B00BFVOGUI EBOK (15 page)

Kolvax sat beneath the great tree,
immersed in the whole of human history. Like most Xylanx
space stations, Gharion Preserve had a sizable
greenhouse ring. His armor shed, Kolvax luxuriated in
his underclothes near an artificial brook, studying from a small crystal display.

Texts and videos translated into
the Xylanx language had taken him far away to Earth,
which was what the humans called their homeworld. He
had followed Homo sapiens from the days of caves and darkness to the discovery
of agriculture, through the births of religion and writing to the splitting of
the atom. He saw the species become a silly people in the previous century,
obsessed with entertainment and squabbling over irrelevancies. And he saw the
arrival of the busybody Regulans, and the great
awakening that followed.

It was all in the knowglobe, there for anyone to find. The second he returned
from Mu Cassiopieae with the humans’ device, his
followers within the Severed had gone to work analyzing the information inside.
There were so many details to sift through. The humans even had a name for the
star the Gharion Preserve station orbited: Pi3 Orionis. Couldn’t they come up with a better name than that?

Humans had no marketing sense at
all.

The most shocking thing, however,
was that none of what Kolvax had already learned had
required any decryption at all. The humans put it all out there for the taking,
like something they were proud of. He hadn’t imagined that possible. The Xylanx were champions of obfuscation and self-censorship
when it came to their own origins. The grand traditions the Dominium sought to
protect were whatever things served its politicos at the moment: the true past
was always kept out of sight.

But any time humanity’s
representatives met another mercantile species and linked knowglobes,
they passed on their complete profile. It was a deranged practice. Slavery,
biological warfare, dancing contests — no horror was so shameful the humans would
not share it. Kolvax was surprised anyone traded with
them at all.

Most tantalizing was the
information from the last few years, since the people of Earth reached out to
the stars. The speed with which they had integrated into the local commercial
scene was truly amazing. And yet there were counterforces
at work on Earth. The humans were concerned about contaminating their planet
with alien biomaterial: it helped that the whirlibangs
were all millions of miles away, in the orbital neighborhood of a planet called
Venus. Bangboxes sent through the transit stations
underwent standard inspections before being carted to the blue planet.

And then there were the
assassinations at Overland carried out by the Walled Garden movement. The Xylanx had heard the filthy Gebrans
were involved in a war some eight years earlier, but they didn’t know with whom
they’d fought it. The news explained a lot.

The existence of an isolationist
movement on Earth was unsurprising: xenophobia was a powerful sentiment among Kolvax’s own people, who had been in space far longer. He himself
had done a lot to milk it. But there was no mistaking which side of the
argument had the upper hand on Earth: humans would continue to migrate any place they were allowed to go. That was part of
why they had to be stopped.

Still, a fifth
column of humanity, willing to take extreme measures to cut off their world
from the galaxy?
That could be useful, Kolvax thought. Fellow travelers to his own silly excuse for a movement. If
not usable in his current plans, then maybe such a human group could come in
handy some day in the future.

He was sure about one thing,
however: the influx of information was certain to feed the Xylanx’s
paranoia about the species, and while that served him well, it had its downside.
He was reluctant to even visit the scriptorium where his Severed
disciples were boiling down the salient points to send back to the Dominium.
The flood of facts must be sending his dear fearmongers
into overdrive.

And there was one now, Kolvax saw, looking up. An armored figure quivered behind a
nearby bush.

Kolvax sighed. “Tellmer,
get out here.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” his aide said,
barely visible through the branches. “You’re naked—”

“No, I’m not,” Kolvax said.
Stupid movement.
“If
it makes you feel any better, adjust your visor’s settings so my unholy kneecaps
will not offend you.”

Tellmer stepped out into the open.
“That’s better,” the relieved Xylander said.

“You’re talking to a shrub, you
idiot,” Kolvax said. “I’m to your right.”

“Sorry. I can’t see very well.”
Sheepishly, Tellmer turned toward him, face-mask
darkened. Of all Kolvax’s followers from his Sigma Draconis exile, only Tellmer had
kept on wearing the deadly golden collar. The others had removed the booby-trapped
devices, but Tellmer had decided to continue to allow
Kolvax to have the ability to kill him on a whim.

Of course, Kolvax
had that ability in any event: Tellmer was a
weakling. Maybe Tellmer was just making things
convenient for him. That was an aide’s job, after all. And maybe, after losing
and regaining two limbs in the last weeks, the imbecile figured the medics
could do the same with his head, should it go astray.

“You have news from Liandro?” Kolvax asked.

“The elder believer has broken
the code,” Tellmer said. “The operational data you
wished is now yours.”

Kolvax looked at his display. Yes, the
information was feeding to it. “You’ve read it all?” he asked.

