Rhythm of the Imperium (4 page)

He reached the correct doorway and laid a hand on its surface. It took a while for the programming to recognize him and announce him to the one behind it, as much as 101 seconds. In that short time, the Wichu female drew a weapon and leveled it at him. Phutes turned his body and eyed the pistol. Its purpose was to excite the flesh of the victim at whom it was fired, at a range that could stun or kill. At his imperturbable stare, she swallowed audibly and moved the side control up to the maximum on the dial. The tiny whine told Phutes all he needed to know about the weapon’s programming. He reached out to touch the barrel and emitted a thin hum, matching the frequency within 110 seconds. Within 101 more, the weapon began to smoke.

“Drop it,” he said. “When it explodes it will injure you.”

The Wichu closed its hands around the stock. The whine increased in volume.

“I’m not dropping it! You back away, now!”

By then, numerous Wichus had gathered from all sides. Some of them took hold of Phutes’s limbs. Angrily, he shook them off. Others pointed weapons, which Phutes was forced to set on overload. The Wichu had courage. Knowing the risk to their fragile flesh, they still maintained a grip on their weapons.

“I warn you, you have 1010 seconds before detonation.”

“Stop threatening me! And use base 10, like a civilized being!”

Phutes felt his inner acids roiling at the insult.

“You accuse
me
of being uncivilized? Shedding hazard!”

“Stone face!”

A booming tone came from the other side of the wall.

“Stop harassment now!” The door slid open. “All will suffer!”

Reluctantly, the white-haired crewmembers shifted away from Phutes. He sensed the terrible stench of contact with their skin and fur. He required a bath, but now he would have to wait in line behind all of his kin. And that was providing that the technicians had corrected the fault in the water line.

The newcomer lifted a massive fist toward Phutes. He had 110, 100 on his right side and 10 on his left, but only 10 legs. He towered over the much younger Kail.

“Welcome, cousin,” he said. His words in pure, unaccented Kail were echoed through not only Phutes’s translation device but his own. Phutes heard the overload tone die away, as the other disabled the devices with a supersonic tone of his own. “Come in. We will leave this uncouth slime outside.”

“Watch who you’re calling uncouth, Fovrates!” shouted the security officer. Phutes spared her one pitying glance as he followed the other into his office.

Once the door closed with an obsequious swish, Fovrates touched limbs with him.

“I regret the unnecessary contact with the crew,” he said, bumping the translator to switch it off. Phutes followed suit. There was no need for the devices among distant kin. “Will you recline?”

Phutes surveyed the chamber. It contained numerous primitive technical devices and scopes, most of them fixed to the walls within reach of a standing Kail. Though there were two chairs and a table suitable for use by the slime crew, most of the floor was given over to a broad (plastic) box filled with sparkling silver sands heaped and swirled like windswept dunes, dotted with a few larger rocks almost the size of his head. At the sight, Phutes felt a deep longing come over him.

“It looks like home,” he said.

“It reminds me of Mother,” Fovrates agreed. His optical receptors showed amusement. “Come. Let us talk.”

Phutes waited until Fovrates chose his place in the box. The bigger Kail lay down at the far end and pulled piles of translucent gray minerals over himself until only his face was visible. He propped one of his enormous feet on the largest rock. Phutes burrowed into the dunes, sending an unspoken apology that he was so tainted by organics. The sand didn’t seem to be troubled. It enveloped him hospitably, cradling his limbs and torso as though it were his birthplace. Phutes felt so comfortable, he almost missed it when Fovrates’s voice vibrated as a mild electrical charge through the fragmented stone.

“It has been 101 days since you came on board, but you did not come to pay your respects at once.”

“Apologies, cousin,” Phutes said, sending his voice back in the same manner. “I bring you greetings from Yesa. She asks for your assistance.”

“I have waited for this summons for many revolutions. My mother, Nefra, sent me word long ago through vibrations in the normal stellar shock waves that you would be coming. The ship is ready. I could take command of every system in a fraction of 1. Give the word, and it will obey us.”

“But is that necessary? Yesa’s plan should cause a collapse in the humans’ civilization without the need of open warfare. They will so demoralized they can be easily removed from the motherworlds that they have invaded once the Zang act.”

He sensed rather than heard the shrug. “Better to have a secondary plan in place. You do not know how randomly the carbon-based ones act. I experience it every day. Even if you succeed in avenging the insult to our motherworlds and destroying the center of human culture, they may rally. For organic slime, they are amazingly resilient. Life persists, even in their terrible, disgusting, odiferous manner. I will give you all my data. I have it in here, where the Wichu never suspect its existence. Like the humans, they long ago gave up on silicon-based storage in favor of quantum. More fools they.”

“I accept it gladly,” Phutes said.

“Then, absorb it.”

