Juggler of Worlds (12 page)

“He’s been all around Sol system. He’s been to a dozen other stars. He’s hunted Bandersnatchi, and lived to talk about it. And still, to every spacer he meets, he’s a flatlander. Being called that irritates the hell out of him.” She waved off Sigmund’s scowl. “I
am
answering you. Gregory’s goal is to go somewhere so unusual, to do something so spectacular, it will demolish anyone who
ever
again dares to call him a flatlander. So that’s where he and Bey went. Out to do something famously stupid.”

Was it too late? “Medusa!” Sigmund shouted at his pocket comp. “Location of the private space yacht
Slower than Infinity?”

The familiar snarling-crown-of-snakes head materialized. “It left Earth three days ago, Sigmund. The flight plan took them out of the traffic-control area and then switches to ‘open.’”

“A maximum-acceleration flight plan,” Andrea guessed. Medusa didn’t correct her. “They’d already be out of the singularity.”

Into hyperspace, on their way… where?

By the hundreds, Citizens leapt, kicked, and pirouetted. Their bejeweled manes sparkled, resplendent. Hooves clicked and clattered against terrazzo, sometimes in unison, sometimes in staccato bursts, sometimes in a rolling, roaring crescendo.

With a discordant trill, Achilles froze the Grand Ballet. He spent more and more time in the holoshow. Most days it was his only company.

If he wasn’t careful, someday he would fail to leave.

Windblown grit pelted the hull of
Remembrance
. Visibility out the view ports was scarcely a few ship lengths. A thoroughly unpleasant world, he thought.

Jinx was an enormous egg, tidally locked with its gas-giant companion. By human convention, “east” was the direction that permanently faced Primary. East End and West End alike protruded above the atmosphere, home to vacuum-based industries.

Jinx’s midlatitudes were habitable, if you could abide, or compensate for, the oppressively strong gravity. Most of the human populace lived in East Band.

Ocean dominated the waist of Jinx, beneath a dense atmosphere. Survival anywhere in the equatorial band took high-pressure gear; few visitors came. Bandersnatchi, the size of mountains, roamed the tropical shorelines.

But Bandersnatchi couldn’t
climb
mountains. Jinx’s equatorial highlands held nothing to interest anyone—so there Achilles hid.

The turbid atmosphere impeded observation from space. Geysers all about disguised
Remembrance’s
heat signature, their thick, sulfurous fumes an additional disguise.

I could go undetected here for years, he thought, too lonely for the notion to cheer him.

Someone had to unwind General Products’ dealings with the Jinxians. And so he did, day after day, through chains of intermediaries, radio relays, and layer upon layer of network anonymizing services.

He remembered calculating that the caretakers who stayed behind on the worlds of Known Space would earn the gratitude of those who led from behind. He remembered the shocked silence when, volunteering, he’d grandly proclaimed, “Achilles was only vulnerable when he presented
his heel.”
That
was a moment of insane bluster his superiors would not soon forget.

He restarted the dance.

THE HUMAN STARED, wide-eyed, through the impregnable walls of his transparent enclosure. His hands shook. Sweat trickled down his face and neck, and soaked his shirt. He panted for breath.

Molecular filters in the transfer-booth ceiling could as easily supply oxygen as remove it. Achilles had yet to decide whether to bother. He watched in silence.

“You abused my hospitality, Ernest,” Achilles finally said, his voice flat with rage. In one mouth he clutched the tiny radio beacon his visitor had thought to smuggle aboard. An earlier stage in the teleportation relay had separated man and device. “You insulted my intelligence.”

“It won’t happen again,” Ernest wheezed softly.

Achilles strained to make out the words. “True,” he answered, and fear blossomed on his captive’s face.

Someone might deserve to die, but it wasn’t this pawn. Someone far above Ernest in the Jinxian Syndicate had given this messenger a beacon.

So much for the supposed emergency that had detained Achilles’ customary visitor. She, clearly, had been wise enough not to take the risk.

How much, Achilles wondered, would the government have paid for the location of the last Puppeteer on Jinx?

“It would not have worked anyway,” Achilles continued. “Active shielding cancels any unauthorized transmissions from this place.”

Ernest’s face was pale blue—of hypoxia, not fashion. His eyes darted about desperately. He said nothing, whether recognizing the futility or conserving what little oxygen remained.

Achilles flipped the useless bug into the air and caught it. Tossed and caught. Tossed and caught. “Perhaps your masters thought to trace the path by which visitors arrive.” Toss and catch. “My precautionary measures of course extend to that route. Had they sensed any signal beyond their abilities to block, you would not have survived even this long.”

Were those precautions sure to forestall the smuggling of beacons—or weapons? Certainty was impossible to prove. Somehow, Achilles managed not to pluck at his mane.
His
doubts must remain secret.

Dead or alive, returning Ernest made a point. Achilles tongued a control console, exchanging the stale air above Ernest’s sweat-sodden head with fresh. Inside the tiny cell, a hidden fan whirred to life. The human
gulped in air. “Take a message back to your superiors,” Achilles said. “They have forfeited any payment from me for a year. Any future dealings will be accomplished solely by vid.

“Tell them.” A wriggle of lip nodes sent the mobster on his way. To the solitude of his surroundings, Achilles added a raucous chord of evil music: an old curse.

ACHILLES TRIED to keep busy. On good days, he lost himself in research. Once, he’d considered himself a physicist.

