Authors: Christopher Rowley
Hut 416 on the North West Alley was empty. Its occupants had been taken away to expiate in the Agony Booth.
All day, Jon lay under the floorboards of the Hut and wept. At night he moved silently into the palace and worked his way through the familiar corridors to the entrance of the secret passageway.
In Magelsa's bedchamber the Princess and Lord Innoo quarreled furiously. She demanded to go home to Ratan. He demanded an heir.
"Why do you persist in your refusal?" He bellowed. "My father suspects me of my mother's murder. We must give him an heir lest his favor turn to my brother Lajook."
"Why should it matter?"
"Why do you think House Firgize rots here on this empty world?" Innoo shouted passionately.
She stared back silently.
"Because we are watched! Because my father escaped death only by coming here. Because the Heir will not accept any possible challenge in court. Because Blue Seygfan wishes to fly alone."
"But we're kiloparsecs away from court! We're beyond the back of beyond, we're almost in human space."
"Superior Buro is here. Old Chalmes, the head valet. He is Buro, my father told me ten years ago. 'Watch your words around Old Chalmes,' he said and he was right! I have observed Old Chalmes at work, he is a sly but persistent spy."
"So what?"
Innoo shrugged expansively. "My father escapes death only because they expect a Gnovii link cemented by an heir who will bring Firgize into Blue Seygfan. My father will not give up the Red!"
"Come to Ratan with me. Take one of my younger sisters, she'll give you your precious heir."
"How can I leave Glegan with that slave on the run? If he's found and questioned then both of us will face Expiation!"
Jon slipped into the room quietly and sprang to Innoo's side. He gave them a manic grin and pressed his hand to Innoo's face his middle finger tapping on the lao Lord's forehead.
"Surprise!" he said quietly. "I have to come to collect on your debt to me."
Innoo trembled, his eyeballs rolled up into his head.
"What do you want?" Magelsa's voice cracked with the strain.
"What the hell do you think I want?"
She looked blankly at him. "How should I know what a human wants? I mean, this is all I really need at this point. A feral human slave interrupting my life."
"How about a feral human slave who's been sleeping in your bed for the last month?"
She sniffed and turned her head.
Innoo groaned miserably, he begged for his life.
"That's funny, that's rich isn't it. You were happy to have me expiate, eh? Blame it all on the
feral
human, right? Think Innoo, one tap on your skull and my fingertip and your head will be joined forever in a little flower of death."
Innoo gulped air. Jon's voice grew cold and hard.
"This is what I demand," he growled and went on to detail his plan, as conceived lying beneath the boards of the empty Hut on North West Alley.
Eventually Magelsa went to the computer console and dialed a large amount of credit out of Innoo's accounts. She purchased two tickets on the next jumper outbound from Glegan, which would leave in two days time. Hers was a long distance ticket, to faraway Ratan. His was for a much shorter hop, to the free human system of Nocanicus, twenty-six light-years away in the direction of the Hyades stars. The cost fully liquidated Innoo's assets.
Then Innoo was made to dictate a full confession of his part in the death of Lady Flaam, which Jon copied and had Magelsa place in Lord Deshilme's personal computer files. It would be summoned up automatically by a simple coded call via telephone. Only Jon and Magelsa would know the code.
During the following forty-eight hours, Jon stayed awake on stimulants right next to Innoo, a handgun in his good hand, trained on Innoo most of the time. Medics came and tended to the rot in his damaged finger. He gave himself doses of local anaesthetic and endured the process while they cut away the tip and cauterized the wound.
Still sweating from that experience, he ordered them to pack a small bag for him. Into it went a bundle of laowon paper bills, some clothes, and a supply of stimulant drugs. In addition, there was a new set of identification papers for himself, describing him as Magelsa's handservant.
On the second day, Innoo, Magelsa and Jon flew to Calb, the small capital city of Glegan, two thousand kilometers west of Firgize. There they boarded the shuttle to the orbiting sat, and after passing through Emigration, passed onto the huge interstellar liner. Jon disposed of his handgun just before the embarkation gate. Now his only defense against Innoo was that coded recording sitting in Lord Deshilme's computer.