Phutes felt the pulse of binary data seeping into his body from all points. He buried his face in the sand and listened to Fovrates’s information.

There was plenty to take in. Instead of the slow, steady beat of the universe, he felt the rush of incoherent and disordered formulae playing upon his senses. The slime beings were even more chaotic than he had been told. The Wichus seemed outwardly disinterested in expansion, yet their sphere of influence had grown by two systems in the last revolution alone, and always toward Kail space. The noise they generated polluted the calm, clean waves of the cosmos. But it was the humans who impinged the worst. Their unclean residences set down on world after world that before had never known the touch of organic molecules, nor were ever intended to. They sent out transmissions in exponential numbers that could in time throw off the universe’s natural pulse. As swiftly as those two races multiplied, there seemed to be no way for the slow-reproducing Kail to overcome them. They had to be prevented from breeding in such large numbers.

“The Zang are our only hope,” Phutes said. That was the conclusion to which his motherworld had come, and many others as well. Fovrates murmured his assent.

“I agree. Are you prepared to convince them?”

“I am. All of Yesa’s children are with me. May we count on Nefra’s for support?”

“Naturally. That is why so many of my siblings are out among the stars, insinuating ourselves through the ships and stations of the slime.” Fovrates chuckled. “Captain Bedelev has sent to her commanders that she does not like me, but she could not picture running this ship without me. She doesn’t yet know how true that is. She’s not running the ship any longer.”

“How long until we reach our destination?”

“I have the information from the helm computers,” Fovrates said. “101 jumps. As many as 10010 ship-days. I am accustomed to the conditions, but can you and your siblings tolerate them?”

“As long as we get some clean water,” Phutes said. “But even if we don’t, we will cope. The beginning of the eradication of the slime begins then.”

CHAPTER 4

“Lord Thomas, this way!” the wrinkled merchant woman called, beckoning to me with a crooked, bronze-hued finger. She raised her other hand, from which dangled strings of flashing crystals and exotically carved beads. Her floor-length dress was festooned all over with more necklaces, bracelets and rings in myriad clusters, as were the walls and canopy of her blue fabric tent. “I have been waiting for you! Oh, please, great noble, come and see my merchandise! It is the finest in all the system. You will never find such a bargain! Lord Thomas! In the name of our long-lasting friendship!”

I kept a slight but unapproachable smile upon my face, but I kept walking through the marketplace that occupied most of the high dome in the center of the spaceport on Taruandula 4. The small, slim silver-haired woman trotting daintily at my side did not have to stride to keep up. If Madame Deirdre had chosen to, she could have run rings around me all the way from the ship and back, and never run out of breath. She was made of whipcord and iron rods, in far better shape than I was, despite my months of intensive training. Madam Deirdre taught over sixty different styles of dance, and had won acclaim across the Imperium for both her own performances and for choreography. I had been fortunate enough to secure her services as a teacher for a series of private lessons. I paid her well, naturally, though the added emolument of an invitation to come along to see the Zang spectacle was a reward for her putting up with a pupil who had not started with her tutelage from childhood and was therefore a trial to an artist such as herself.

“Why didn’t you stop?” she asked, with a curious, bright-eyed glance. “She seemed to know you. And there were some nice sparklies for sale in her booth.”

I smiled at her. “I have an excellent memory. A brief glimpse was enough to tell me that I was not personally acquainted with the lady. Like most of the merchants here on this planet, she undoubtedly obtained images of me and those members of my family traveling with me from our Infogrid files. I have over thirty million casual followers. I was required to post that my cousins and I are traveling toward Zang space, from which businesses may infer that we will be halting at a number of jump points of which this might be one. Also, her sparklies,” I recorded the charming phrase for later use, “are far from unique. As we pass more deeply into the bazaar, we’ll find the same items again and again, but almost certainly at better prices. Tourists who shop the edges pay the most. I think you would find that to be true no matter where along the circumference of this enormous marketplace you go.”

I gestured outward in a dramatic fashion. Through the translucent dome that covered the area to protect it from not only the weather, but from the noise of arrivals and departures, we could see numerous ships and shuttles of myriad designs. The
Imperium Jaunter
and its escort remained in orbit, taking on fuel and undergoing inspection for any engineering faults. We had made the descent by shuttle. Four of the small craft were in a secure hangar almost a kilometer behind us by then.