“Yes,” Tellmer
said. “Full profiles on all the members of the trader’s team. Biometric
information, principally — they monitor each other’s well-being while in armor.”

“How touching,” Kolvax said, scowling as he scanned. He was more interested
in the histories. “What does this mean? About the merchant?”

“Ah. That was the most difficult
encryption to break,” Tellmer said. “Evidently, the
trader — one Jamison Phillip Sturm — had among his mission dossiers record-keeping
about his own goals. As near as we can figure, he is obligated to obtain what
is apparently a vast sum of riches in the next few weeks.”

“Or what?” Kolvax
said.

“I would imagine they’d kill him.
Or perhaps they would simply mutilate him in some way.” He flexed his gloved
hands, uncomfortably. “It’s what we’d do.”

“Hmm.” Kolvax
hadn’t studied up enough yet on what the human sanctions were for poor job
performance. But in examining the file Tellmer was
referring to, Kolvax observed that the trader
certainly seemed motivated. A breakneck trading schedule had been plotted out, human
visits to several destinations emanating from the Sigma Draconis
station that had once been their place of exile.

“This Sturm is in a real hurry,”
he concluded. “You’re right. It must be pretty bad, what he’s facing. You’ve
seen him, Tellmer: he’s almost as big a coward as you
are.”

And now Kolvax
had his itinerary.

The Xylander
went silent for a moment, contemplating. Yes, he had the resources now for one
of his more ambitious plans — and the knowglobe had
given him more than enough information to pull it off. He spoke his thoughts
out loud. “What…what if we could really take care of the human problem once and
for all?”

Tellmer straightened. “I thought the
Dominium advocated going slowly on the human matter, Great Kolvax.
They just wanted you to investigate.”

“So I’ve investigated,” he said.
He waved the crystal display in his hand. “What more do they want me to find
out?” He licked his cracked lips. “No, this is perfect. The next time we see
Jamison Phillip Sturm, his whole world is going to change.” He looked up. “And
so will ours.”

“Can we please stop giving cute
names to things that can kill us?” Jamie asked.

Bridget laughed. It was true; the
Moogles were more than a little frightening. They
resembled mammoth muffins: each on three legs, each leg the size of an
elephant. Ten slender arms were evenly spaced around their wide muffin-top midsections,
and giant mouths appeared as sphincters on the top of their “heads.”

“Just stay out of traffic and
you’ll be okay,” she said. The Moogles walked by
twirling around on one giant foot, and if they had a way of seeing what was
underneath them, she didn’t know what it was. The dossier on the Moogles suggested the arms, which seemed to be constantly
in motion, might provide some kind of optical or motion-sensory input, but
nobody really knew. All that the Signatory Systems knew was that Moog, the planet
the Moogles lived on, was a commercial dead zone. And a heavy one, at that.

Xi Boötes
A was a G-type star more similar in size, color, and age to Earth’s sun than
any they had visited recently. Of course, it wasn’t the only star in its
system, and its main inhabited planet was a dense iron ball twice the size of
the Earth. Landing on Moog had caused Bridget’s weight to more than double
instantly: they probably wouldn’t be putting in any spas for the
weight-conscious here. And breast implants wouldn’t be too popular either. They
would not be founding New California on Moog.

All the members of Surge Three
wore their high-gravity HardSHEL armor units, with
armatures specially designed to provide movement — and inside, exerting pressure
to keep blood flowing back upward. Nonetheless, they couldn’t stay here long,
on account of Jamie. The others were in peak physical condition, but Jamie was
already nursing a sore leg from a fall on Leel, and
she didn’t take him for a workout nut. He had also had the usual sea-legs
difficulties getting around.

“I feel like I’m drunk,” Jamie
said, staggering on the yellow stone surface.

“You were. Now you’re just heavy.
Let the servos do their job,” she said. “When you fall down, you’re falling
almost three times as fast.”

“Every day’s a thrill ride,”
Jamie said, resigned.

“You’ll be an old hand soon,” she
said. “Like me.”

“Dear God, don’t let that
happen.”

Bridget grinned. After their conversation
in the kitchen, she’d come to appreciate his situation a little better — if not
to approve of his actions. Jamie wasn’t whining nearly as much after the sales
coup on Leel — it really was a big deal — and it seemed
to Bridget as if Jamie was finally beginning to understand just how diverse and
exotic life in the galaxy was.

From a desktop, she thought, it
was probably easy to imagine that the creatures of the universe were just like
you. Dealing solely with names and numbers, you never imagined just how
unfamiliar your trading partners really looked. The Sheoruk,
the Baghu, the Leelites — these
had to tell Jamie that the universe was a lot more complicated than he
imagined.

That great variety, however, also
made the bipedal Xylanx — who were shaped like humans — of
definite interest. But they were of interest for different reasons than they
would have been even half a century earlier.

