Back | Next
Contents

SIXTY-ONE Canary Row

"Shitgoddamnittohell!"

Coughing fluorocarbon every step of the way, Gutierrez erupted from the entrance pool outside the Proprietor's quarters and ran for the foot of the nearest staircase.

Access to the outer surface—and to his precious shuttlecraft—was through an air lock, installed recently as a courteous afterthought at treetop level, which penetrated the mustard yellow polymer to hang beside a convenient canopy tree. Most of the community's buildings above ground level were supported like so many shelf mushrooms anyway, so it was not unusual to see a spiral staircase encircling one of the forest giants. In the asteroid's minimal gravity, the climb always turned out to be less daunting than it initially appeared.

What was odd about this particular staircase was that it worked like a high-speed escalator—the treads and risers even canted inward to avoid flinging passengers away—without benefit of any visible moving parts. In stolid silence and with gritted teeth, Gutierrez took the spiral journey which amounted to almost five kilometers but consumed less than a minute and a half.

"Horatio!" a familiar voice greeted him at his journey's end. "Sam told me you were coming. I got here as quickly as I could, myself. Tl*m*nch*l's on his way, too." He handed Gutierrez a small bundle. "In the meantime, see if you can squeeze into this!"

Eichra Oren, looking incomplete somehow without the talking dog who'd been his lifelong companion, had met the former general on the small balcony outside the hanging air lock. They were joined within a score of heartbeats by Mister Thoggosh's security chief, one of the sea-scorpionoids that the humans sometimes called "lobster people."

Both wore the lightweight, transparent filmsuits which provided protection for various species associated with the Elders in virtually any hostile environment. Eichra Oren had brought one for Gutierrez. His arms and legs slid easily into those of the suit. The midsection stretched to accommodate his own. Sealing the seam and pulling the flexible helmet and mask over his face, he would have appreciated the many advantages it had over the bulky armor his own people had inherited from NASA, if the situation hadn't been so urgent.

By comparison with the escalator, the lock cycled slowly, rising through the canopy as it did, giving Gutierrez time to adjust to his clothing. He noticed that Tl*m*nch*l had reslung his gun belt outside his own protective covering, that Eichra Oren even had his sword of office handy, slapping at his plastic-covered thigh, and realized that his own little pistol, the Kahr K9, was buttoned up under his suit where it couldn't do him any good. As the floor of the lock rose under them, carrying them outside, he nodded toward his companions' weapons.

"You really think we're going to need all that hardware? Seems to me our real problem is going to be figuring out how to fight a fire in a vacuum."

The elevator stopped; the door began to open. Gutierrez was aware that his feet were sticking gently to the floor. Staying put had been a challenge when they'd first arrived.

"On the contrary, friend Horatio," Tl*m*nch*l's clawtips raced across the keyboard of his vocalizer, "our real problem consists of figuring out how a fire got started in a vacuum!"

"Make that three fires, Tl*m*nch*l," corrected Eichra Oren. "Horatio, I hate coincidences like this. And yes, they never fail to make me look to my arma—"

The man was suddenly speechless. Everywhere they looked, people of a dozen different species, in thin filmsuits and heavy NASA armor alike, were scurrying about like vermin whose comfortable log had just been kicked over. Although many carried fire extinguishers and other, less-identifiable equipment, they seemed to be accomplishing about as much as scurrying vermin, to Gutierrez's eye, trained for command.

Far out across the plastic plain, literally smooth as a billiard ball beneath two suns and a scattering of embarrassed-looking stars, all three of the venerable American spacecraft were belching thick, black, greasy smoke through their many hull penetrations. In the absence of any significant gravity, the pall surrounded them like an evil fog, hellishly lit, orange-red, from within.

Gutierrez set his jaw and turned to the Antarctican. "Eichra Oren, give me your sword!"

* * *

S*bb*ts*rrh was a happy being.

Although he was the only member of his species here not working in the security contingent, his position was important and remunerative. As a Small Artifactologist, it was his responsibility to supervise the excavation, handling, and disposition of whatever hand-carryable Predecessor discoveries were made. It was exacting work which he enjoyed, having spent most of a lifetime preparing for it.

