Fall of the White Ship Avatar (42 page)

Floyt could see from their faces that Alacrity and Heart were back on a truce footing and a lot more, the two wearing cream-in-whiskers looks.

Heart had changed from the slop-around shipsuit and now wore a stupefying black sheath of high-sheen skin-film, not quite transparent, so sheer and taut that it seemed it must burst, molding parts of the Nonpareil that didn't really require molding. The chalk-blond hair was full and perfect again, weighty locks of it that framed her face and the wide, encased shoulders, and one curl that bobbed mischievously across her eye. Her spike-heeled evening slippers of smokey duraglaze chimed faintly with each step on the pathstones and made her Alacrity's height and more.

She wore the proteus Floyt recalled, an Impe'ria Optitech that looked like a chic manacle, made of precious metals set with natural wavestones, ardors, and Satan's tears.

As for Alacrity, he was as heroic and noble as could be in his splendid captain's uniform. Their appearance alone made them a formidable couple, an impact to be reckoned with. Alacrity gazed around rapt at the Vale, which had long ago rested on a planetary surface—in Alacrity's grandfather's backyard on Paradise, to be exact.

Sibyl Higgins spied the two and didn't hesitate for a moment to block their way, making Heart less ebullient and Alacrity mistrustful. "So, Fitzhugh, you made it here alive! Against the odds! I have heard a good deal about you, and read the files. Young man, you do not strike me as the sort of chap who'll die in bed!"

"God knows, I try, ma'am."

Heart stifled a kind of
yimph
! of laughter and fought to keep a straight face. Higgins nearly smiled.

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[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

"How very nice for you both, I'm sure. Shareholder Fitzhugh, your friend Mr. Floyt knows a certain amount about what's about here tonight. I suggest you join him. How you vote is your decision, of course. Your sympathies seem to lie in the right place; I hope you are with us as a matter of morale, even though you don't represent much stock."

"Thanks."
Have you got a surprise coming, Granny
!

Higgins went to make final preparations, joined by Heart and the rest of her privy circle, One-Vote-Fitzhugh pointedly excluded. Alacrity ambled over to Floyt, who was savoring a cup of coffee that tasted far better than any the Earthservice ever served up to a functionary third class.

"Hecate's in the bag," Alacrity slurred, so that Floyt had a hard time catching it, Alacrity unsure of who might be watching or listening. "What've you found out?"

Floyt sipped again, eyes closed in rapture. "Just that the White Ship is practically a sideshow, in some ways, at this point."

That made Alacrity's big, oblique eyes go nearly round. "Wha? Look, spit it out; we haven't got much time."

Floyt set the delicate cup down in its fragile saucer precisely. "There are the many, many patents and licenses that have come out of the White Ship and Ship research, of course, and they represent a huge income. But even those are secondary. Alacrity, that Heavyset ship? The one down near Spica?
It's here
because it heard the White Ship
! The Ship's AI's summoned it, or were talking to each other, or something, in Heavyset, or modified Precursor symbology, or some combination of the foregoing.

Nobody's sure."

"They—who—how—"

"Don't interrupt, and I'll endeavor to make this painless."

A serving robo drifted by and Alacrity got it to cough up a pisco sour. He debated over an inhaler of perkup; the contusions and other hurts he'd received in the scuffle with Gentry Standing Bear were starting to ache again. So he shrugged and took a wheeze or two.

He wished there was a little more recuperative time available. A half-grain hit of kick might do as a substitute, but it would be a bad idea to overdo and be playing Tarzan out on a Vale tree limb someplace while Dincrist and his contingent made their move.

In the meantime Floyt brought Alacrity up to date. "I've been listening to these people here and accessing a little, and I tell you, the Ship's brain and the AI's it uses to run things—well, they're very good, but they were drawn from everywhere, put together piecemeal and updated very, ah,
haphazardly.

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[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

Stuff right out of military R&D side by side with stuff that had been extracted from older starships, do you see what I mean? What I'm saying is, the right hand doesn't necessarily know what the left is doing.

