will she ever learn?
Phoenicia opened a refrigerated compartment beneath her seat and removed a plastic bag of food. She held the bag in the window opening, momentarily between worlds. One of her platinum bracelets dangled to the sill.
Lutt looked at this with what he thought of as objective judgment. He was a newspaperman considering a story about the contrast between extreme wealth and dismal poverty.
Dutifully, the limo slowed. Phoenicia extended her food package. Her slender, manicured fingers released their grip on the prize. It dropped.
“The fastest and strongest always get it,” she said, keeping her hand out the window and pointing at the older children and women who ran toward the package on the street behind the limo.
One girl, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, wearing a ragged skirt too short for her skinny legs, ignored the food package. She caught up with the slowed limo and coughed phlegm at Phoenicia’s extended hand.
“Ohhhh!” Phoenicia jerked her hand into the limo and grimaced at a gob of brownish-yellow spittle on her wrist. “Pittance!” the running girl screamed.
The limo picked up speed quickly, leaving the girl and the crowd around the food parcel far behind.
Phoenicia cleaned her wrist with a square of French linen followed by disinfectant from a spray can in her purse.
Morey touched a button and the window closed with a soft thump. A fan whirred, cleansing the air in the limo. “They’re doing that much more frequently,” Morey said.
Lutt nodded. “Someday, one of them is going to steal a gun and give you more than spit. It’s damned foolish to open that window.”
Lutt remembered the scrambling people, the faces looking at the limo. He had seen no anger in the faces, only desperation. He knew the anger was there, though.
This gift of a food parcel had become one of Phoenicia’s rituals, Lutt realized. It’d make a helluva feature for the Enquirer.
Rich lady with fake conscience doesn’t accomplish jack shit for the poor. She does this for herself so she can brag to friends about her charity and talk about the deplorable behavior of the recipients: What would the old man say if I published that story? Can’t do it, of course. We take care of our own. Maybe we should do another Lowtown series, though. The downtrodden poor are always with us—the unfortunate wretches clinging to the shadows of our lives.
Ryll absorbed this. His adventure was turning out not at all the way he had imagined. The values of patience and attention to lessons began to gain new stature.
“Does L.H. know you do that?” Lutt asked.
“Now, I don’t want you telling your father I opened the window,” Phoenicia said. “It would only disturb him.”
“It’d do more than disturb him,” Lutt said. “He’d be furious after all his attention to security.”
“He thinks a nasty terrorist will throw a bomb through the window,” Phoenicia said.
“Or a bunch of those locator dots that stick to your clothes,” Morey said.
“Your father is positively paranoid about someone with an electronic tracker following us to his offices,” Phoenicia said.
Lutt spoke dryly. “It’s been tried, you know.”
“Sometimes, I don’t understand him,” Phoenicia said. “His business interests get more attention from Security than his own home.”
“It’s just a different kind of security, Mother,” Morey said. “He’s right when he says we don’t want to live underground. It’s bad enough to have to work there.”
“But he’s so secretive . . . even with his own family,” Phoenicia complained. “It’s like stories you hear about the military and . . . and ‘the need to know.’”
“Why don’t you hook a refrigerated container to the outside of the limo?” Morey asked. “Push a button in here and it dumps the food. Father’s right, you know, when he says a Hanson can’t be too careful.”
“Would you make such a device for me, Lutt?” Phoenicia asked.
“Sure. Only I’ll have the robots throw the food. That way, we’ll use the existing in-car communications system instead of a new signal button.”
“Oh, that would be splendid!” Phoenicia said.
Lutt shook his head in dismay at the things he could not say. Father’s mechanical coolies will throw pittances to the peasants. What a story if only I dared print it! Are you getting all this, Ryll?
You do have a strange family by any standards I have ever encountered, Lutt Ohhh . . . why are we stopping?
We’ve arrived at You Gee One.
Lutt heard the great security doors clang shut behind the limo, and brilliant artificial light bathed the interior parking area with its bustle of human and mechanical activity.
As usual, Lutt felt a tightening of his stomach.