That wasn't why he was happy at this particular moment, however. Earlier this morning, an entity he thought of as *rth*r*mpl**d* had barged into his office in the Elders' settlement—it was pure chance the creature had caught him there, he was usually out in the field these days among new friends who shared his interests—claiming to speak for something called "The Committee for the Preservation of Antiquities, representing the unanimous opinion of the human community" nearby. Citing the fact, which nobody disputed anyway, that the asteroid 5023 Eris was located in an alternative version of the Solar System presently inhabited by its own species and none other, it had demanded that all exploration of the ancient spaceship halt immediately.

S*bb*ts*rrh had begun by calling *rth*r*mpl**d* a liar. In the first place, there wasn't a sapient species in all of probability capable of unanimity in numbers much over three, and humans had proven themselves no different from anyone else in that regard. Dissent was the primary social characteristic of sapience. How could a species explore every environmental niche and avenue of survival—which in the last analysis was the function of intelligence—if they acted like copies of one another? In the second, some of his new friends happened to be human, and—T*y*p*l*sk* and R*g*r*w*n in particular—were as sanguine about exploring the asteroid as himself.

He'd begun by calling *rth*r*mpl**d* a liar, but he'd hardly stopped there. As exacting with his insults as he was with everything else, he'd exhausted the invective vocabulary of twenty-three languages before going on to items of his own devising. In the end, *rth*r*mpl**d* had stalked off, tossing vaguely ominous alien terms like libel and slander over his shoulder and threatening to sue S*bb*ts*rrh for what he'd said—a process the artifactologist gathered was akin to adversary proceedings before a moral debt assessor.

Determined to remain methodical, S*bb*ts*rrh was now on his way to the office of Eichra Oren between the Elders' settlement and the human encampment. He was no p'Nan professional, but he knew that, no matter how annoying it might be, moral debt cannot be created by a verbalism. Somewhere at the heart of every moral debt lay an act of initiated force, actual or threatened. He was certain that his judgement in this matter would be confirmed—which was why he was happy—and because this assessor happened to be human, the experience would add something to his understanding of the species.

Having decided to walk in order to prolong his enjoyment of the moment, he was mentally occupied with the delightfully delicate problem of preserving an actual Predecessor footprint in the dust, deep inside the asteroid, which had been covered over with more dust for a billion years, had just rounded one of the giant canopy trees, and was virtually within hailing distance of the assessor's home. Thus he failed to see his attacker until the final instant.

S*bb*ts*rrh's fleeting first impression was his last. What he saw as he drew the last molecules of air over his gills and snatched desperately at a weapon he carried on his belt—beneath his filmsuit—was an apparition three times his size belonging to no species he'd ever heard of. The thing's face may have been that of a mantoid, rather broad at the top, narrower at the bottom. Its principal features were a pair of rage-maddened eyes, two nostril penetrations, and a slash of a mouth filled with nasty-looking masticators.

The rest was worse, a patchwork of pallid flesh and haphazard plates. Some of the manipulators sticking out at odd angles around the edges appeared mammalian, others arthropodic. S*bb*ts*rrh didn't have time to be certain, but thought he saw an odd number of them, seven or perhaps nine. It was the last thought he had. Before it was complete, the entity swung a huge tool it held in a manipulator, bringing it down on S*bb*ts*rrh's head, crushing his pseudochitin skull, dashing his brains out on the grass, and ending his life.

 

Arthur Empleado, former head of the American KGB on 5023 Eris—in the same sense that Gutierrez was a former general—stood in the open air lock wearing someone else's discarded spacesuit, watching the efforts of several different species to fight the fire outside. A row of buttons blinking angrily on the panel told him that someone below was clamoring to use the elevator.

All three of the elderly shuttlecraft were ablaze. Each had survived many distinguished twentieth-century missions, more than three quarters of a century lying in mothballs in Florida, rededication in the names of heroes of the socialist revolution, and a three-hundred-million kilometer trip to the asteroid belt.

Soon they would be gone.

There would be no way his companions could avoid inferring that their precious spacecraft had been sabotaged. The only way to get them to burn was to fill them with oxygen instead of the plain air they'd been designed for. That sort of thing could hardly happen accidently, not to three ships separated by several hundred meters' distance. In his mind's eye, Empleado could see the incendiary devices plainly. If he remembered right, they'd been invented by the French resistance during the Second World War. An ordinary cigarette could be placed anywhere, closed in a book of matches so that, once it smoldered down to the heads—five minutes in a normal atmosphere, probably less in oxygen—they'd go up in a sudden blaze, taking everything else with them.

