Juggler of Worlds (8 page)

“And the bad news?” Nessus prompted.

With a shudder, Puck shook the remaining hints of order from his usually meticulously coiffed mane. “The bad news is, the galaxy is dying.”

Earth had been at peace too long.

Sigmund stood and stretched, thoroughly bored. When he’d signed up four years ago, ARMs were expected to dope down—or, for naturals like him, dope up—on weekends. Paranoia at work, sanity at play. For six months
now, the policy had extended to
all
time off. They waived the rule while you stayed in ARM facilities.

No one wanted to yo-yo daily.

He shared the off-duty lounge this evening with Feather, a very foul-tempered Conan Murphy, and a pinch-faced newbie named Andrea Girard. The newbie snored softly on the couch. Murphy and Feather watched soccer, the vid sound turned low.

Murphy was always in a foul mood. Maybe it was his assignment. The Kdatlyno
looked
scary, a bit like scaly, wingless dragons, but they
loved
humans. They’d been Kzinti slaves until humans freed their worlds during the Second Man-Kzin War. You watched the Kdatlyno because this was the Bureau of Alien Affairs and they were aliens. Not even the most dedicated paranoid had ever found cause for worry about them.

Sleeping Beauty had been assigned to watching Puppeteers. You could tell she still saw them as sock puppets selling pricy toys. For all Sigmund knew, she was right—he just didn’t believe it. Puppeteers were secretive. They had tech far beyond humans and Kzinti. They didn’t mind being called Puppeteers, for tanj sake.

And he’d never gotten over the feeling Adonis had pulled one over on him back on We Made It.

He’d rather be working.

Sigmund had been killing time online in a massively multiplayer quest game. His ranking tonight stank, but that might soon change. For motivation he’d overridden the other players’ avatar choices. In his holo views, from now on, the wizards and treasure hunters would appear as Kzinti and Jinxians. Never mind that he watched Jinxians for a living. He watched Kzinti, too, but unofficially. ARM higher-ups doubted his objectivity.

Maybe someone botched a play. “Futz this,” Feather announced. She caught Sigmund’s eye and then glanced at the door to the small sleeping area. Sigmund and sleeping area. Sigmund and sleeping area.

Feather had never mastered subtlety. She hadn’t ever tried. “What about Murphy?” Sigmund mouthed. Murphy, oblivious, kept watching his vid.

“You’re such a prude,” she said loudly. “Murphy, can I borrow your body for a while? Sigmund won’t play.”

Sigmund sighed, embarrassed. “I’ve reconsidered.”

Murphy ignored them both.

Sigmund let her tow him into the nap nook. It didn’t matter that
he
was quiet, and he imagined Murphy and the awakened newbie exchanging grins. After, floating between the sleeper plates, Sigmund said, “You and Murphy?”

“Or the new girl, if you men both fail me.” Feather laughed. “You’re actually jealous.”

“No, I’m actually paranoid.” He loved being able to say that aloud. And maybe he was jealous, too, although he knew Feather was yanking his chain. It was time to change the subject. “Things seem quiet tonight.”

“Every night.” She raked her fingers through her hair, tonight emerald green with silver sparkles. It went with her mint-green skin dye job. She favored colors as much as he avoided them. “We’re all fossils. Eventually even Kzinti know when they’re defeated.”

Feather would know. She kept an eye on the ratcats.

She was trembling! Feather, who could rip a limb from a Kzin with her bare hands. Sigmund pecked her bare shoulder, just above where the contraceptive crystal was implanted. They both knew where ARMs got redirected when things got slow.

“I know,” he said softly.

“I
hate
mother hunts!” Feather burst out. “Those poor, scared women.”

Desperate for a baby. Desperate enough to hide for months while their contraceptive implants dissolved. Desperate enough to forfeit their own lives if caught with an unlicensed child.

“I know.” What else could he say? He put an arm around her.

Enforcing the Fertility Laws meant mother hunts, parental executions, and sterilization of the unlicensed offspring. Not enforcing the laws would mean utter chaos. You needed more than good genes to get a birthright license from the Fertility Board. You needed persistence. For a short while, he’d once read, Earth’s population appeared to stabilize. During that period, the people without an aching need for children voluntarily thinned their ranks. After a lull, after the ambivalent, like the space-eager, had withdrawn themselves from the gene pool, Earth’s population had exploded with a vengeance.

Unchecked, today’s 18 billion could double in a generation.

“I want a child,” Feather whispered. “I need a child.”

They were both natural paranoids. The Fertility Board had never—ever—licensed a child to a paranoid parent. He kissed the nape of her neck. “I know.”

THE SQUAD ROOM was as relaxed as Sigmund had left it after his last shift. People moseyed, or sat with their feet on their desks, or shot the breeze.

Boredom is the sworn enemy of vigilance. He sifted through the latest intel, surveillance of recently arrived visiting Jinxians. He saw only business meetings and a club-wrecking night on the town. He skimmed recent
publication abstracts from the Institute of Knowledge. He ordered a statistical survey of Jinxian emigration patterns.

Newbie was also back on-shift, lazily painting her fingernails. She hadn’t spent enough time in Alien Affairs to earn her boredom. He strolled over. “What are the Puppeteers up to, Girard?”

She fanned a hand, fingers spread, the wet polish gleaming. “Not a thing.”

“How do you know?” Sigmund asked. She seemed far too relaxed. Calibrating meds was an art. The right dose for training wasn’t necessarily the right dose on the job.

Andrea Girard swung her feet from her desk. Maybe she’d gotten the message. “Honest, Sigmund, I’m doing my job. Look.” She twiddled with her comp, and a graphic appeared. “Transfer-booth usage by Puppeteers. I watch North America, but I’ve asked around. The pattern’s the same, down, worldwide. The Puppeteers are in their office buildings, minding their own business.”