Intelligent life was everywhere
in the cosmos, humanity had found: that Big Question had been answered, but
good. As the possible configurations that sentience took grew and grew, though,
Earth’s travelers noted a disappointing lack of locations that humans could
live in without space suits or mechanical assistance.

Earthlings could live and work, of course, quite comfortably in those other places:
the revolutionary Supralight Hygienic Environment
Layer, the innermost skin of a HardSHEL or SoftSHEL suit, made that possible. But many humans longed
for a place where they could kick back outside, lounging beneath a tree in a
nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, protected by an ozone layer at twenty-four degrees
Celsius. And while potential Earthlike planets had been catalogued by
researchers since the late twentieth century, no actual Terra-twins had been
found. Shafted by the final frontier, real estate brokers everywhere had gone
into therapy.

So the Xylanx
were of interest on their own, but also because of what their existence
suggested. Weighing eighty kilos, having long limbs, and owning opposable
thumbs made sense only on a certain kind of planet. The Xylanx
seemed a little more massive than the baseline human, but their general shape was
still close enough. Did they breathe air in those helmets? What was their sun
like? Did they have more than one home?

Moog’s sun was nice and familiar,
but no humans would be moving here. And it didn’t seem as if there was any
trading to do, either. The Moogles were allegedly
intelligent, and their stomping grounds had great mineral riches. But they
protected the ground just by walking around.

“Porriman
trader approaching,” Hiro Welligan
said from his watch point. “Hold on to your wallet.”

Jamie and Bridget turned to see a
tracked vehicle crawling slowly toward them, giving the herd of tromping Moogles a wide berth.

Natives of Porrima
were chubby lumps. About the same height as humans, Porrimans
propelled themselves along, sluglike, on a sheen of
internally generated ooze. With their four arms, minds for deal making, and home
conveniently located near several other Signatory Systems worlds,
the Porrimans had inveigled a position for themselves
as the premier warehouse keepers for the stellar neighborhood. Granted, they
seldom got shipments right, but that only attracted foreign advisers by the ’boxload there to work as observers — while spending money in Porriman establishments. Bridget thought it was a pretty
good scheme.

The trader’s vehicle trundled up.
Bridget could see clearly the Porriman’s pudgy body
mechanically — and, she imagined, uncomfortably — suspended inside his vehicle. Robotic
arms hung limply outside the carriage. The Porriman’s
dark eyes stared at them. “More victims here, I see,” a jolly but sarcastic
male voice said over the airwaves.

Jamie did a double take at the
words.

“Victims?” Bridget asked.

“To try the
impossible — selling to the Moogles.” The Porriman
gestured back with one of his hands toward the milling field of giants. “Humans, aren’t you?” he said. “Well, Frocky
of Porrima welcomes you. Even as
he’s about to leave!”

“Now come on!” Jamie said,
looking back at the team’s knowglobe. “That’s Phil
Silvers!”

Bridget blinked. “Who?”

“Television comic from the twentieth
century,” Jamie said.

“Oh, that again,” she said,
dismissively. “You have a strange hobby.” She understood nostalgia: remembering
things you were exposed to in your youth is good for your synapses. Nostalgia
for things before you were born, on the other hand, made no sense to her.

Jamie shook his head. “I’m just
imagining how much licensing money the knowglobe
people must pay out. Personality rights are descendible, you know. That started
with Elvis.”

“Who…?” Bridget shook her head. “Never mind. You’ll just tell me.”

Frocky wheeled toward Jamie. “What’s
the matter, my friend? You sound troubled. As if trust is missing from our
relationship. Tragic, given how long we’ve known each other.
Why, it must be two minutes we’ve known each other. You’re breaking poor Frocky’s circulatory organs.”

“Well, it’s not you,” Jamie said.
“Or maybe it is. Our knowglobe has selected for your
voice a human who was famous for portraying a con artist.”

“Portraying?” Frocky
said, sounding mildly interested. “Was he one?”

“I don’t think so. But listening
to you, I can’t take you seriously.”

“Well, it’s a two-way street,
young man — to use an expression which is completely meaningless to me. Because
my
knowglobe,
back at the ship that you’ve so thoughtfully double-parked, has chosen a
communications profile for you that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

Jamie’s interest was piqued. “Who
is it?”

“Weren’t you listening? It’s my
worst enemy. Supervisor Vangwoo.
The mere sound of your voice makes me want to crawl back into the egg.”

Bridget smiled. “You were saying
about the Moogles?”

Frocky waved his arms. “Hopeless! Completely hopeless. No one can sell to these things. Better
people have tried. I just have. It’s useless to ask. They’re living on a field
we know holds wealth beyond measure — and if you poke a stick into the ground,
they stomp you to death! You can’t trade them anything, because there’s nothing
they want!”