Gutierrez had evidently arrived at the same conclusion. Empleado saw him seize Eichra Oren's proffered sword and run toward the nearest shuttle, the flagship Honorable Robert Dole illegally rechristened Laika, followed by the assessor and Tl*m*nch*l, the sea-scorpionoid he knew was Mister Thoggosh's chief of security. Raising the razor-sharp assessor's weapon over his head, the general hacked brutally at a spot on the shuttlecraft's hull just below the pilots' windows.

Before the man had taken a dozen such strokes, the unearthly alloy of the sword had found its way through the tough material of the hull and a sudden spark-edged tongue of flame shot outward as Gutierrez leaped aside at the last instant to avoid it. The beleaguered spaceship vomited smoke and flames for a couple of seconds, then the conflagration whuffed out as if someone had thrown a switch. Without waiting to see the results, the general hurried to the next ship.

If he'd planned repeating his Conan act, Tl*m*nch*l was too fast for him. That being drew its sidearm, aiming at the same spot on the hull of the Honorable Orrin Hatch (alias Geronimo) which the Gutierrez had attacked on the Laika. There was no report, but a head-sized ragged hole opened in the vessel's side, shot flames, and went black as the fire inside died for lack of oxygen. By that time, Eichra Oren had used his fusion-powered pistol on the John Galt, formerly the Honorable John McCain, and put her fire out, as well.

Inside his helmet, Empleado shook his head. He pushed a button on the panel of the combination elevator-air lock. The door closed, and the machine descended. He stepped out at treetop level under the canopy, where there was almost as much activity as topside. Several aerostats hovered directly below the points where the ruined spacecraft stood—for what reason the former KGB man couldn't say.

One carried Mister Thoggosh himself.

Half a dozen individuals, identifiable as aliens under their transparent coverings, gave him what he was sure was a dirty look as they stepped into the air lock he'd just stepped out of. Empleado shrugged to himself indifferently, put a foot on the first step of the spiral escalator, going down, and headed back the way he'd just come from the human camp.

 

Mister Thoggosh returned to his office/living quarters that afternoon, looking forward to the peace and quiet of his accustomed solitude—and the comfort of peeling off the environmental filmsuit he wore to protect his gills and other soft tissues in the desiccating atmosphere preferred by his land-dwelling associates.

Lightweight and transparent though it was, the absurd getup still made him feel uncomfortably confined, and restricted his movements. Moreover, it had been no help when it came to shielding him from the heat of the shuttle fire which had been perceptible even through the world-enveloping organic canopy beneath which he'd hovered—all day, it seemed—in his aerostat.

The heat had worried him most, not just for the craft—which would have come in handy exploring the Cometary Halo—but for the entire colony. The canopy had begun as intertwined branches at the tops of great trees that supported it a kilometer above the asteroid's real surface. Ultraviolet exposure had softened and polymerized it into a covering to hold the atmosphere on the planetoid and protect its inhabitants from the cold, vacuum, and radiation of space. Intense heat was one thing it had not been engineered to withstand.

All afternoon, he'd had disturbing mental images of the canopy melting, bursting, and spewing its contents, including thousands of sapient beings, into the void. Had it not been possible to put the fires out immediately, his people would have cast the stricken vessels off and let them burn several kilometers away from the canopy. Thanks to fast thinking and even faster action on the part of Gutierrez, that had proven unnecessary. The canopy had held. Cooled again, it appeared as reliable as it had been to begin with.

Dictating the hundredth memo of the day into his implant for transmission to the appropriate recipient, the nautiloid descended a flight of stairs into the fluorocarbon with which his apartments were filled, cycled the lock, and floated inside. A stand of housekelp waved a friendly, mindless greeting, and he began to feel at home.

"Princess of the Royal Web Nek Nam'l Las, Chief Logistics Engineer. Copy to her aide, Voozh Preeno, and to Llessure Knarrfic, Administration. Note her rank according to customs of her people. My dear Princess, colon, I transmit this for the record, comma, to commend you and your division on their energetic and brilliant assistance during the emergency connected with the destruction of the human spacecraft, period. Had it not been for your swift judgment and attention to vital detail, comma, in excess of duties for which you originally contracted, comma, there is no way to estimate the disastrous consequences which might have resulted, period. Paragraph. You will be gratified to learn that this exemplary performance will find a substantive reward in the form of a bonus in the amount of—"

The nautiloid stopped dictating abruptly, disturbed by a sense that something was out of place in his office. The tentacle which had begun reaching for the fastener of his filmsuit froze in place as he realized what it was: his prized songfish, which usually greeted him with its beautiful trilling, was silent.