"And so what happened was, Dincrist and that lot began making inroads with the Ship, starting some years back. They were using data that were of interest to the Ship to open up operational areas of its brain to them, so they could window their way through to a position of power, at the same time as they were putting together a majority of voting shares. They've got the shares, but they don't seem to have that window, at least not yet."

Floyt stopped for a deep breath and another sip of coffee. Alacrity sipped the pisco sour and curbed himself from interrupting.

"But what the Old Guard
did
feed in—Dincrist did, mainly—were Heavyset/Precursor correlations.

Symbols, impulses; I don't quite understand yet. Alacrity, I think some of it came from Weir. That in return for the Blackguard intelligence Dincrist gave Weir—and that Dincrist thought Weir was merely going to use to become a landholder on Blackguard, instead of using it to throw down the Camarilla—

Dincrist got some of the Heavyset/Precursor stuff I'm talking about." His voice had dropped to a stage whisper.

Alacrity's forehead was ridged with lines of thought. "Maybe as his Inheritance?"

Floyt held up his hands helplessly. "I wish I could tell you. I won't have a clear idea until I do a lot more accessing, preferably someplace private."

The perkup had Alacrity feeling alert, dynamic, unhampered by injuries, tingling. Floyt said, "Put down that inhaler and listen, damn you! Somewhere in the labyrinth of the Ship mind, in some information pocket no one's been able to isolate, is the basis for the first real contact humans or anyone else have ever had with the Heavysets! As long as you're going to stand there with your mouth open, drink."

Alacrity did, but not much; he was too distracted.

The Heavysets were almost as much a mystery as the Precursors. There were those who thought the Heavies
were
the Precursors. Except that the Heavysets seemed more or less contemporaries of humanity and were anxious to solve the Precursor enigmas, too. Certainly, the Heavies avoided contact with
Homo sapiens,
and just as certainly their technology gave humans every reason not to push the issue.

A few observations had been made, like the fact that Heavyset ships apparently zipped in and out of singularities as they pleased, and a few conclusions, such as the one that the Heavysets had visited the Galactic Core and other galaxies as well. They preferred extreme-gravity worlds and situations; thus file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...%20-%20Fall%20of%20the%20White%20Ship%20Avatar.htm (216 of 242)23-2-2006 17:03:14

[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

their name.

An exclusive pipeline to the Heavysets could amount to a throne from which the human race and most other known intelligent species could be ruled if the wrong party or parties controlled the White Ship.

Sibyl Higgins, swiping her peppermint hair out of her eyes, was clearing her throat and calling for attention. Alacrity, looking at her, wondered if she'd worn her white clinician outfit for prestige or simply because she figured there might be some medical emergencies before the meeting was over.

"As leading shareholder of our faction, I believe I'm to speak for us all. Unless someone objects? I hold four hundred fifty-five thousand six hundred shares in the White Ship."

Nobody said anything. Alacrity seemed very interested in the bioluminescent grass, so like cotton candy, underfoot.

"We are met in that very same Paradise Vale where the original Ship founders convened and threw in their lot together these many years ago," Higgins went on. "This very beautiful place that was later transported up
in toto
and made part of the Ship." She gestured around her at the faerie beauty.

"I shall put our case at the full meeting, as we've agreed, and we'll see whom we may sway on the other side. Failing an upset, it seems, we must turn our efforts to public opinion and to every avenue of acquisition of more shares."

As if Dincrist and his bunch would care about public opinion if they get a hotline to the Heavies,
Alacrity thought.
I sure wouldn't.

A tone sounded through the Vale, not out of phase with the humming of XT insects and the susurrus of a light breeze that came from no source Floyt could see.

"The meeting begins directly," Higgins said. "Please take your places." The Nonpareil took Alacrity's hand and led him to his assigned place. On the way, Higgins intercepted again and drew Alacrity aside.

"Your family was well intended, from what I can find out. But good intentions are not enough. Don't disrupt what we are trying to do here for personal vendettas. I hope you're made of sterner stuff than your mother and father."