“Maybe it’s all in your
approach,” Jamie said. “Have you tried teddy bears?”

“A comedian! Funny, this kid is.” Frocky shook his head. “Well, you can do the floor show
without me, because I give up. Good old Frocky is
through!” With that, he started rolling toward his spacecraft.

Bridget looked back at the Moogles. There
were
hundreds of them, wandering aimlessly like cattle — only cows that gesticulated
constantly with ten hands. “I think we’ll give it a try anyway, Frocky.”

“‘A try,’ she says!” Frocky
waved with four arms to the brilliant blue sky. “Well, young lady, I’m sure you
will do wonderfully well in my absence. Just don’t come to Frocky
after you’ve been flattened. I can’t stand the sight of anything that’s been
inside anyone else, regardless of species or creed!”

“Wait,” Bridget said. “You said
you talked with them. We don’t have a language file—”

“You wouldn’t.” Frocky stopped and looked them over. “Sure,” he said. “Why not. I’ve got nothing to lose. It’s a sign language.
They’re always moving their arms, right? Astonishingly, it means something.
I’ve spent a month learning it. Here.” He touched a
control inside his compartment. “I’m transmitting it to you now. I hope you
enjoy all the time it’ll take for you to learn it!”

At that, he rumbled off to his
ship.

“It takes all kinds,” Bridget
said.

“Then we’re in luck, because it looks
like the universe has them all,” Jamie replied. “And it keeps sending them all
to me.”

Simply walking out onto the
yellow plain had been a challenge for Jamie. He’d fallen twice and would have
broken his arms if it weren’t for the power-assist his outfit was providing.
This time, he’d been given a high-grav HardSHEL suit like the other troops had, although without
the armament.
Stupid
regulation.

But the internal armature had
come in handy on another front. As always, Jamie marveled at what Trovatelli was able to accomplish. She hadn’t wanted to
come along, as she was still absorbed in her studies of the data on the Xylanx. But even from
Indispensable
,
she’d been able to help Jamie accomplish something in hours that had taken Frocky a month.

Under the watchful eyes of
Bridget and her companions, Jamie stood before a single Moogle
that had wandered away from its herd.

“Hello,” the trader said. As he
did so, the servos caused his arms to flap up and down.

“You’re a seagull,” Welligan said, laughing.

“I’m talking here,” Jamie
replied — and that statement, too, caused his arms to gesticulate wildly.

It got the Moogle’s
attention. It twirled backward on one leg and then returned to its original
position.

Jamie read the readout projected
inside his helmet. His cameras, interfacing with the language database Frocky had provided, interpreted the response as an
acknowledgment. Nothing more.

I
feel like a marionette playing charades
, Jamie thought.

“I have much to sell,” Jamie
said. He started to point back to the ship, where the fabricator had been
rolled out, but his arms began moving in a wild sequence of gestures that sent
the briefcase tumbling from his hand.

He felt like a football referee
on a bender. Now all his bodyguards were chuckling. Bridget picked up the
briefcase and held it for him. “Try again,” she said, smiling.

“I will trade for mining rights,”
Jamie said, trying to use as few words as possible so as to protect his poor
arms. “We will not damage your land. You must tell me what you want.”

As soon as Jamie’s arms finished
their sequence of moves, the Moogle raised its hands
in the air and thundered off to the west, running away from him and toward the
herd, far away.

“What the hell?” Jamie asked. He
regretted he’d opened his mouth. “Interface off,” he snarled.

Bridget stared into the distance.
“Something rattled that guy,” she said. It had reached its companions in an
amazingly short time for something so massive.

Jamie heard a chime in his ear.
It was Trovatelli calling in. “You guys had better
wait,” she said, her voice sounding urgent.

“What is it?” Jamie asked. He
stared at the Moogles. Something was going on out
there, half a kilometer away.

“We forgot something with the
sign language,” she said. “The Porrimans’ language
required four arms.”

“Yeah,” Bridget said. “But we
allotted for that. We built a vocab using just the
words that required his, er, top arms.”

“That’s what I thought,” Trovatelli said. “But I was just rechecking — and I think we
misread ‘dominant arm’ for ‘top arm.’”

Bridget’s eyes narrowed. “You
mean Frocky was left-handed?”

“Bottom-handed,”
the Q/A said.

Jamie saw the huge herd beginning
to move. “So what did I just tell them? I asked what they wanted!”

“No,” Trovatelli
said. “You told them you wanted to eat their young!”

Bridget took a step back.
“That’s…no good.” The herd was moving now, stampeding on all threes toward them.

The entire team turned,
struggling to run in the high gravity.

“Well, I think we know what they
want now,” Jamie yelled, huffing. “They want to stomp us to death!”

To be continued in the next episode. Your book will be automatically updated with Episode 5 and you can continue reading from this page.