Sigmund’s lips twitched at her little joke. The Puppeteers did nothing
but
business. General Products had a presence in Known Space. Of the Puppeteer government, or governments, humans, Kzinti, and Kdatlyno alike knew the same: nothing. “How long have they been doing whatever they’re doing?” he asked.

“It’s been quiet for days,” she said.

Days of unexplained new behavior? Girard’s meds definitely needed a tweak. “Who have you informed?” he demanded. She named names, and Sigmund couldn’t argue, so he turned back to her holo. “The transfer-booth traffic looks about normal at the main spaceports.”

“Meeting incoming ships? They’re importers, Sigmund.” She blew on her fingernails. “Don’t you have Jinxians to watch?”

Behind him, people sniggered. Was no one working today? Sigmund suddenly knew it wasn’t only Newbie whose meds were too low. The ’docs had been dialed down. Without any threats on the horizon, why manufacture paranoia?

That’s just what Earth’s enemies
wanted
the ARM to think.

Maybe mother hunts weren’t the worst thing.

He kept studying the holo, ignoring the squad-room laughter. “Mojave Spaceport has a lull in visitors. Why is that?”

A hand came down heavily on his shoulder. Conan Murphy said, “Give it a rest, Sigmund. Let the woman do her job.”

Sigmund returned to his desk. The Jinxians had done nothing suspicious in the minutes he’d been gone. (Lying low, like the Puppeteers? In conspiracy with the Puppeteers?)

He leapt from his chair. To anyone in the room who might be listening, he explained, “Puppeteers are cowards. Who or what are they avoiding?”

No one answered—and no one laughed. He perched on a corner of Newbie’s desk. “Andrea, you say the Puppeteers are all in GP buildings. Now tell me what they’re doing.”

She couldn’t.

From what did Earth’s Puppeteers hide? Sigmund surfed the Net, looking for inspiration. Riots after the World Cup semifinals. A teleportation-system malfunction in Phoenix, some kind of a data-collection problem. The ongoing corruption scandal in the Beijing city council. Starving mountain lions had attacked a hiker camped on Mount Shasta. Celebrity gossip.

“What’s the extent of the transfer-booth outage?” Sigmund asked. Others had silently gathered to watch. Someone reached past him to call up a map. A blotchy area ebbed and flowed, amoeba-like: the time-lapse view of the service disruption. Sporadically, a pseudopod reached out to graze Mojave Spaceport.

Mojave was the only spaceport Puppeteers seemed to be avoiding. Because, cowards that they were, they shunned the area affected by the outage?

Things aren’t always what they seem. Were Puppeteers gathering in GP buildings? Were they avoiding Mojave Spaceport?

A sick conviction seized Sigmund. A data-collection malfunction needn’t mean the system couldn’t work. It was a billing problem—and, by extension, a problem with tracking people’s movements. Or Puppeteers’ movements. “Any unusual flight activity at Mojave in the last few days?”

General Products had long stored an unsold colony ship at Mojave. Like all modern colony ships, it used GP’s largest-model hull. Sigmund had seen #4s, and they were monsters, spheres a good third of a kilometer in diameter. A ship like that would carry a
lot
of Puppeteers. Every Puppeteer on Earth, perhaps? Boarded unseen through transfer booths?

The colony ship had taken off yesterday.

When inspectors began reporting back that GP buildings around the planet were empty, Sigmund wasn’t at all surprised.

MURMURS AND MUTTERS, intense whispers and heartfelt cussing, purposefully quick footsteps—all the sounds of a major investigation. Fear and dread gnawed at Sigmund’s gut.

He found the time to smile at Feather. They wouldn’t be sent on a mother hunt anytime soon.

The vastness commonly referred to as Known Space encompassed an approximate sphere of about 60 light-years in diameter.

To apply that description,
known
, took breathtaking hubris. Few solar systems in that enormous volume had ever been surveyed, much less settled. The gulfs between stars were, since the advent of hyperdrive, circumvented rather than traversed. Most of “Known Space” remained defiantly unknown—including, in a timely example, the location, presumably somewhere in the region, of the Puppeteer world or worlds.

To our ignorance, Sigmund mused, we can add a new mystery. All the Puppeteers who once visited the settled worlds of Known Space—worlds of all races, not only humans—had vanished. No one could say to where.

Jinx, abruptly, was no longer Sigmund’s designated worry. As the reports trickled in, sometimes unsolicited, as often triggered by Earth’s frantic hyperwave queries, ARM HQ had decreed the need for a special task force to investigate the Puppeteer disappearances.

And they had named Sigmund to direct it.

He’d reported as ordered to HQ in New York. His new office was barren, as ascetic as his black suit. He set the walls to window mode, and gazed out over Manhattan. Freighters clogged the harbor. Cargo planes filled the skies over the bustling megalopolis. It seemed normal, and yet—

A few klicks to the south, amid the tallest of Manhattan’s office towers, the biggest stock market in Sol system was imploding.

Sun glinted from the kilometers-tall spires of the financial community. People said that once you reached terminal velocity, the final seconds before impact were peaceful. No one could tell Sigmund how they knew that.

That wasn’t a constructive train of thought. He blanked the walls again, wondering where to start. Three-Vs droned in neighboring offices.

Across Known Space, slow-motion catastrophe unfolded. General Products had wiped out three races’ hull-production industries—and now GP was gone. Rebuilding the lost construction capacity would be the labor of years.

Economic crisis began with starship builders and interstellar cruise lines.
It spread to their subcontractors and investors. And to all their employees, of course. Then to clothing stores, restaurants, realtors, utilities…