He’d been posted to Kzin itself, gleaning subtle wisdom from experiments Kzinti scientists were rash enough to perform. Some days, he even found an eerie fascination in Kzinti daring.

And then the BVS-1 expedition had come.

He’d been promoted to We Made It expressly to oversee the neutron-star mission, but there was never time to plumb its findings. Another promotion, from We Made It to the larger General Products office on Jinx, only delayed his research.

Now he had all the time he could ever want to study the BVS-1 data. Every day, he found it harder and harder to care.

Each morning, utterly alone, he hoped his reward—in fame and privileges—would match his sacrifice. Then he would picture the other sacrificial few who had remained behind, one to a solar system. At some time or another, he’d met most of them. They were all misfits—especially that social climber Nessus.

In his hearts Achilles knew: That was how everyone on Hearth would see
him
. And it could only get worse.

Those willing to leave home, the scouts, had always been suspect. Then came the calamitous news, the shock that had plunged almost everyone into despair. He’d been one of the few on Jinx to remain functioning. How they’d struggled to move the catatonic, belly-hugging hundreds to the embarkation points! How he ached, imagining their unceremonious off-loading from the evacuation ship. The herd would now disdain scouts more than ever.

Somehow, the howling wind sounded lonely. Now that he’d begun to crave even human contact, he did not dare to meet with them.

ACHILLES SYNTHED some grasses-and-grain mush. He chewed mechanically, wondering: Is it too early today to resume the dance?

Is it too soon to propose to those who lead from behind that he could safely return home?

An alert chord, strident and vibrato, chased away his introspection. Who could possibly be using this comm ID? He answered, cautiously, “Eight eight three two six seven seven oh.”

“My General Products hull has failed,” said a human stranger.

Achilles had responded voice only; not so his callers. The man who spoke was unimposing by Jinxian standards but bulky by the norms of every other human world. He looked like a bull next to his spindly companion. Beowulf Shaeffer!

But a hull failure? That was impossible. The coincidence of Shaeffer’s presence faded to insignificance. “I beg your pardon?” Achilles said.

“My name is Gregory Pelton. Twelve years ago I bought a number-two hull from General Products. A month and a half ago it failed. We’ve spent the intervening time limping home. May I speak to a Puppeteer?”

Achilles turned on his camera, wondering if Shaeffer would recognize him. What was it about Shaeffer and unsuspected vulnerabilities in GP hulls?

Achilles tried to ignore the lethally dense atmosphere outside, and the stampede of doubts whether
Remembrance
would protect him. “This is quite serious. Naturally we will pay the indemnity in full. Would you mind detailing the circumstances?”

Pelton didn’t mind at all. He was vehement. He went on at length about the exotic properties of the nascent solar system they’d just explored.

“I see,” Achilles said. He did: The two were fools. “Our apologies are insufficient, of course, but you will understand that it was a natural mistake. We did not think that antimatter was available anywhere in the galaxy, especially in such quantity.”

The humans twitched. Pelton’s voice became curiously soft. “Antimatter?”

“Of course. We have no excuse, of course, but you should have realized it at once. Interstellar gas of normal matter had polished the planet’s surface with minuscule explosions, had raised the temperature of the protosun beyond any rational estimate, and was causing a truly incredible radiation hazard. Did you not even wonder about these things? You knew that the system was from beyond the galaxy. Humans are supposed to be highly curious, are they not?”

“The hull,” Pelton said. His stunned expression appended a question mark.

“A General Products hull is an artificially generated molecule with interatomic bonds artificially strengthened by a small power plant.” Achilles
was deep into the explanation before he realized what valuable information he was imparting. How starved he was for companionship! Too late now to stop. “The strengthened molecular bonds are proof against any kind of impact and heat into the hundreds of thousands of degrees. But when enough of the atoms had been obliterated by antimatter explosions, the molecule naturally fell apart.”

Pelton nodded, apparently struck speechless.

Achilles said, “When may we expect you to collect your indemnity? I gather no human was killed; this is fortunate, since our funds are low.”

Rather than answer, Pelton broke the connection. Achilles assumed Pelton would call back. Until then, it was unclear whether he or the humans were more appalled.

Klaxons screamed.

From the holo that suddenly hovered over Sigmund’s desk, a grim-faced man spoke rapidly. The name tag on his uniform said: Rickman. “Attention, ARM. Repeat. Attention, ARM. Jinx is under attack.”

The vanished Puppeteers demanded all Sigmund’s time. He had had to trust others to keep watch on Jinx. Only
very
high-priority matters now made it past his message filter. Rickman’s message was coded COSMIC; priorities didn’t come any higher.

All the colony worlds were prickly about their independence, Jinx more than most. They would call for ARM help only under the direst of circumstances.

Sigmund killed the audible alarm. Blinking icons in a corner of the holo indicated double encryption, in ARM and Jinx Defense Force standards. He squinted at routing codes beneath the icons. The recording had passed through Southworth Station, the hyperwave relay out past Pluto, and James P. Baen Station, in a similar orbit just outside Sirius A’s singularity.

It looked frighteningly authentic.

“We’ve spotted a ship-sized object plunging into Sirius system at eight-tenths light speed. Repeat, oh-point-eight cee. Preliminary observations suggest that it’s altering course.”

Aiming?

People filled the hallway outside Sigmund’s office. “Kzinti?” someone whispered. Others murmured agreement.