Heart and Floyt held their breath, and Floyt readied to jump into a brawl again. Alacrity said in a low, scorching voice, "Look, I know all about you and that Strike Recondo training, but if you ever say anything like that to me again, I'll
drink your blood
, understand?"

Once she saw she'd gotten him angry, Higgins became as serene as the Ship. "If I've given you rage, channel it toward our opposition, as shrewdness."

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[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

"Madam, you are crotch curd."

Alacrity assumed his seat, face burning. Floyt stood behind it, as the other advisors and companions were doing for their principals, and asked himself which side Sibyl Higgins was working for.

Yester, behind Wulf's seat, looked like a graven image. Sibyl Higgins sat at one end of the table, all the New Faction to her right, Heart the closest; no one stood behind Heart's chair, or Higgins's.

From among the trees walked a file of newcomers, about an even balance of males and females, along with two nonhumans, wending their way down through the magical Vale. Dincrist led.

Heart's father came to stand at the other end of the table; those who followed him went to their places at his right. The nonhuman pair was Srillan, and Floyt had a momentary feeling of pleasure; though Srillans had laid waste so much of Terra during the Final Smear, the two members of that species he'd met personally turned out to be good friends and allies. But he saw that neither the aardvarklike alien in the chair nor the one who stood behind was Maska or his nephew Corva. Floyt's Earthbred loathing overcame him again.

Alacrity scanned the newcomers, too: Dincrist, regally tall and fit and tan, silver-maned, sworn to kill Alacrity and Floyt. Clearly the leader. Next along was Praxis, head of the Church of Human Potential, Saint of the Irreducible I, textbook-class mental defective. Praxis had the white hair and distinguished looks common to his type, a holyman of self-forgiveness and self-understanding. His secret vice, known to Alacrity and Floyt and a very few others, was subjecting clones of himself to unutterable abuses.

Floyt recognized most of the others from the files he'd read—well fleshed but hard-eyed, all, including the several women among them.

Watching Alacrity with predatory hatred was Baron Mason of Styx, once a Better of Blackguard until Alacrity and Floyt had to bring all Blackguard's ugliness down to get away with their skins, and also because the universe was better off that way. Mason was the biggest person there, half a head taller than Alacrity, vigorous looking, with direct, piercing black eyes. He had a head of thick, curly black hair touched with white—not gray—at the temples. His beard projected in two menacing spikes, the middle of his chin being clean shaven.

And standing behind Mason …

Alacrity's mouth twisted. "Well, hey, Constance! Up and around, huh? I figured they'd still be busy replacing that brain of yours with something a little better, like for example a half-watt bulb."

Constance, once Dincrist's creature, now stood behind Mason's chair, from where she gave Alacrity a seething, teasing look. Constance had helped waylay Alacrity and Floyt and implant the actijots in them.

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[Fitzhugh 3]-FALL OF THE WHITE SHIP AVATAR

She no longer worked in tandem with her pirate-partner/lover Sile because Sile wasn't very presentable after Alacrity shot him dead.

Constance's eyes were long, painted ellipses—eyes blue as Spica, Alacrity had once observed to himself.

Floyt compared them to cornflowers. She was olive-skinned, lean-flanked as a boy, with lemon-yellow hair barely long enough to hold a part. She wore soleskins and a minimal V-shaped garment of white glove leather, crotch to shoulders, her skin glitterflecked.

Constance crossed her arms, tapping herself absently with fingers encased in long golden mandarin-style sheaths set with gems and painted in enamel to look like dragon's claws. Alacrity knew the fingernails within were bitten to the quick. Floyt thought of Hecate, and of Paloma Sudan.

" 'Lo, cupcake," she purred. "You don't know how much I wanted to see you again. And poor old dippy Hobart Floyt, there, too, it goes without saying! But, oh, Fitz-yow!
Teh
! The
score
we have to settle!"

Constance shook her head and rolled her eyes. Floyt felt the hair stand on the back of his neck.