 

Grateful to be away from what he regarded as the eerily inhuman environs of the nautiloid settlement, Empleado trudged through the forest, back toward the American encampment.

The bulky spacesuit he carried over his arm would have been a burden had it not been for the light gravity. Whatever it had cost him in nerve-strain and fatigue, it had been worth wearing the sweat-stinking armor and rubbing elbows with that nightmare menagerie. He'd had three objectives in mind, and seen all of them accomplished in half a day. His old superiors would have been proud of him had there been some way to report to them—and if they weren't busy preserving their own hides just now in a world turned politically upside down.

His way through the woods followed what was becoming a well-worn trail. Before he knew it, someone would be suggesting that it be paved. For some reason that annoyed him, and he left the path where it curved about the base of one of the great trees and took the other way around. The ground was reasonably clear of cover here, and the footing was no more difficult than on the path.

He hadn't gone another hundred yards when he saw something glistening between the spreading roots of another canopy tree, as if someone had been littering, discarding, of all things, a huge wad of transparent kitchen wrap. That thought suddenly made him freeze in his tracks, hair stirring at the back of his neck. There was only one thing on this asteroid that looked like kitchen wrap.

Someone had been littering, all right—and apparently trying to do his job for him in their clumsy, violent way. Pushed hastily between the barrel-sized roots was the dead body of one of the lobster people, its head smashed to a pulp.

In effect, Empleado realized, somebody had just killed a cop.

 

Mister Thoggosh was as angry as he ever got.

Almost anyone who knew the nautiloid Elder would have agreed that this was angry enough. His assistant, Aelbraugh Pritsch, had once remarked, when he thought he was outside his employer's hearing, that for a cold-blooded entity, the Proprietor was more terrifying in his hot-blooded wrath than any other being he'd ever met—or even heard of. At the time, the giant mollusc had felt somewhat complimented. Now what he experienced was a hostility toward whoever had done this to him, so powerful and implacable that he wondered how he could possibly contain it without bursting.

The brilliantly colored and beautiful songfish that had come with him on the arduous voyage to this alternative reality was floating belly-up in its little cage, eyes clouded over and scales fading to a deathly white. Its melodious singing would never soothe him again. Monitors built into his desk, which he usually relied on to tell him that the fluorocarbon surrounding him was sufficiently charged with oxygen, were flashing an infuriated red of their own.

He'd never been meant to see those monitors. The would-be murderer had assumed he'd pull his nearly invisible suit off as soon as he stepped through the door. He'd very nearly done that. Only his abstraction and fatigue, his concentration on the memo he'd been dictating, and a subtle feel of wrongness within his suite, had stayed his tentacle until he'd reached the area of the sandy floor at the opposite end of the room set aside as a desk. According to his instruments, the fluorocarbon had been contaminated with a lethal volume—it must have taken several liters—of an industrial solvent combining the attributes of carbon tetrachloride and dimethyl sulfoxide: highly penetrative and extremely deadly.

What made him angriest, having been in the midst of a commendatory note to one of his employees, was that it must have been someone he trusted. The door, for example, wouldn't open to just anyone, but employed a crude form of judgment based on information automatically derived from the day-to-day operation of his implant. In short, someone he trusted had tried to kill him, and it made him furious.

Terrorism, under which this incident must be categorized, was an interesting and instructive phenomenon in the abstract. His culture intelligently took its appearance as a sign of deep social maladies. Like political assassination, it was an ultimate check and balance, never to be altogether discouraged. Those who practiced terrorism functioned something like canaries in coal mines—or his poor songfish in its little cage—informing those who ran civilization that they were failing a few sensitive individuals at the fringes and were therefore in danger of failing less sensitive, more sensible individuals if they continued along whatever course had triggered the event in the first place.

That said, Mister Thoggosh was unable to view his own attempted murder quite so detachedly. Prudently, he believed, he'd already set automated devices to cleaning up the mess himself. He hadn't made it to his present ancient age entirely by accident. He decided to tell no one about this, with the exception of the closest thing his culture offered to a detective, the p'Nan moral debt assessor—and his good friend—Eichra Oren.

Someone was going to pay for this.

In blood.

 

Back | Next
Contents
Framed