A contingent of blue-uniformed Hanson guards ran toward the limo, weapons ready.
“Now, you two boys be nice for your father,” Phoenicia said. ‘I’ll see you later.”
“Aren’t you coming in with us?” Lutt asked.
“I have to get to the auction house and straighten out this little misunderstanding. Morey will speak to your father about it. He knows what to say.”
Yeah! Morey always knows what to say!
***
Speed and efficiency have never been part of the Dreen psyche. Our high technology is concentrated on travel through the Spirals into an ever-changing universe. Ancient, unalterable Dreenor must remain a regenerative nest. The Dreen watchwords, “All things are possible,” must serve us always as a bulwark of conservatism.
—“Mugly the Elder,” a critique
“Why didn’t she warn us the shield is going to change our sky?” Mugly complained.
He stared out a window of Jongleur’s home where he had been summoned by the Chief Storyteller. A late-afternoon sun painted rosy edges on puffy white clouds. But moments earlier, a weak test shield idmaged by Habiba had dissolved. During the test, Mugly and Jongleur had stared out at a gray landscape, not quite dusk and definitely unfamiliar.
“She’s testing because childseeds require a particular spectrum of sunlight,” Jongleur said. “There’s some question whether a shield can admit the correct light. Oddly, the light we need is close to what Earthers favor for darkening their skins.”
“That’s called ‘tanning,’” Mugly said.
“I know what it’s called!”
“We could always open flaps in the shield occasionally,” Mugly said.
“And how would we guard such openings?” Jongleur demanded. “Will we make weapons and slaughter intruders?”
“We have a right to defend ourselves,” Mugly insisted.
“The shield is a brilliant idea,” Jongleur said.
“Even if we never again have children, we must protect what we have now!” Mugly insisted.
“And what is it we have now?” Jongleur asked.
Mugly waved his arms to encompass Dreenor. “Everything! What a strange question! Your mind is becoming odd, Jongleur.”
Jongleur had to agree. Only that morning, he had taken his fears to Habiba. “What have we created in that Earth?”
“We?” Habiba had asked.
“Dreens have meddled with Earth since its creation,” Jongleur mourned.
“Meddled? These are strange thoughts, Jongleur.”
And Habiba
had taken him on a small tour of her cone to quiet him. It was a strange feeling to walk the colorful floors and realize they were built over an extinct volcano. The porous ground beneath the cone was a spiritual abode, a place of secret chambers and passageways only Habiba traveled. Jongleur knew of them from Habiba’s quiet comments.
“Beneath this precise spot is a fumarole that spirals down very deep, and it is dry for all of that descent.”
Jongleur treasured these tours. The palatial floors and corridors inlaid with jewels brought to Habiba from uncounted planets had always seemed the most permanent thing in the universe.
But this day he was struck by the impermanence of the structure. In a catastrophic attack by Earthers, everything here might be scattered in fragments.
All things are possible. And once there was a volcano here. But now it’s a pumice island whirling in a sea . . . An eternal sea? Is anything eternal?
Thoughts about eternity came readily at the Sea of All Things but Jongleur now found them disquieting.
Mugly jerked him out of these reflections with a stark question:
“Is it true the erasure ship crashed?”
“The wreckage is on Earth.”
“Wreckage. That’s good.”
“My son was in it. And we do not know the extent of damage. If sensitive components survived . . .”
Jongleur let that idea hang between them.
“Patricia was designed to self-destruct rather than let aliens learn her secrets,” Mugly said.
“That is a very strange name for a ship, Mugly.”
“It is a common name for Earther women. Men are often called by a similar form, Patrick. A holy man, you know?”
“Did you think of that ship as holy?”
“I did not think of it as anything. My aides built it without my knowledge or consent. Why did you summon me, Jongleur?”
“Habiba commanded me to make certain our secrets are never learned by Earthers. And now I hear you have sent the Eminence Prosik to Earth with orders to retrieve this . . . this Patricia.”
“My people contributed to the problem; they should solve it.”
“Is Prosik a good choice?”
“The best.”