He boarded the jumper, keeping close to Magelsa in case she should attempt some treachery. He needn't have bothered. The situation was working out just as Magelsa would have wished. She was on her way back to Ratan, with a horror story to recount to her parents. The Gnovii would sunder their claim on Firgize, and she would be safe. As for Jon, she had come to admire the determination to survive she sensed in him. A determined search had found little rancor toward him in her heart, and even a few embers of her previous passion; he was a lean, muscular young man with narrow face and dark eyes, so unlike the bulky laowon males she had known all her life.
The jumper built up the gravitomagnetic field and departed the Glegan system.
Innoo went back to Castle Firgize with a troubling tale for his father, of an insane Magelsa who had killed his mother and absconded with a human lover. Lord Deshilme never discovered the recording implanted in his computer and never truly understood why the Gnovii consequently cut his connection to them and dissolved the match between Innoo and Magelsa.
Deshilme, truth to tell, felt he'd come out of the affair relatively well considering he was finally free of the Castigrii witch Flaam. He even considered remarrying and was on the point of requesting the Heir for permission to return to court to find someone suitable from the ranks of Blue Seygfan when he was murdered by unknown assassins.
After a week in which suspicion focused on Innoo, a new bride for the Firgize Heir arrived, one Lady Tsinka of the Point of Blue, sent from court. She was three times his age, a near-senile hag with disgusting habits. It was suggested that Innoo would preserve his own future by seeking out permanent vasectomy. Uncertainty concerning the death of Deshilme was, however, laid to rest forever.
Jon Iehard, in the meanwhile, had flown across the deeps of space into the human sphere. The trip took several weeks, subjective, from point to point across the starfields, usually traveling in short hops of one to three light-years. Each time the ship reemerged in normal space, it had to begin rebuilding the gravitomagnetic fields while the navigators aligned it precisely with its destination point, avoiding all gravity nodes along the way. The process could take many hours.
At Ialpitan Space Base, Princess Magelsa said farewell to Jon with even a few tears, and kisses of joy. She was due to board another, larger vessel, a liner that would head out on the truly immense voyage into the far Orion arm, where eventually she would reach Ratan.
Jon watched her go with some misgivings. At the space base, surrounded by laowon military, he felt the most vulnerable to any move by Innoo. He was alone, and without Magelsa to back his story, he might be unable to get Lord Firgize to listen to the tape of Innoo's confession. For all Jon knew Innoo had already seen to the destruction of the computer that contained the damaging file.
But no troopers appeared to arrest him before the jumper unshipped and headed out to the jump point.
Jon shared a small cabin on a crowded deck with an elderly woman who'd been given her freedom and a jumper ticket by her grateful laowon patron after a lifetime of service. She was en route to die in a free human system, and she spent most of her time burning incense and singing Panhumanist hymns in a doleful voice. It didn't take long for Jon to find her company oppressive and he forsook the cabin, spending most of his time idling in the small shipboard library.
Although the vast majority of its works concerned the laowon, a few volumes were devoted to the human race. There he found his introduction to perspectives on humanity that he had never before suspected. He discovered the universal alphabet of human ideografs. He set himself to memorize as much of the seventy most commonly used ones as he could before he reached human space.
As he viewed and read and listened, the enormity of the galaxy, even of human occupied space, crashed home to him. There were thousands of human colony worlds. There were the old settled worlds of the inner core stars and then there were the remarkable High Cultures of the far flung clusters, the Hyades, the Dipper Region, the Aldebaran Group. In all those systems humans ruled themselves. That thought was strange to Jon, almost frightening in its novelty.
When at last the jumper arrived in the Nocanicus star system, they began the wearying period of fusion drive, with aching hours of acceleration and deceleration as the ship nosed into the asteroid belt that was the prime settled part of the system, which had no habitable planets. Finally they reached Hyperion Grandee, the largest single asteroid habitat in the system.
The books and videos he'd studied had described the marvels of a high corporate system in glowing terms—Asteroid colonies! Space habitats! Jon was primed for all the technological wonders, nor was he disappointed. The jumper had to ease its way through crowded space lanes to approach Hyperion Grandee.