“Oh,” Dierdre said, with refreshing eagerness. “I wondered how you came to have so many friends here who knew so much about you! He’s such a social lad,” Madame Deirdre confided to Lieutenant Anstruther, who dogged our steps with all the air of a protective mother wolf. I had protested at being assigned a bodyguard, but the
Jaunter
’s captain insisted that all of us nobles be watched over at all times we were not on ship. I had insisted with equal fervor that if that was the case, I would prefer to have one of my own crew beside or, in this case, behind me. It was Anstruther’s turn. Nesbitt and Redius were off somewhere else in the company of a couple of my cousins. “Well, I need to buy some pretties for my daughters and grandchildren. They seldom leave Keinolt, and I hardly ever have time to look for anything nice when I’m traveling with a troupe. We might as well perform in a warehouse in the middle of an asteroid belt, for all we see of those exotic locations we go to, I am always telling the producer!”

I smiled. This was yet another way in which I could reward this extraordinary woman. She was not an experienced shopper, of that I had already ample proof. One of my talents, hard-honed among my cousins, who were also avid acquisitors of interesting merchandise, was to discover, evaluate and obtain, at a fair price, that which took my fancy. I extended an elbow, into which she tucked her narrow hand.

“Come with me, then. I have a friend here on this planet. OTL-590i is an LAI who is the secondary backup secure bookkeeping unit for the local banking system. Odile knows not only who are the most prosperous merchants, but who order their wares and supplies from the finest sources. She has given me a list,” I brandished my viewpad, “separated into categories such as clothing, housewares, works of art, jewelry and the like. The entries are overlaid onto a map of the marketplace. We are about twenty yards from the first of her choices.”

Madame Deirdre looked enchanted. Her large gray eyes twinkled like so many “sparklies.”

“How interesting! I must meet your friend. I am afraid I spend so much time rehearsing and performing that I seldom get to know the mechanicals in our midst. The lovely device that looks after the cabins on my level always has a pleasant word for us. It could easily ignore us, but it doesn’t. Curious. Their wants are not our wants; our needs are not the same as theirs. We live side by side with them, but it might be a completely parallel existence, as we have with plants.”

“Exactly so,” I replied, delighted. “I have found their observations on our lives to be of immense value. I hope they like us, since our well-being is so frequently in the palms of their circuitry, so to speak. I must say that most of the time they take a neutral stance on their view of our behavior. It is often far better than we deserve.”

“We ought to explore what it would take to evoke concepts for an electronic personality,” Madame Deirdre said, her eyes brightening. “I have never performed for any that I know of.”

“That is a wonderful notion!” I agreed. “Shall we create a
pas de deux?
Most of the LAIs I know work in a cooperative situation. A solo performance would not resonate with them as well as it does with biological beings.”

She tapped me on the arm. “You are beginning to think like a choreographer, Lord Thomas,” she said, with a little smile. I was taken slightly aback, since I had begun to create dances months ago. I had to remind myself that though I outranked her by exponents in social, economic and genetic spheres, I was but an embryo in her world. “That is a good notion. All of these insights will inform our performance. You can fill me in on their culture as we walk. Tell me about some of your friends.”

As we passed among the range of booths, tents, counters and the like that filled the covered marketplace, I described how I had come to be acquainted with a freezer unit, a vacuum system, a rather erudite file cross-checker in an elite university library, and many others. Apart from Emby, my oldest LAI friend who had been employed in food storage and was now a nannibot on a distant planet, what most artificial intelligences had in common was that they remained stationary. Humans, Wichus, Uctus and the like saw only the small proportion of LAIs that were employed as mobile units: caretakers, servers, and so on. The great majority occupied the machines that they ran, very much like a shopkeeper living over her or his premises. I said as much to Madame Deirdre. She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, thinking.

“That is a penetrating notion, Lord Thomas. Very interesting. We must concentrate on meaning without extraneous movement.”

The slightly-built woman raised her arms over her head with her fingers gracefully tented toward one another, moving one muscle at a time until her arms appeared to be two ends of a spiral. I was so fascinated by her control that I walked directly into an obstruction. Anstruther leaped forward to extract me from my obstacle.

“Oof! Oh, I say!”

“I beg your pardon!” I exclaimed, as we steadied my victim. Then I recognized him: a human male, tall, though not quite as tall as I was, possessing massive shoulders and prominent musculature, handsome of countenance with teak-brown skin, wide brown-black eyes and a strong, cleft chin. “Nole! We thought you were not coming!”

Nole, my cousin Nalney’s younger brother, gave me a sheepish grin.

“Thomas! I knew I should have stayed in my ship and not gone shopping, but I couldn’t resist such a marketplace,” he said. He glanced around. So did I. None of our relatives was in sight. “You won’t give me away, will you, Thomas? I meant to surprise everyone. I had no idea you were all so close behind me.”

“The
Jaunter
is the fastest civilian liner in the Core Worlds,” I said. “We must have caught up just before or after one of the first three jumps. So, your new vessel is ready? I can’t wait to see it.” I scanned the hulks out on the perimeter around the spaceport, but none gave off that frisson of newness that I expected to feel. “Which of these is yours?”