On the screen, he'd watched spellbound as spindly ships, all grids and spheres and bright identification lights, slid by. Closer in, past rings of agrihabitats, swarmed smaller craft, only visible by their lights, winking myriads of red and white and blue.
As they curved onto the docking path, enormous shadowy structures passed by on either side of the jumper. Huge, intense lights blazed from a row of hexagonal openings. From the camera view, Jon had the impression they were approaching the hub of a vast wheel. Dimly lit, spokelike things, many times the size of the ship were drifting slowly past them.
The jumper docked with a slight shudder of vibration and shortly afterward Jon Iehard was out on the crowded corridors of Hyperion Grandee, his belongings in a small tote bag slung over his shoulder. He was a free man, standing on human-built floorspace.
The habitat was overwhelming. It pulsed with life, a steady pounding of human surf inside the public ways and open spaces. Rivers of people flowed everywhere, almost twenty-four million of them according to the tourist program. All were connected in some way or other to the centers of finance, trade, entertainment, and light industry that gave Hyperion Grandee its astonishing vigor.
Fortunately he did not arrive penniless, or he would not have been allowed to disembark. Hyperion Grandee had a severe overcrowding problem. Advertising signs flashed in multicolored frenzy, images poured forth in an overloading fury that he had never imagined before. After gazing openmouthed for a while he found that by contrasting the common ideografs he'd memorized with Nocanicus Varietals, he could comprehend many of the big signs and logos. "SDaba," "Wirl," "Stop No-Joy," "DD," "Alfa Time," there were dozens, hundreds, thousands.
He took the notes of Lao Mercantility he'd packed at Castle Firgize to the first bank he identified, the Baltitude & Oxygen Bank. Inside the bank his notes gave the young woman who ran the small foreign exchange desk quite a thrill; she'd never seen paper money. She found the patterns beautiful, the colors rich and lustrous. However, she had to inform Jon that they were not of particularly high denominations and he wound up with a mere eleven hundred and thirty Nocanicus credit units for them. He only barely qualified for a credit card.
Back out in the city, he wandered in awe through the enormous clefts of the central sector around Octagon Five where structures towered more than a thousand meters above his head. He passed through immense archways, wandered inside broad passageways lined with shops, restaurants, pleasure parlors. Everywhere there were people, millions upon millions, brightly clad in the pastels and primaries that were so fashionable. They surged restlessly through the corridors, their passing giving rise to a susurration that reminded Jon of waves breaking on the shores of the Sweetcrystal in storm.
He ate at snackstands and slept on a park bench his first night. He was duly awakened by the police who let him loose only after a stern lecture about vagrancy and a friendly warning to get the laowon brand removed from his forehead as soon as possible.
Day, night, day, he wandered, finding that the habitat was always awake, always pulsing with life. If anything the night cycle crowds were even greater than those of the day. At some point he paused and booked into the cheapest hotel he could find, a hundred credits a day for the smallest room. He started to investigate the chances of getting a job.
After a day or so he discovered that he'd stepped from one trap into another. Hyperion Grandee's economy was superservice, high skill. Jon lacked the educational credits required for any jobs outside the realm of service. But one look at the brand on his forehead and the faces of potential service employers shriveled in disgust. He began to hear disparaging words such as "breed," "brand man," and "laoman."
On his fifth evening he got into a fight in a small bar in Octagon One after being turned down for a job as a bartender. Almost the whole bar turned on him and roughed him up. Then he was almost denied entry to a hospital when he produced his new credit card. Eventually he was treated, grudgingly, in a charity clinic.
In desperation, the next morning, he limped to a government job center. But the counselors' recommendations were not encouraging: Jon could, he was told, raise a small sum of capital by selling the rights to his organs to the transplant banks, enough to keep him going until the banks required his heart or liver or lungs. Since he was young and fit and reasonably good looking, he might be able to earn a meager living from the sale of his body for sexual abuse. In the light of the brands on his body and obvious laowon connections, the counselors advised him strongly against this course.