“None of them,” Nole said, with an almost forgivable smirk. “I came in by flitter-cab. I’m out beyond one of the moons. Did you see that there were sixty moons? Ostentation, I call it.”

“Just because Keinolt only has three?” I countered. “It’s not as though there will be a side-by-side comparison. Then, do you have pictures of your vessel? A digitavid?” I couldn’t conceal my eagerness.

Nole’s smirk increased in intensity. “Not one. You will just have to wait until we get to the viewing platform for the grand reveal. I have spent too much time and money on it to let even a single image get out ahead of time. My ship is so spectacular I don’t want an erg of excitement to be expended until everyone can see it at once. It will be the second most amazing thing you will see there. Not that some of you haven’t tried. Nalney sent a hefty bribe to my shipbuilders, trying to get a look at the plans. So did at least two or three others of our cousins, according to the bookkeeper and the architect.” I attempted to look innocent. “Oh, not you, too, Thomas?”

“The curiosity is killing me,” I confessed. “A project this detailed and involved, that has managed to consume one of our fugitive attention spans for almost two years, has to be one of the wonders of the universe.”

“I think so,” Nole said, so complacently I thought about devising a prank to play upon him at that precise moment. But I had company, so I was on better behavior than I might have been had I been surrounded by cousins and siblings alone. In that moment, I recalled my manners.

“Madame Deirdre, may I present my cousin, Lord Nole Odin Melarides Kinago? Nole, this is Madame Deirdre, dancer, choreographer, and my teacher.”

“I am delighted to meet you, Lord Nole,” Deirdre said.

Nole bowed. “A pleasure, madam,” he said. “If you are Thomas’s teacher, you must be a miracle of patience. I believe I have heard of you. Our grandmother, Nestorina Kinago Castana, is a great patroness of the arts. She brought us all to concerts and performances since we were old enough to sit in the seats, albeit not quietly.”

Deirdre beamed at him.

“Yes, Lady Nestorina is the one who made the connection for me with Lord Thomas,” she said, grasping his hand and shaking energetically. “What a pleasure to meet one of her precious grandchildren! She is so very proud of all of you. She sponsored my dance troupe in one of our first seasons, more than thirty years ago, and remains a very good friend of the arts. We have tea at least once a year. I owe her greatly for that.”

“And that is how she managed to convince you to teach my benighted cousin,” Nole concluded, hearing the unspoken context. I winced.

“Not at all!” Madame Deirdre insisted, though after months of close contact I could read her body language to see that she was telling a white lie. “Lord Thomas is a most devoted student.”

Nole fell into a coughing fit that covered derisive laughter. My wounded pride caused my self-control to momentarily turn its back. While it was deliberately not looking, I punched Nole in the arm. He countered with a playful blow to my upper thorax. We dropped our fists. Honor had been satisfied.

“And this is Lieutenant Philomena Anstruther, of my naval vessel,
Rodrigo,
” I said. “A talented programmer as well as a superlative officer.” Nole bowed to the slender girl, whose face turned a becoming shade of crimson.

“I have heard good things about you and the others,” Nole said, gallantly. “Thomas can’t stop talking about all of you. On the other hand, Thomas can’t stop talking, full stop.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Lord Nole,” Anstruther said, shyly.

“The pleasure is all mine, dear lady,” Nole said. “That’s a fine outfit you’re wearing, Thomas.” I looked down with pleasure at the cranberry-red ensemble I had donned for shopping. The tunic, trousers and shoulder cape fit perfectly, of course, despite the cape and tunic containing dozens of concealed pockets, suitable for squirreling away little purchases for my cousins I didn’t want them to see yet. “Who made it?”

“An LAI, HU-54d. He’s on board the
Jaunter
, as it happens. In case I need a new outfit for one of my—our—performances,” I corrected myself, with an enveloping gesture toward Deirdre. “He has made several for us already. It was very much worthwhile bringing him.”

“Would you mind if I borrowed him?” Nole asked, with a hopeful expression in his coffee-brown eyes. “I want a formal suit for my house—I mean, shipwarming party. I’ll hold that after the Zang’s destruction event. I need something that will knock everyone’s eyes out.”

“I’m not certain we can spare him, Nole,” I said.

“Oh, go on, Lord Thomas,” Deirdre encouraged me. “I think we have enough costumes to last us.”

I nodded reluctant assent. “If you are certain, Madame, then of course I will. I can certainly ask Hugh if he would like to take your commission, Nole. Do you want him to accompany you the rest of the way to Zang space to do fittings and so on?”

Nole beamed.

“Yes, please. I would be very grateful if you can let me have him.”

I removed my viewpad from a pocket near the collar of my cape. It seemed to appear out of nowhere. Nole’s eyes widened with surprise, and he nodded.